Question about blindness.

Would have just asked the question in subject but whenever I do that people attempt to answer it without reading the qualifiers.
OK, now , suppose everyone told you they had a sixth sense and they received these sensations through their belly button. They call the sense “blork” but you don’t get any sensation from your belly button and never have. People are always asking you if it’s weird not being able to blork. What I’m wondering is: Do people who have been blind since birth and have no NEURAL capacity for sight have any concept of what we are talking about when we speak of seeing? I know that some people are just born with problems in the eye or optic nerve and can therefore see colors and/or vague patterns, but what about someone with a neural dysfunction who never sees a thing? I have read Cecil’s article regarding whether or not the blind dream but that answer doesn’t take into account these particular qualifiers. I was wondering if the sense of touch provided a basis for understanding the concept of sight from an understanding of spatial relationships. Take for example bat sonar. While I don’t have this sense (yet) I can imagine what the feeling MIGHT be like. You’ll notice I used the word feeling; I imagine sonar as a pressure building in my head as i approached something. There is a big difference between understanding the concept of sonar and blorking. I still know that sonar is a distance gauging sense but have no idea what blorking gauges. Sight however is much more than merely distance gauging. I was wondering if the type of blind people I described above have a similar “gut feeling” about what sight might be like or if they have no concept of all like me and blorking.

Probably headed for GD.

OK I’m not blind, but I don’t think it would be hard to come to some kind of understanding of sight. Sight is just the reception of of part of the EM spectrum, albeit immensely detailed and focussed. Even without eyes people can still sense part of the spectrum (IR) through their skin. We can all judge the shape of hot objects without touching them simply by moving our hands around them. I could describe sight to a blind person as being like an ability to sense the heat from all objects, no matter how far away they are and guage thew shape from that heat pattern, Not a perfect description by a long shot, but similar to the way you imagine sonar (which interstingly is completely different to the way I imagine it) and enough to allow a person to imagine sight. With enough other questions asked about limitations, and a few more examples thrown in I suspect a blind person could get a fairly good impression of what sight is like.

Slightly off-topic I had a freind in Uni who was completely colour blind, true monchromatic vision, who decided he wanted to know whether he could see some colours and so needed to find out what colours were like. We finally concluded he was genuinely colour blind but in the process we discovered that we could in fact describe colours to someone who had never seen them by describing them in terms of the senses he did have and allowing a lot of questions. It took twelve months but he finally had a very good knowledge of colour perception and could have convinced most people that he knew what colour was. While obviously not as severe as blindness I think it illustrates that a blind person, even with no experience of sight, could develop an understanding of what it would be like. Not a gut-feeling, but more one develped thruogh asking questions, and I think blind people would ask a lot of questions about what sight is like. It’s only natural.

Try reading Douglas Adams description of the Rhino’s sense of smell in ‘Last Chance To See’ for a good example of how you can describe a largely alien sense using experienced senses.

Couple things Gaspode,

  1. I definately dont think this is a GD. Reason? All we have to do is ask a blind person of the type I describe if they have a concept of sight. If they reply “No damn it, I don’t and it’s really beginning to bug me. Almost more than people asking me if I have the concept of it in the first place.” If they give any description like mine of sonar, then I think that classifies as a concept, right or wrong.

  2. I’d be interested to hear what your concept of sonar was. What senses you related. Did you get a more bitter taste in your mouth as you approaced a wall? :slight_smile:

  3. Your description about the color blind dude was not off topic at all. That was just the kind of thing I was looking for.

OP - “Do people who have been blind since birth and have no neural capacity for sight have any idea what we are talking about when we talk about seeing?”

Yes. A person with blindness can understand that with sight, we (the sighted) can identify objects that are not within our range of touch or sensation (wind movements, echos, difference in walking surface, etc.) Blind people do this too. You or I look at the phone across the room when it rings, a blind person knows that it is 23 feet to the left, around the TV and 4 feet across the floor. They can’t “see” it, but they know where it is. They understand that with sight they could “see” it, but, hey, they know where it is anyway.

