Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision

New in Paperback! Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision.

This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

In the 1990s, David Milner and Mel Goodale published a book for OUP, now considered to one of the most important psychology books of the last 20 years - one that significantly altered our understanding of the nature of consciousness - 'The visual brain in action'. The book is one of the most frequently cited books in the field of consciousness (most recently by Nobel Laureate - Francis Crick).