LAUSR

A man who can read but can9t consciously see numerals could help scientists understand how conscious awareness arises in the brain. To him, numbers look like a jumble of lines, but he can read and do mental arithmetic, researchers report this month. "What it tells me," says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who specializes in consciousness and was not involved in the work, "is that … you can get dissociation between cognition and consciousness."