Human and Animal Senses: Would a person who was born blind and can suddenly see, be able to recognize a shape by just looking at it for the first time? I.E. If he was looking at a ball for the first time ever, will he be able to say that it is round?
5 Answers
I had a best friend who was blinded at an early age (he could read letter-by-letter things written about an inch tall with a Sharpie, just well enough that he was never forced to learn Braille very well). He really did not have a three-dimensional sense of the world, and he could not describe the shapes of things in any recognizable way or recognize their descriptions, even something as simple as this:
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We went back and forth on the phone for 45 minutes one day about this very object because he'd lost track of the thread; until he managed to convince me that I was wrong and he owned some entirely differently shaped brand of floss that I'd never heard of. Next day at his apartment I looked, and there was the exact floss in the photo that I was certain he had. I'm quite good at describing things like that but it didn't help.
It used to drive him nuts that when the power went out I could get around his apartment better than he could; and every time he got a new little memo recorder or such he'd challenge me to figure out how it worked with my eyes closed. I always could and it made him mad.
For him life seemed to be a sort of serial bit-stream heavily favoring audio. His memory for things that had been read to him was phenomenal.
And if I could figure out a way to do something with my eyes closed, like load paper in his pinfeed Okidata printer, or assemble a filter coffee pot, I could take him through the motions twice and he'd have it forever.
He was aware of the man in Britain who gained his sight as an adult and suicided a year later, unable to cope with the visual world. He very much wanted to see but was terrified of what might happen if he could.
So I'm not at all sure what he'd have been able to tell you about a ball by looking at it.
It used to drive him nuts that when the power went out I could get around his apartment better than he could; and every time he got a new little memo recorder or such he'd challenge me to figure out how it worked with my eyes closed. I always could and it made him mad.
For him life seemed to be a sort of serial bit-stream heavily favoring audio. His memory for things that had been read to him was phenomenal.
And if I could figure out a way to do something with my eyes closed, like load paper in his pinfeed Okidata printer, or assemble a filter coffee pot, I could take him through the motions twice and he'd have it forever.
He was aware of the man in Britain who gained his sight as an adult and suicided a year later, unable to cope with the visual world. He very much wanted to see but was terrified of what might happen if he could.
So I'm not at all sure what he'd have been able to tell you about a ball by looking at it.
People who are born blind and later gain vision thru surgery are said to have great difficulty living in their sighted world. There are examples of people who regained sight who nevertheless continue to work with their eyes closed, because it's easier. Spatial awareness can be quite difficult. For instance, if you were to walk away from your newly sighted friend, he is likely to perceive you as getting smaller somehow rather than moving away. You can imagine how difficult it would be to adjust to a newly seen world under these conditions. Someone stayed it might be a good idea to learn within an undistrwcting environment and I would agree with that.
There are some great books you might want to read that cover this question in greater depth. One is by Oliver Sacks, MD, called "an anthropologist on Mars", which might be enlightening. (I find all Oliver Sacks books enlightening, but in this particular book he tells the story of a man who gains sight after many years of being blind and who continues to live as if blind after his sight-giving surgery. I think he called it 'mental blindness', but I might be wrong about the term he used.). There is another book called "Crashing Thru" by Kurson that has been made into a motion picture, which you might find interesting. There's a movie starring Val Kilmer about a man who was blind at birth and gained sight for the first time as an adult. Movies don't always stick to the facts but there was one scene that I thought really captured the confusion the character felt in his now sighted world. He was standing in a store and thought he was looking at a cab in the street outside. However, when the traffic moved, the cab stayed where it was because what he was seeing was actually a toy car on a shelf. Depth perception and object recognition are quite difficult for folks who receive vision restoration procedures.
I'm not sure how well one can Learn to see, but I do know that the visual cortex does not develop properly without visual input as a young age. In fact, when one specialized part of a brain is not used for its usual purpose, that part of the brain usually begins to do other things. For instance, echo location used by some blind people has been shown to be located in the visual cortex! I LOVE that. What a clever organ the brain is!
