Sometimes it takes some time to publish a new phenomenon, in particular if it is a “discovery”, and if it is based on a “single case study”. Nowadays, “big data” counts. Accidentally, (and that can happen in exploratory studies) a new visual phenomenon on “visual completion” in the visual field was observed in a patient during a lecture in front of some 300 medical students.

 

The patient had suffered a severe brain injury which resulted in loss of speech, (but he regained some after intense training); the patient lost also his number sense, and he lost parts of his visual field (see abstract below). Experiments on “visual completion” were repeated over decades and were confirmed again and again by different observers.

 

Of course, one wants to publish observations one has made. But our manuscript about this unique case was rejected at least 10 times by different scientific journals until it finally reached the scientific community. The reasons for rejections were manifold, like “this cannot be believed”, or ”such a phenomenon is impossible”, or “this phenomenon is already well-known” (which is incorrect), or “this is not interesting” (certainly true for many others working in different fields), or “bring more cases” (which implies that single cases are worthless, although the development of cognitive neuroscience in many areas is mainly based on single case studies: language, memory, abstraction, personality, Alzheimer, etc).

 

What can one do? As a poet once said: “Keep it in the mail”. Try again and again - and trust yourself.

 

Conscious vision in blindness: A new perceptual phenomenon implemented on the “wrong” side of the brain.

PsyCh Journal, 1–8

 

Authors with affiliations:

 

Yan Bao 1,2 | Bin Zhou 3,4 | Xinchi Yu 5,6 | Lihua Mao 1,2 | Evgeny Gutyrchik 7 | Marco Paolini 8 | Nikos Logothetis 9 | Ernst Pöppel 1,7. (2024)

 

1 School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences,

Peking University, Beijing, China

 

2 Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health,

Peking University, Beijing, China

 

3 State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology,

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

 

4 Department of Psychology,

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

 

5 Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science,

University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

 

6 Department of Linguistics,

University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

 

7 Institute of Medical Psychology,

Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich, Germany

 

8 Department of Radiology,

University Hospital, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich, Germany

 

9 International Center for Primate Brain Research,

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

 

Abstract

 

Patients with lesions in the visual cortex are blind in corresponding regions of the visual field, but they still may process visual information, a phenomenon referred to as residual vision or “blindsight”. Here we report behavioral and fMRI observations with a patient who reports conscious vision across an extended area of blindness for moving, but not for stationary stimuli. This completion effect is shown to be of perceptual and not of conceptual origin, most likely mediated by spared representations of the visual field in the striate cortex. The neural output to extra-striate areas from regions of the deafferented striate cortex is apparently still intact; this is, for instance, indicated by preserved size constancy of visually completed stimuli. Neural responses as measured with fMRI reveal an activation only for moving stimuli, but importantly on the ipsilateral side of the brain. In a conceptual model this shift of activation to the “wrong” hemisphere is explained on the basis of an imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory interactions within and between the striate cortices due to the brain injury. The observed neuroplasticity indicated by this shift together with the behavioral observations provide important new insights into the functional architecture of the human visual system and into the concept of consciousness.