Your Brain: Perception Deception, PBS Nova (2023): S50(EP9)

Greetings,

I discovered this interesting rebroadcast while scrolling through several PBS Nova science episodes. Midway through, this specific episode profiled an experiment involving a subject who suffered a blind spot in her vision field due to a stroke that damaged a portion of her brain’s vision processing center. Despite that, an experiment during this Nova episode showed that this person was somehow able to perceive objects placed in her blind spot though seemingly not consciously aware of those objects.  For Nova commentators, this compelling paradox posed the larger question of whether there’s a need for consciousness when we may be quite able to perceive our environment without it. The answer, according to those commentators, may involve the importance of conscious awareness to infant learning--but that answer, in my view, completely ignored the question of why the subject in experiment was able to perceive objects without being consciously awareness of those objects.

Towards the end of this 30-minute Nova episode, its commentators focused on a blanket explanation that offered a perspective of how our brain stitches together our reality from very little information.  However, I generally find that the perspectives of brain function that these commentators and most neuroscientists agree with are flawed.  For example, most neuroscientists believe that the thalamus generally functions as neural relay station that filters what sensory information ultimately reaches the cortex where sophisticated neural processing occurs.  Until recently, I believed similarly but they and I were wrong.

Although I have a keen interest in neuroscience, I am not a neuroscientist.  However, what the overall evidence in science suggests to me now is that the thalamus functions more like a tuning fork during infancy that becomes more like a central alarm as we mature.  This distinction is important because it explains what may be happening in a brain that produces aberrant output and behaviors such as schizophrenia, autism, dementia, and perception in the absence of conscious awareness. 

As I perceive the evidence, our brain function comprises two structural components: the thalamus and everything in the cranial cavity other than the thalamus.  There may be maladies and physical defects affecting these components that can and do contribute to the aberrance our brain function may produce but understanding the precise functional role of these components--minus potential maladies and defects--is crucial to understanding and ameliorating the potential aberrance each component could produce.  I welcome your thoughts.