A man who researchers refer to as “Patient X” was a medical mystery. He suffered two strokes, which severed the connection between his eyes and brain. So even though his eyes were perfectly functional and could take in sights, his brain couldn’t “register” what he was seeing. From Patient X’s perspective, he was blind. Neuroscientists, however, were intrigued by his unique circumstance. They began to run tests to understand exactly how his eyes and brain work together. In one test, they held up images of people expressing emotions: A happy woman and an angry man. Something fascinating happened. Patient X could accurately identify which emotion was being shown to him despite the fact that he couldn’t see or describe the picture. How was this possible? To find out, the researchers took brain scans of Patient X. They found that the brain has a second path from the eyes. This second route, the one Patient X was using to recognize emotions, goes directly to the lower part of the brain (to the amygdala). This lower path is faster-acting and doesn’t express itself via speech. As Daniel Goleman writes in his book Social Intelligence, “Patient X was not seeing the emotions on the faces so much as feeling them…” Instead of seeing and identifying the emotions in the image, Patient X’s brain was mimicking the emotion in his body. Then, he could identify the emotion he felt in his own body and guess accordingly.

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