The visual unconscious

Neurobiological accounts of consciousness typically partition brain activity into two components: one correlated with conscious experience (the neural correlate of consciousness) and the other not. Here I use evidence derived from visual hallucinations in the context of eye disease – the Charles Bonnet Syndrome – to examine the nature of what might be termed the visual unconscious. Forcing us to reconsider the nature of the unconscious, this hidden system of modular processing underlies our apparently seamless conscious visual experience of the world with many of its complex functions yet to be recognised by visual science.