人的心智生活既包括有意识体验也包括各种类型的无意识和非意识的过程。意识研究的方法之一就是在病理学观察中比较特定脑损伤患者身上呈现出的令人瞩目的意识事件与无意识事件的对比。由于敏锐地观察到视觉皮层受损患者DF身上的有意识表现与无意识表现之间令人惊异对比的重要价值,古德尔和米尔纳随后对DF进行了系统而严格的跟踪研究。在《行动中的视觉脑》和《看不见的视觉》这两本著作中,古德尔和米尔纳在传统视觉神经理论基础上提出了一个视觉加工的双流理论,他们认为视觉系统中存在两个视觉信息的加工和利用的通道:一个是知觉视觉,一个是行动视觉,前者通常会造成有意识的视觉体验,而后者能引导行为但通常是无意识的。这个理论为我们在现象学、行为和神经层面理解视觉的意识与无意识的根本差异,以及它们各自的活动特点和如何分工合作提供了一个极为有益的理论参考。
Conscious experience, unconscious and non-conscious processes combine the whole mental life of human beings.Pathological observation offers us one of effective ways to explore human minds, in which we could compare the remarkable conscious and unconscious events happened on particular brain-damaged pa-tients.Goodale and Milner subtly observed the astonished phenomena on DF whose visual cortex was severely destroyed, and then they designed a series of precise experiments upon her conscious and unconscious behav-iors to explore the causal reasons between her behaviors and her brain.In The Visual Brain in Action and Sight Unseen, the co-writers, Goodale and Milner have been advancing the idea that the ventral perception stream and the dorsal action stream are two independent visual systems within the primate brain.Normally, the former offers us the conscious experience but we could not realize how the latter works, which guides our actions un-consciously.This theory is very helpful for us to understand the difference between consciousness and uncon-sciousness in the way of phenomenology, neuroscience and behaviors, and also it is a useful reference to the division of labor of consciousness and unconsciousness.