I’ve always wondered why Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, etc. seem to rock back and forth while seated. I met a blind person recently who did the same thing while sitting in a chair.
Why do blind people do this? Thanks.
[www.icevi-europe.org/cracow2000/proceedings/chapter06/06-06.doc+blind+people+rocking&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=10]The](http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:aHQ4O72hlbQJ:[url) explanations don’t seem overwhelming but from what I can tell, They may do it to get sensory cues about their body that other people normally get through sight. That is, by rocking they can get their sense of balance (proprioception) to always tell them how their body relates to the environment. If you sit very still and close your eyes and then start rocking, you can tell that you are getting more information than they would otherwise. The fact that they can never use visual cues makes it apparent that this can be an effective alternate strategy.
Just as a person with just one eye can get some depth of perception by bobbing their head side to side.
A subtle way to get directional and distance information.
[OT]Animals without (or with limited) overlapping binocular vision do this quite a lot, especially birds.
stereoscopic was the word I was looking for
the blind people you named are musicians. perhaps that could account for it. i think i seen bob segar rocking back and forth once. 
Kind of makes sense…I imagine rocking back and forth causes sounds to manifest differently based on the angles and such. A blind person could get a clearer picture of the world by hearing sounds reflecting from different angles. Ever see Daredevil? Excellent sequences in the movies kind of show how that might happen.
Of course, they do this so that they can extract depth information from the parallax shift from each individual eye, instead of doing it stereoscopically – they move that way because they are sighted.
I assume you mean, “A subtle way to get directional and distance information from what they hear.”
I just closed my eyes, and thought about my sense of balance. I realized I felt like I was floating, to an extent.
I started bobbing myself left and right by what felt like about an inch. The floating feeling went away immediately.
I stopped after thirty seconds or so, and the floating feeling came back very quickly, though not immediately.
I think, as the second or third post in this thread suggests, that this is what’s going on.
Try it and see for yourself.
-FrL-
This is actually the cause that lead me here. I watched a YouTube video about cyclopes wherein the guy said they would, if they were real, probably sway their heads to get a sense of depth and distance. I know deaf people do this, and I was hoping to find a term for this action.
That too. You can’t help it with good music, just watch the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene in Wayne’s World. When the music rocks, so do you. But I think with blind people it may be something different.
I would do that all the time if I didn’t know how ridiculous I’d look doing it. Maybe blind people are less conscious about how they look?
A WAG but maybe that’s the natural way to sit.
Look at mentally retarded people or young children; you’ll often see the same kind of movement when they’re sitting. Sitting still may just be a social behavior and these people lack the social awareness to follow it. Most adults sit still because that’s what the people around them are doing.
Blind people lack this social cue because they can’t see what the rest of the people in the room are doing. So they just do what feels natural as an individual.
I’m visually impaired (Legally blind in one eye, legally “low vision” in the other. (Legal definition of low vision: vision correctible to no better than 20/70) and haven’t had binocular vision in many years. (FWIW, my ophthalmologists say “binocular,” not “stereoscopic.”) Being monocular affects your sense of balance. For instance, most people have more trouble standing on one foot if their eyes are closed. I have more trouble doing so with my eyes open. I do not, however, rock or sway, either sitting or standing.
I’m not sure why some blind people do this. It’s certainly not universal. Most people think of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, two blind musicians who swayed; however, when I’ve seen blind musician Jose Feliciano on TV, he did not sway. For those who do, it may be a form of self-stimulation due to the lack of sensory information from the visual cortex. I don’t think it’d have anything to do with trying to perceive the space around them because if that were the case, it wouldn’t be repetitive.
It’s to calibrate their radar sense.
I don’t recall seeing young chidren swaying, but mentally retarded people do it for the same reasons elephants do.
High functioning autistic here, I rock, shift, twitch and fidgit. I rarely sit absolutely still unless I am hyperconcentrating on something.
And think about it - sitting absolutely still is a trained habit - think how often you hear parents tell their kids to sit down and sit still. If a kid is fidgity now, they get accused of being ADHD and having pills shoved down their throats.
WTF? I was a sign language interpreter for 15 years. I had to quit interpreting because of carpal tunnel syndrome, but I still have lots of Deaf friends (conversational signing is nowhere as stressful as interpreting), and I did my interpreter training at Gallaudet University. I don’t know a single Deaf person who does that.
I also don’t know a blind person who does that either, although I don’t have as much experience with blind people, but I had a special endorsement for Deaf-blind interpreting, and did a lot of it. I once went to a convention of the National Federation of the Blind as a Deaf-blind interpreter. So I saw a huge roomful of blind people, and I don’t recall anyone swaying. Certainly, neither of my two good friends who are Deaf-blind does it. And one friend I had who just happened to be blind did not do it-- she had some vision, though, although I would not call her “legally blind”-- she pretty much saw blobs of color, with no distance perception.
I haven’t seen a lot of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, and I don’t have a lot of experience of professional musicians, but I do know one professional pianist who is the sister of the friend my son was named for. She says that musicians deliberately affect a lot of the movement and the facial expressions of being “into” their music for the sake of the show they put on for the audience. Maybe Charles and Wonder were told to do this at some point, and are doing their idea of it, but they haven’t actually seen what they are trying to do, so it is different from other musicians, and possibly they don’t (or didn’t, in Charles case) realize it wasn’t supposed to carry over into just sitting and having a conversation. Or maybe they got so used to doing it when playing, that they did it unconsciously when they talked about music.
Did they do it all the time, or just when discussing music?