Blindsight and the Collective Unconscious

Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth, France

Sometimes it seems that we can still see, despite ourselves. A fascinating phenomenon is the case of a man who suffered a stroke to the visual cortex of his brain which left him blind. The important thing to remember here is that while his brain was damaged, his eyes and the rest of his visual array were left in pristine condition.

Researchers conducted an experiment with this individual. He had to negotiate an obstacle course without any sort of cane or device whatsoever and was able to pass by each object in his way without touching any of them.

The phenomenon at work here is the concept of “blindsight” which has been identified in patients with similar cases of brain damage. It seems that there’s a primary visual pathway at the subconscious level that the brain is constantly using. This subconscious pathway is bridged somewhere in the brain, feeding visual data to the conscious part of the brain, making a person aware that they are actually seeing something.

In the case of the man mentioned here, the stroke damaged the ability of his brain to bridge visual stimuli to his consciousness. Although he can walk through an obstacle course and he’s aware from a non-visual perspective that he’s doing it, he’s not aware from a visual perspective that he’s doing it.

This shows that there’s so much more that we experience at different levels on a daily basis; so much that we’ve yet to understand. When I first read the accounts of this blind man who can still see, it immediately brought to mind the concept of the “collective unconscious” as postulated by Carl Jung:

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.^[1]

^{Could the core, basic part of the brain and its activity actually be a main part of the equation that Jung calls the “collective unconscious”? Was it this basic structure in the brain that gave Jung the impression that there are inherited archetypical forms simply because the brain is at work in mysterious ways, helping to organize experience? How then does this affect our perception of art? Are we seeing and responding to things at another level, despite our conscious selves, then adding to that basic response with what we have already learned and known while we were aware?} 

^{Further scientific research will eventually shed more light on this. On our part, we'll just have to keep on looking and thinking about art within all of our own various levels of consciousness.}

1. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43