'The patient seemed to be as surprised as we were that he could respond to these 'unseen' obstacles,' Goodale adds.

These findings provide compelling evidence for the idea that obstacle avoidance depends on ancient visual pathways in the brain that appear to bypass the main visual areas that allow us to perceive the world.

Thus, even when the part of the brain that gives us our visual experience is damaged, other parts of the brain still maintain a limited ability to use visual information from the eyes to control skilled movements of the limbs.

Additional experiments in Goodale's lab at the world-renowned Centre for Brain & Mind have shown that these primitive visual pathways work only in real-time and do not have access to memories, even of the short-term variety.

As an example, they provided an obstacle in the patient's blind field but delayed his reach by two seconds. With this short delay, he no longer showed any sensitivity to the object's location, said an UWO release.

These results have been published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.