Sam KeanIn the video, the man sounds creeped out. “This is too strange for words,” he mutters. He’s holding a plate-size, green foam 8.
When upright, it looks to him like an incoherent jumble. But when he rotates it 90°, the shape snaps into focus; it looks like “a mask.” He begins to rotate the numeral back and forth, watching it melt and cohere over and over.
He finally hands it to a nearby scientist, saying, “You gotta take that away.”This man, known as RFS, is the subject of a new case study that would have made neurologist Oliver Sacks proud.
RFS can read words and letters just fine. But as researchers report this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he cannot see numerals at all—at least not consciously.