A new paper claims to show the neural activity associated with consciously seeing something:
Awareness-related activity in prefrontal and parietal cortices in blindsight reflects more than superior visual performance.
You might think it would be easy to find the neural correlates of seeing stuff. Just pop someone in the scanner and show them a picture.
However, it's not that simple, because that wouldn't tell you which brain activations were associated with concious awareness as such, as opposed to all of the other things that happen when we see a picture, many of which may be unconscious.
The new paper makes use of a patient, "GY", who has what's known as blindsight, a mysterious phenomenon caused by damage to the primary visual cortex on one side of the brain. In GY's case this was caused by head trauma at age 8. He's now 52, and is unable to see anything on ...
