The B.T. Woman is the only case of its kind as far as we know. After an accident she woke up completely blind. Her eyes were physically fine but her brain’s visual centers were damaged and was diagnosed with cortical blindness. She lived that way for 15 years. Then while she was in therapy for a completely unrelated diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is where you have multiple identities, she discovered that one of her 10 identities could see. Eventually, doctors found that 8 of her 10 identities could see perfectly fine while only 2 stayed blind. And the switch between “blind” and “sighted” could happen in seconds. Doctors ran visual evoked potential tests electrodes, which read the brain’s electrical response to a flickering pattern in real time. You can’t consciously fake this or “trick” the machine like with a lie detector test. In her sighted identities there was a clean, healthy signal. In her blind ones, nothing just a flatline. Same brain, minutes apart. This is a single case report, and DID is genuinely debated in psychiatry, so take this as one data point, but it suggests something intriguing…that our brains may be able to filter in and out what reaches our conscious awareness far more than we thought. Read more: Strasburger H, Waldvogel B. Sight and blindness in the same person: Gating in the visual system. Psych J. 2015 Dec;4(4):178-85. doi: 10.1002/pchj.109. Epub 2015 Oct 15. PMID: 26468893. #mindblown #unsolvedmysteries #weird #humanbody
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