In another sensory systrm, hearing, the same difficulties occur. Getting a cochlear implant as an adult after a lifetime of being deaf results in some real challenges for the newly hearing person. Suddenly hearing your child speak will not automatically allow a formally deaf person to know what is said. Much training is required and, even then, as I understand it, many people will still choose to turn off their hearing input at times. It just requires terrific concentration and can prove to be too tiring.
There are some great books you might want to read that cover this question in greater depth. One is by Oliver Sacks, MD, called "an anthropologist on Mars", which might be enlightening. (I find all Oliver Sacks books enlightening, but in this particular book he tells the story of a man who gains sight after many years of being blind and who continues to live as if blind after his sight-giving surgery. I think he called it 'mental blindness', but I might be wrong about the term he used.). There is another book called "Crashing Thru" by Kurson that has been made into a motion picture, which you might find interesting. There's a movie starring Val Kilmer about a man who was blind at birth and gained sight for the first time as an adult. Movies don't always stick to the facts but there was one scene that I thought really captured the confusion the character felt in his now sighted world. He was standing in a store and thought he was looking at a cab in the street outside. However, when the traffic moved, the cab stayed where it was because what he was seeing was actually a toy car on a shelf. Depth perception and object recognition are quite difficult for folks who receive vision restoration procedures.
I'm not sure how well one can Learn to see, but I do know that the visual cortex does not develop properly without visual input as a young age. In fact, when one specialized part of a brain is not used for its usual purpose, that part of the brain usually begins to do other things. For instance, echo location used by some blind people has been shown to be located in the visual cortex! I LOVE that. What a clever organ the brain is!
In another sensory systrm, hearing, the same difficulties occur. Getting a cochlear implant as an adult after a lifetime of being deaf results in some real challenges for the newly hearing person. Suddenly hearing your child speak will not automatically allow a formally deaf person to know what is said. Much training is required and, even then, as I understand it, many people will still choose to turn off their hearing input at times. It just requires terrific concentration and can prove to be too tiring.
I think that when you are looking at objects you have never seen but you have felt before, you can, in fact, recognize them in a couple of ways.
Fistly, I think you'd have to put the poor man/woman in a dark area with not too many colours and/or objects. A white room with no doors or recognizable corners would do best.
Then there's the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. When placing a ball, say, for example a solid red ball in the middle of this room. Would his mind be able to make out what the shadows are? If he were to walk around it, could he only THEN make out it's shape?
You can also paint a red circle on the wall. When walking around this time, his perspective only changes, which might be very strange for someone who is seeing for the first time.
The same would go for squares and triangles...
I think that the more complex shapes like bottles and lamps could also be recognized, but the more complex you go, the less likely it will get for the used-to-be-blind person to recognize it.
This also raises the question for me wheter a man, when seeing for the first time, would think women are pretty by looking at them.
Also, could they appreciate abstract art?
Fistly, I think you'd have to put the poor man/woman in a dark area with not too many colours and/or objects. A white room with no doors or recognizable corners would do best.
Then there's the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. When placing a ball, say, for example a solid red ball in the middle of this room. Would his mind be able to make out what the shadows are? If he were to walk around it, could he only THEN make out it's shape?
You can also paint a red circle on the wall. When walking around this time, his perspective only changes, which might be very strange for someone who is seeing for the first time.
The same would go for squares and triangles...
I think that the more complex shapes like bottles and lamps could also be recognized, but the more complex you go, the less likely it will get for the used-to-be-blind person to recognize it.
This also raises the question for me wheter a man, when seeing for the first time, would think women are pretty by looking at them.
Also, could they appreciate abstract art?
Well, I have heard of a situation matching the specifics of this question. I'm fairly sure that the answer is no. A blind person will not be able to relate the roundness of a sphere or the pointiness of a cube to the actual appearance of the objects. Unless they performed some kind of deduction, such as, this object has 6 sides, like a cube, so it is probably a cube, they would not be able to tell which was the cube and which was the sphere just by looking.
