Blindsight - Unseen
But we can date the year when the word ‘blindsight’ was first used
– [by me] in 1973. Its oxymoronic properties were such that it soon found frequent usage, sufficient to make its entry into the Oxford Concise Dictionary – ‘a condition in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them’.
Larry Weiskrantz (1973/2010)
Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says. “not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.”
Annie Dillard (1974)
I stand at my front door and look at this view most mornings; although not this view, it is never the same twice. Frequently it seems that far from seeing the view, I instead dwell on details that appear unrelated to the space: at a ‘weed’ near me, at a broken
bough
How do the particular bits relate to the generalities that we seem to live by?
in the river, at distant grass browning. I try - as Dillard tries - to see, but the
effort
This being ‘captured’ by particulars recalls distractions in meditation.
remains un-rewarded. Guided by my
conscious
Here is Dillard (harmlessly?) eliding consciousness and verbalization.
wishes I can inspect any part or aspect, but the
‘whole’
What is this ‘whole’, is it what we also call an abstraction?
often, although not always, remains unseen. The work of the psychologist Weiskrantz, in the 70s, on people with lesions to some of the neural pathways that concern sight, led him to coin the term blindsight for circumstances where there is very good reason to believe that subjects could not consciously see, but nevertheless seem to know what would otherwise be seen. Observers and psychologists agree that there is a gap between awareness and what we sense: what you see is not what you get.
Weiskrantz was reminiscing for the British Psychological Society in 2010 when he looked back 30 years to the time he came up with the word ‘blindsight’. The account is at: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/looking-back-blindsight-hindsight. Dillard’s very spirited account of a year engaged with her surroundings living beside Tinker Creek, hinges on how we perceive what is around us - this point, like all her topics, she tackles head on and with the greatest vigour in her rightly award winning book: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which was originally published by Harper’s Magazine Press. The quote is from page 33 of the Canterbury Press 2022 edition.
The view is from my desk in southern Scotland, one July morning, with a wide angle lens that renders the hill small and the clouds large.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 30th August 2025
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