How would one explain sight to someone who has never seen anything? Or sound to a deaf person?
How would someone who has never seen or heard anything understand what they are missing?
My best analogy is this: I have never been clairvoyant, but I can imagine having that sense & I think I can reasonably understand it. But not knowing anything about sight, how could you explain, “You can tell where people are and what is in the room by just looking”?
I think the concept of “looking” or “hearing” is unfathomable to someone who has never done it. How is it explained? How is it understood?
Interesting question. I’ve known deaf people who can feel changes in vibration well enought to dance to some types of music. They might be able to draw the analogy to sound. I really don’t know how you would explain sight, though.
The closest I can come to picture it myself is thinking about people who can project umpteen chess moves in advance by glancing at the board, or who have perfect pitch. I can vaguely imagine how it must feel to have that kind of ability, but only vaguely.
Tough question. In a movie I saw once, a man was trying to explain colors to a blind person. He had several rocks which he heated or cooled to different temperatures. I remember that he handed the person a cold rock and told him/her (I forgot) that that was blue. Hot was red, warm orange–something like that. I don’t know if such a technique would really help the blind person, but I thought it was pretty clever and I couldn’t think of any better way to explain it.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
I turned this one upside down once. I had a friend who was blind from birth. I asked her, once, when did she first realize that other people could see. She is a very unhandicapped by her blindness, so I was pretty sure that she could give me some new information. I was right.
When she was in first grade, her teacher gave her her first books. The teacher made a minor point about the fact that my friend’s books were special, being in Braille. The distinction was lost on her. She immediately asked to have regular books, like everyone else. It took some time for her to understand that being blind was not just some special thing about her, but that she could not use the same books, because she could not see them.
It took a long time for her to find out that the books everyone else used did not have letters shaped the same as the Braille text markings, too. She reported that she was rather incensed to have to learn the alphabet over again, just to be able to read bas relief lettering, when she first found some. “Why are there two sets of letters?” “You mean, you can’t read the books I have, even if you can see them?”
She also finds it terribly “sightist” that she has to have a monitor to hook up to her computer. She complains that it would be much cheaper if they would just make a Dongle to cheat the operating system into thinking there was a monitor there, and she would not miss it at all. She does own the cheesiest, cheapest, crummiest monitor you ever saw. She also sells the new ones, whenever she upgrades, to get even with all those “sightist” computer geeks.
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The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
–** Ambrose Bierce**
The movie to which Lucky refers is Mask. It’s a beautiful scene: taking what is very real and mundane to a sighted person and communicating it - through metaphor - to a blind person. I think white was cotton balls.
And I think that’s important … some things we can only understand on a metaphorical level.
The only other way I could think of to explain sight (without color) to a blind person might be to have them explore with their hands, but always moving their hands out from their eyes and stopping at the first object they reach. So if my hand is in front of my face, your hand reaching out won’t hit my face, it’ll stop first at my hand. This would explain some of the limitations of sight, but also some of the advantages - if your arms were long enough, you could reach out and touch a mountain, but with sight you can see reach out and touch anything (that’s not blocked by something else). So in a way, sight is liking having infinitely long arms, except that those arms wouldn’t be able to manipulate anything. Being able to see something and not affect it is a frustration peculiar to sighted people alone.
Explaining transparency would be a whole 'nother problem. I think sound would be somewhat easier to explain to a deaf person - for the vibration reasons cher3 mentioned. Explaining smell to a non-smeller (there’s gotta be a better term for that!) would be really hard, I think … “when some things make your nose feel a certain way”. Taste kind of takes a back seat to smell so it might not be such a big deal … “somethings that smell a certain way also taste a certain way.” And I’m totally clueless about what it would be like to lack sense of touch.
Hey, wait a minute, Triskadecamus! How do computers for blind people work? I’ve wondered about this, and figured I hadn’t heard anything about it because not much blind technology had been developed yet. Sounds like I’m just out of it, though.
There’s a book by Abbot called Flatland, about a race of two-dimensional creatures. This is part of the same deal - a two-dimensional creature would have real trouble conceiving a third dimension. The main character is a square (not a put-down in Flatland) who get introduced to the third dimension (“upward, but not northwards”) by a sphere. He then tries to explain it to his flat compatriots, and have no success. Just as you would have no success pointing to the fourth dimension - it’s at right angles to every dimension you can conceive of.
H.G.Wells wrote a story called “Kingdom of the Blind” (“in the Kingdom of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King”). About an explorer who stumbled into a forgotten valley whose inhabitants were all blind. When he tried to explain the concept of seeing to them, they of course thought he was nuts. He could see that there was something like an avalance above the valley that was about to come down upon them and kill them and he tried to warn them, but of course they didn’t listen to the crazy man. So he escaped with an attractive blind woman, who became his wife. And she eventually came to understand the concept of “sight” but told him she was glad she was blind.
For visual things for blind people, sing or play music.
Far easier to explain sound to a full deaf person or sight to a full blind person than to teach a hearing person what its like to be deaf or a sighted person what it’s like to not see.
My friend’s computer had a voice synthesizer, and she pretty much lived in a text only world. The synthesizer read to her at about 400 words per minute, which I could not even begin to understand, although I read about that fast. Bewildering, I tell you. Also, ASCII art really sucks, if it is more than a couple of characters long.
I often chatted with my friend, on a BBS we both belonged to. I would regularly include endings to my statements like this. Colon right paren Eventually, someone asked me in the chat room, "Why do you keep writing colon right paren? I held off for a few seconds, and sure enough, my friend said, “Oh, that is a smiley face, look at it sideways!” Everyone but my friend was horrified that I had perpetrated a six-week practical joke on the “poor blind girl.” She told me later the three-minute silence that followed the other member mentioning that I had been spelling out the words was due to her falling off her chair, literally ROFL.
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The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.
–Alexander Jablokov, The Place of No Shadows
A little OT, but when my 8th-grade teacher,Mr. Webber, got upset with us, he’d make us write a 200-word essay, “describing sunset to a man born blind.” Anyone using visual terms would be ridiculed in front of the entire class. So I described the scene in terms of the other senses, and escaped his wrath.
Boris raised the question of explaining transparency to a blind person. Actually I think that (and transluscency) would be easy to explain, by way of analogy to a wall which blocks sound, vs. a curtain which will muffle it a lot, or a little, or not at all.