Here's a real teaser from Scientific American. They've got a video and article of a blind guy who can navigate through a cluttered space, sidestepping objects and not crashing.
They don't tell you anything about this so-called 'blindsight,' except how blind the guy is. You have to subscribe/register to read more.
So I go on wikipedia and it doesn't have anything useful either about how this is possible, and after much googling, I finally find the explanation. Cheap trick, SciAm. He's not really blind. This isn't really special to blindness in general. It only applies to people who are not "blind" because their eyes do not function. Rather, they suffer from cortical blindness - they sensory information but don't process it correctly, usually due to damage in some part of the brain.
This was clever marketing on SciAm - something people at journalistic organizations always tell you, but I thought in the name of passing on knowledge this was kind of cheap, no? And wouldn't they figure that generally people will try to see if the answer's somewhere for free online elsewhere but leave SciAm with kind of a bad taste in their mouths?
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