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A German woman, known as B.T., was diagnosed with cortical blindness when she was 20.
She was in an accident, and it damaged the part of her brain responsible for sight.
But now, at age 37, she’s discovered something about herself that fascinates doctors.
Since her accident, she’s also developed dissociative identity disorder, a condition which causes multiple personalities to battle for control. She has ten documented ones.
One of them is a teenage boy. And this personality can see.
Now, during treatment for her disorder, she’s regained sight in eight out of ten personalities.
Doctors are perplexed, as they assumed the damage to her eyesight was done in her brain. When given tests in her blind personality, her brain and eyes would respond as a blind person would—that is, not at all.
When she was in a sighted personality, her test results were normal.
Now, doctors believe this must be a psychological problem—but a complex one. They believe she had an emotional response to her accident. Her body tried to stop her from seeing what she could see, since in many psychological cases, a patient in an accident can feel so emotionally stressed that they wish to be blind.
It’s unknown whether or not she’ll recover her vision in all of her personalities.
