Current Biology

Vol 18 No 24R1128

striate pathways account or TN’sintact navigation skills.We investigated the residual visionor locomotion in TN, an unusualsubject as the only available case inthe literature with selective bilateraloccipital damage (but see also [1] ora report on intact ear conditioningin a similar patient). TN suered therst stroke that damaged his occipitalcortex unilaterally, and some 36 dayslater a second stroke occurred thatdamaged the occipital cortex othe other hemisphere (Figure 1A ).He was initially studied by Pegna

et al.

[2] while in hospital in Genevaater his second stroke. Theserst observations on TN showedaective blindsight in response toacial expressions, as indicatedby condition-specic amygdalaactivation or emotional expressionso ear, anger and joy compared toneutral. We studied TN behaviorally,electroencephalographically and withbrain imaging techniques, includingdiusion tensor imaging (DTI), inTilburg and Maastricht.No active visual cortex could beound in TN in response to a range ovisual stimuli in a series o imagingsessions, including dierent sessionso retinotopic mapping. Becauseit was impossible to control hisxation, one could not be certainthat absolutely all visual cortexhad been destroyed or inactivated.Nevertheless, it is a highly reasonablesurmise that this was so giventhe consistently negative imaging

Intact navigationskills after bilateralloss of striate cortex

Beatrice de Gelder

1,2,

, MarcoTamietto

1,3,4

, Geert van Boxtel

,Rainer Goebel

, Arash Sahraie

,Jan van den Stock

, Bernard M.C.Stienen

, Lawrence Weiskrantz

and Alan Pegna

A patient with bilateral damage toprimary visual (striated) cortex hasprovided the opportunity to assess just what visual capacities arepossible in the absence o geniculo-striate pathways. Patient TN sueredtwo strokes in succession, lesioningeach visual cortex in turn and causingclinical blindness over his whole visualeld. Functional and anatomical brainimaging assessments showed thatTN completely lacks any unctionalvisual cortex. We report here that,among other retained abilities, hecan successully navigate down theextent o a long corridor in whichvarious barriers were placed. A videorecording shows him skillully avoidingand turning around the blockages.This demonstrates that extra-striatepathways in humans can sustainsophisticated visuo-spatial skills inthe absence o perceptual awareness,akin to what has been previouslyreported in monkeys. It remains to bedetermined which o the several extra-

Figure 1. Anatomical description o the lesions in TN.(A) T1-weighted MRI (axial view) showing TN’s lesions and conrming bilateral destruction othe visual cortex (Talairach

-coordinates are given; let is let, right is right). (B) Fibers o thecorpus callosum (CC) in TN (view rom let-posterior). While seed points were placed in the en-tire CC, only bers originating rom the genu and body o the CC were ound. In the splenium,no callosal bers were detected. Only inero-rontal running bers could be delineated, whichdo not belong to CC.

arms, these arms are rapidlybeing converted to input-intensivemonocultures [2,3]. Thus, it isimperative to highlight the ecologicalunction o shade coee arms, notonly in providing reuge or nativeauna, but also in preserving habitatconnectivity and gene-fow processesessential or reorestation by nativetree species.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data are available athttp:// www.current-biology.com/supplemental/ S0960-9822(08)01496-6

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the HelenOlson Brower Fellowship at the University oMichigan (to S.J.) and the National ScienceFoundation (award DEB 043665 to C.W.D.).The authors would like to thank John Vandermeer or help in the development andimplementation o this project. The authorswould also like to thank the armers in Nueva Alemania, Chiapas or the permission tocollect samples on their land.

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Department o Ecology and EvolutionaryBiology, University o Michigan, Ann Arbor,MI 48109, USA.

University o MichiganHerbarium, 3600 Varsity Drive, Ann Arbor,MI 48108-2287, USA.

Smithsonian TropicalResearch Institute, P.O. Box 0843-03092,Balboa Ancón, Republic o Panamá.*E-mail:sjha@umich.edu