People who are completely blind can become familiar with their/a environment and know that the door is open or shut based on the movement of air through a room. They can become familiar with an environment and know that the coffee table is one step forward, the hallway is three steps forward, the bathroom is two steps past and to the left, etc. It’s spatial relationships, as the OP suggested.

The blind understand that the sighted use different methods (sight) to move about their environment. People with blindness use cues that to the sighted, are use without thinking (i.e., curb cuts allow a blind person with a cane to know where a corner is.)

Good questions, Gaspode and good on you for asking. BTW, the whole bat/sonar thing is considered offensive to the blind. They just listen, feel and pay more attention to the environment, where the sighted just can look and go.

(Kind of related to the OP) A friend tells a story about two friends of his who were blind. They both had guide dogs. He finally told them one time when he was visiting, “Look, if you’re going to have the dog’s play fetch at night in the house, you really should be fair to them and turn the lights on.”

The trouble with asking a blind person is that being people they’re going to be able to imagine having sight, the same way I can imagine being able to fly or walk through walls. That doesn’t tell you anything about how the feeling derived or how closely such feeling match actuality. I could imagine what it was like to fly before I ever actually flew because I’d experienced falling, amusement park rides, swimming and a range of other experiences that I could combine with watching animals and planes flying. Similarly blind people can hear, feel heat, touch, smell etc and can combine those to create an imagined sensation of what sight must be like.

If you’re just asking do people completely blind from birth imagine the sensation of sight to allow them to interact with sighted people, then the answer is yes. The one blind person I knew reasonably well used to do exactly that and was quite capable of asking if I could see this or that (eg her misplaced car keys) despite the fact that she couldn’t locate them using any of her own senses. She never expressed any suprise at other people being incacpacitated by a lack of light so she obviously had come to some underatnding of light and dark. Obviously she could understand how sight worked.

Imagine living in a world where you are one of the few peolpe who can’t walk through some solid objects. You could never truly understand how it’s done or what the experience was like but you’d very rapidly learn to imagine how it’s done so you could anticipate when other people were going to do it, how they do it, their limitations etc. That’s just human nature and blind people are no different. However you wouldn’t easily be able to judge whether your imagined conception of walking through walls was in any way comparable to the actual event.

I always imagined sonar as being like a three dimensional shadow play. You know where shadows are cast on a curtain from behind. Imagine every single object illuminated from behind by a light so bright that you can only see the silhouette of the object, no colour, no texture, just three dimensional blocks. You’d have nearly perfect spatial awareness of every object, there’d be no way something could hide in the shadows because it would be backlit but you couldn’t actually see two dimensional images or pick up the whether a box was made of steel or cardboard. Now turn the entire image negative, so the objects become white and are silhoutted in black and that’s pretty close to my image of sonar.

The one blind person I knew reasonably well used to do exactly that and was quite capable of asking if I could see this or that (eg her misplaced car keys) despite the fact that she couldn’t locate them using any of her own senses.

[quote]

And I’ve just realised how strange that seems. i just used the lost carkeys example because it’s something we’re all familiar with. Probably not the best example to use for a blind person.

There was a movie made recently (a couple of years or so ago, starred Val Kilmer, I think. Ah At first sight) based on a true story of a person who was blind from birth (or a very young age)but had some surgery allowing him to be physically capable of sight. The movie was based on an Oliver Sachs book.
Anyway, this man could receive visual signals, but had a very hard time comprehending them in any meaningful way. I’m not sure how much progress he ever made towards sight as we know it.

This would seem to me to indicate that even the physical sensation of sight is inadequate to convey what we conceive of as sight, and that the neural structures we all know and love must be there too. Which brings me to my next point.

