Blindsight is a condition in which a patient responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. Usually, it refers to the situation that follows lesions of the geniculostriate pathway (usually damage in the optic radiations or in V1 cortex); such people can still make eye movements to visual stimuli and even carry out rudimentary visual discriminations. However, they profess to be blind, and thus seem to be unconscious of the visual stimuli they are responding to. That people can still respond to visual stimuli following geniculostriate damage is perhaps not surprising because optic nerve afferents also reach several other brain targets besides the lateral geniculate (LGN). See Extrageniculostriate visual pathways below and Blindsight by Larry Weiskrantz in Scholarpedia, 2(4):3047. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.3047.
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