Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

I love the brain. It’s just awesome. The more I learn about consciousness and the evolution of the human mind (among other animals, too), the more I love it.

A new study suggests that your brain can see and process more information than you might think.

To come to this heady conclusion, scientists had to zap the brains of healthy volunteers (and rather brave ones, we might add) and temporarily shut down the part of the brain that processes visual information. For a fraction of a second, a pulse of energy called transcranial magnetic stimulation shut down each person’s visual cortex. That’s the part of the brain known to process what we see. [LiveScience Article]

Researchers from Rice University came to this conclusion after testing volunteers who agreed to allow the scientists to temporarily shut down the part of their brain that processes visual information, or the primary visual cortex, according to a report from Live Science. During their flash of blindness, volunteers were staring at a computer screen and were shown a simple image.

When asked if they saw the picture, all of them said “no.” But when asked to guess at what they saw, whether it was a color or shape, the nine volunteers gave right answers almost three out of four times.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online edition this week.