A while back (1988, Sur, Garraghty, Roe) there was an experiment where the neural connections of the visual and auditory centers of baby ferrets were swapped. The ferrets then went on to develop working visual and auditory systems, even though the visual was where the auditory usually is, and vice versa.

In short, even if you could blork, you’d have to learn to blork. And any concept you may have of what blorking may be like probably does not do it justice.

Ok, you both have great points but I would throw in a correction for your approval and a new idea too.

  1. Gaspode - the feeling of flying or what it would be like to walk through walls isnt a sense that we don’t already have. It is merely the kinesthetic imaginings of something we haven’t done (yet). The “feeling” of flying is a variation on touch. You don’t need a new sense apparatus to know what it’s like to fly, you need a new physical appartus - Wings.

  2. Damn I forgot your name, and it’s not a reflection on your post. I agree with most of what you said, but a compensatory change in sensory acuity of sound given lack of sight is also not a new sense but a different composition of existing senses. And FTR, I think it’s a shame that blind people would be offended by the sonar reference (though i must say I wasnt actually making the analogy nor thinking of it). Whatever aspect of spatial orientation we achieve through sound is essentially echo-location, blind or not. It’s just that blind people use a larger percentage of “echo-location” as means to orient themselves in space. If I play the non-fitting role of knee-jerk liberal Devil’s Advocate, I could say that the analogy is a great way for “Those with sight to have a better understanding and empathy for the challenges that the blind must endure.”
    Having said that, I think you both helped answer my question, at least to my satisfaction. Here is my take on it. The blind do have a concept of sight. The reason is that any existing senses, whether innate to our species or not, make, for lack of a better word, “sense.” Any sense that we don’t have, does have a corresponding sense in our species. Senses for every species are designed to orient ourselves in space, detect life sustaining and threating “material”, etc. If I began to explain to someone what purpose my fictional sense, “blorking,” served me, I could make an analogy to my own senses because any sense must serve an evolutionary purpose in this universe. Even something like ESP could be likened to intuition. Every sense that does exist serves a purpose that every species must deal with, its just the compostion of what purposes are being served with that particular sense organ that differ and what we name it.
    The reason we have no concept of what blorking is, besides that fact that it’s fictional :slight_smile: is because I didnt describe to what end it serves. If you can think of a purpose that blorking can serve, you can make an analogy to any of our senses (If you include intuition) and therefore have a concept of it. Even if your belly button had the ability to sense a quantum phenomenom we could at least get as good a concept as one can get from getting the concept, however brief, of wave-particle duality.
    Thanks for your thought-provoking responses. Now I have to take a Xanax.

Hi nerd,
you posted that as i was writing the last response. Didnt mean to leave you out. Yea that book by Sacks was “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.” Actually I never saw the Movie but from what you describe, it is (very) loosely based on the eponymous essay. If my memory served me correctly (which it doesnt) I could tell you the problem had something do do with a screw up in the Corpus Collosum, the information sharing bridge between the right and left hemispheres. While the right brain understands the “face” as a whole, the left one see’s a nose, eyes, ears,etc. Right brain is gestalt while left is whatever the word for the opposite of gestalt is :). This guy’s right hemisphere was ****** up, and had no ability to put the parts into a whole and therefore saw things out of context, just by there shape, color, etc. The name of the essay is derived from a situation in Sack’s office where the man with this affliction grabbed his wife’s head thinking it was his hat.
BTW the title of that book reminds me of another book that throws a whole new wrench in my engine. “The Man who Tasted Shapes.” - a book about synesthsiacs (word?) whose neural wiring was crossed. The title guy didnt experience taste as taste but as touch. Every taste had a different shape. And these werent analogical shapes like something sweet being smooth or something bitter being jagged. If I remember he correctly (which I dont) his sense of his wife’s spagetthi sause was star-like objects with ridges on the edge ala the quarter. I don’t know about you but I sure as hell don’t get that concept. Maybe I should take acid again.