This book investigates the phenomenon of blindsight, a condition where patients with damage to the primary visual cortex retain the ability to process visual information without conscious awareness. Lawrence Weiskrantz, a distinguished neuropsychologist, utilizes extensive longitudinal research on a specific patient, known as D.B., to challenge traditional understandings of visual perception and consciousness. By documenting the patient's ability to discriminate visual stimuli within their scotoma despite reporting total blindness, the author argues for a dissociation between conscious visual experience and unconscious visual processing.

Experts recognize this work as a foundational text in the study of visual perception and the neural correlates of consciousness. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which provides a rigorous, data-driven examination of a complex neurological anomaly.