What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Anomalocaris]

There is a rare and very puzzling stroke symptom associated with neurological basis of vision and visual perception.    The stroke victim becomes completely blind as far as the victim perceive vision.  He/she reports being able to see nothing, being unable to even perceive light or dark.   They are clinically totally blind.

But if you throw an object at them they can catch it in mid air.    If you ask them to navigate an obstacle course quickly, they can do by adroitly avoiding all obstacles that a person with normal vision can see.     They can even walk around obstacles on normal sidewalks and cross busy streets.

They apparently retain all the ability to process vision unconsciously to support motor activity,  but have no conscious visual perception whatsoever.


There is another condition which is the opposite.   A stroke victim insist he/she retain perfect vision against all contrary evidence, they can not react to or describe what is around them.  Yet they believe they see.

There is a third condition where a stroke victim person exhibit normal conscious visual perception, can accurately describe what they see across their entire vision field.   However, they are only able to process vision unconsiciously to support motor activity from one side.   Throw the ball at them from one side and they catch it in the air effortlessly.  Throw the ball from the other side and they can’t catch it.

Finally there is an extremely rare stroke condition where the victim only consciously perceive moving objects in their field of view.   If it ain’t moving, it is totally invisible to them.

[arewethereyet]

That dendrophilia is a sexual attraction to trees and other large plants.

I'll explain since this is very, very random.

As usual I was watching true crime. I often pay little attention but this one got real weird and I had to watch. Guy kills mother, father, and young son in a family. Young teen daughter is not accounted for. After some super-sleuthing the cops think they have figured out who it is...details of how that happened escape me as the other stuff took over in my brain. Cops enter the guys house and find in a living room an area that is sort of fenced off and is filled with leaves...think a ball pit but with leaves. Yeah, the officers said that's a new one. They go through the house and find rooms that are 'decorated' with grocery bags full of leaves. Hundreds of bags lined up in neat rows and covering the entire wall as well as windows. Yep, that's a headscratcher.

In the basement they find the young teen girl that was missing...remember her...I told you that you start straying from the murders and now known kidnapping.

She was laying on a bed of leaves...actually the basement floor was about two feet deep in leaves. Though she had been sexually assaulted, she was ultimately okay physically.

It gets more twisted.

He murdered the three people mentioned above, dismantled them and put the body parts into a hollow tree that he was particularly fond of. He was feeding the tree.

You can't make stuff like this up. And how does someone become so enamored of trees that it gets to this level?

This was a new one on me.

[polymath257]

There is a rare and very puzzling stroke symptom associated with neurological basis of vision and visual perception.    The stroke victim becomes completely blind as far as the victim perceive vision.  He/she reports being able to see nothing, being unable to even perceive light or dark.   They are clinically totally blind.

But if you throw an object at them they can catch it in mid air.    If you ask them to navigate an obstacle course quickly, they can do by adroitly avoiding all obstacles that a person with normal vision can see.     They can even walk around obstacles on normal sidewalks and cross busy streets.

They apparently retain all the ability to process vision unconsciously to support motor activity,  but have no conscious visual perception whatsoever.


There is another condition which is the opposite.   A stroke victim insist he/she retain perfect vision against all contrary evidence, they can not react to or describe what is around them.  Yet they believe they see.

There is a third condition where a stroke victim person exhibit normal conscious visual perception, can accurately describe what they see across their entire vision field.   However, they are only able to process vision unconsiciously to support motor activity from one side.   Throw the ball at them from one side and they catch it in the air effortlessly.  Throw the ball from the other side and they can’t catch it.

Finally there is an extremely rare stroke condition where the victim only consciously perceive moving objects in their field of view.   If it ain’t moving, it is totally invisible to them.

All things that might well be hints at how the brain produces consciousness. The first, especially.

[Fireball]

That dendrophilia is a sexual attraction to trees and other large plants.

I'll explain since this is very, very random.

As usual I was watching true crime.  I often pay little attention but this one got real weird and I had to watch.  Guy kills mother, father, and young son in a family.  Young teen daughter is not accounted for.  After some super-sleuthing the cops think they have figured out who it is...details of how that happened escape me as the other stuff took over in my brain.  Cops enter the guys house and find in a living room an area that is sort of fenced off and is filled with leaves...think a ball pit but with leaves.  Yeah, the officers said that's a new one.  They go through the house and find rooms that are 'decorated' with grocery bags full of leaves.  Hundreds of bags lined up in neat rows and covering the entire wall as well as windows.  Yep, that's a headscratcher.

In the basement they find the young teen girl that was missing...remember her...I told you that you start straying from the murders and now known kidnapping.

She was laying on a bed of leaves...actually the basement floor was about two feet deep in leaves.  Though she had been sexually assaulted, she was ultimately okay physically.

It gets more twisted.

He murdered the three people mentioned above, dismantled them and put the body parts into a hollow tree that he was particularly fond of.  He was feeding the tree.

You can't make stuff like this up.  And how does someone become so enamored of trees that it gets to this level?

This was a new one on me.

The twisted minds of plot writers... Though there is a science fiction book named, "Integral Trees" based on their resemblance to the integral signs in calculus. They bury their dead in a pit where they rot, and "feed it to the tree".

[Anomalocaris]

There is a rare and very puzzling stroke symptom associated with neurological basis of vision and visual perception.    The stroke victim becomes completely blind as far as the victim perceive vision.  He/she reports being able to see nothing, being unable to even perceive light or dark.   They are clinically totally blind.

But if you throw an object at them they can catch it in mid air.    If you ask them to navigate an obstacle course quickly, they can do by adroitly avoiding all obstacles that a person with normal vision can see.     They can even walk around obstacles on normal sidewalks and cross busy streets.

They apparently retain all the ability to process vision unconsciously to support motor activity,  but have no conscious visual perception whatsoever.


There is another condition which is the opposite.   A stroke victim insist he/she retain perfect vision against all contrary evidence, they can not react to or describe what is around them.  Yet they believe they see.

There is a third condition where a stroke victim person exhibit normal conscious visual perception, can accurately describe what they see across their entire vision field.   However, they are only able to process vision unconsiciously to support motor activity from one side.   Throw the ball at them from one side and they catch it in the air effortlessly.  Throw the ball from the other side and they can’t catch it.

Finally there is an extremely rare stroke condition where the victim only consciously perceive moving objects in their field of view.   If it ain’t moving, it is totally invisible to them.

All things that might well be hints at how the brain produces consciousness. The first, especially.

indeed, it suggest the neurological mechanism for consciousness is not closely intertwined with mechanism for even sophisticated behavior.    This has been used to suggest intelligence and consciousness are not highly correlated, and that incipient intelligence is much more likely to confers evolutionary advantage than incipient consciousness.   this has been proposed as a solution to the fermi paradox.

[Mister Agenda]

This novel posits high levels of intelligence without consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

[Disagreeable]

The last woolly mammoths died out about 3,700 years ago. And apparently, they inbred themselves to death.

They were around during the time of the ancient Egyptians, by the by.

[Angrboda]

Flour will keep frozen for up to 2 years.

[Disagreeable]

I'm even more intelligent than I thought I was . . . and also more arrogant.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm even more intelligent than I thought I was . . . and also more arrogant.

I’m almost as smart as I wish I was.

Boru