Andrew Gallimore

How do we know it does that?

That's a good question.

Well, there are a number of things.

So the earliest evidence came from a one of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield.

Are you familiar with?

No.

So Wilder Penfield, he was interested in treating epilepsy.

And he invented something called the Montreal procedure, where he would remove a part of the brain that was the focus of epileptiform activity, the idea being that it would kind of cure someone's epilepsy.

But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn't removing

You know, important parts for someone's function.

So what he would do is he would cut the top of their skull off when they're still awake.

Yeah.

And kind of expose their brain.

And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, you know, what's happening?

Nowadays, things have moved on a bit, right?

Yeah, okay.

Exactly.

They would zap it.

And what he noticed is that when he would zap right at the back of the brain, so this is this primary visual cortex that's receiving information from the environment, his patients would say, oh, I see flashes of light.

I see lines.