When it comes to functional blindness and the suggested split between consciousness and perception, I feel that it means that there is a significant difference between hypnotic blindness and visual conversion disorder. I feel this way because visual conversion disorder is defined in the article as, "diagnosed when either a loss or an alteration in visual functioning occurs in a way that suggests, but cannot be explained by, a physical disorder, appears to be influenced by psychological factors, and is not under voluntary control", (p. 228, Bryant & McConkey). This means that though the patient is claming to be blind, there is no clinical explanation for it. Whereas hypnotic blindness is where a given patient will, according to p. 229 of the article, appear to be clinically blind until being administered a complicated filter test. It is at this point that the patient's results will then tell us that they are able to process visual information. The strange part about this is that while the patient it appearing to process the visual information they still report that they are blind and are cooperating subconsciously.
             According to the research done in the article, for the subject with a visual conversion disorder they responded to the visual task in a way that placed them above chance level when they were told that there was visual information present, according to p. 228 of the article. It was also said that they performed at chance level when they were told that there was no visual information present. I think that the subject with the visual conversion disorder responded to the testing in this way due to the fact that, though they believe themselves to be blind, there is no reason as to why they should be because their sensory apparatus is working, and therefore are still able to process visual stimuli. When visual testing was done on a subject with hypnotic blindness, the results we such that the subject responded ...