I suspect you experience true blindness (briefly) during laser eye surgery, when the flap is cut in the cornea. I remember how odd it felt - the feeling of seeing nothing at all, not even darkness.
What Do Blind People Actually See?
11–20 of 119 posts
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#12> “When the belt experiment was over, Wächter felt lost”
It seems slightly cruel to me to give someone a device to augment their senses without some provision for them to continue using it if the experiment is successful.
I suppose it's also possible that Wächter didn't want to continue using / being reliant upon the belt despite the loss of the spatial sense it had provided.
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#13> “When the belt experiment was over, Wächter felt lost” It seems slightly cruel to me to give someone a device to augment their senses without some provision for them to continue using it if the experiment is successful. I suppose it's also possible that Wächter didn't want to continue using / being reliant upon the belt despite the loss of the spatial sense it had provided.
I think the experiment was still in progress when they took it away, since they observed his reactions to this.
Later they might have given him the device.
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#14A very interesting take on the perceptions of blind people. I don't think I am acquainted with anyone who has been entirely blind from birth (which is a rare condition of life). I know a professor of psychology (who indeed does much of his research on human visual perception)[1] who has very limited vision, and thus is "legally blind." He began life, I think, with a bit more vision than he has now, but has long been visually disabled. In a personal conversation, he related that his originally intended research field was astrophysics, which of course can be studied by analyzing instrument readings from radio telescopes and other devices that don't necessarily have visual outputs. My wife is his piano teacher, and she has had to adapt her teaching to her first student who cannot read a printed musical score.
A much younger person I know who has very limited vision (and the prospect of declining vision as she grows up) attends summer mathematics programs with children running around playing soccer and Frisbee and seems to handle that with aplomb. To not even be able to recognize shapes or moving human beings, something that the blind people I know best are still able to do, would be especially challenging.
Aside: Have you all noticed that people who have acquired profound deafness that begins in adulthood have much less understandable speech than people with normal hearing? Apparently we all rely on feedback from our own senses to keep our speech behavior within the phonologically normal range of whatever language we speak as a native language, and habit alone can't maintain the fine tolerances necessary for readily understandable speech.
AFTER EDIT: Of course anyone can experience total lack of sight simply by going into a totally unlighted place. The human eye doesn't emit vision rays, after all (even though the ancient Greeks seemed to think otherwise), so if you are where there is no light, you see nothing with your eyes.[2] Studies on the human diurnal behavior cycle are sometimes done in deep caves with no source of artificial light.
[1] http://legge.psych.umn.edu/
[2] http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/50-of-college-students-thin...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/30/241906619/seeing-...
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#15I still want that vibrating compass belt.
I wonder if it could be done more subtly, perhaps with a few vibrating motors embedded in the skin around one ankle.
There is something similar to this that is already reality: people use a magnet on one finger to be able to perceive EM fields.
We have the ability to turn our senses off when we are going to sleep, so any "sixth sense" prosthetics should be switchable or at least not strong enough to disturb sleep.
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#16A very interesting take on the perceptions of blind people. I don't think I am acquainted with anyone who has been entirely blind from birth (which is a rare condition of life). I know a professor of psychology (who indeed does much of his research on human visual perception)[1] who has very limited vision, and thus is "legally blind." He began life, I think, with a bit more vision than he has now, but has long been…
Originally from SF area, I have been living in Tokyo for over a year now, and since moving I rarely speak with native English speakers anymore. I've been told by friends and family on occasion my accent and grammar is slowly deteriorating.
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#17As someone who has been blind since birth this is accurate. I know that people who go blind later in life continue to dream in color since they have the memory of color to reference while I do not. I wonder if someone who goes blind later in life experiences things differently, possibly by automatically filling in what they assume they would see based on what they know of there surroundings from there other sences.
I've been blind in my left eye since birth and kids often asked me what I saw, assuming that it was just blackness. In my case if you shine a flashlight in my left eye at the right angle I can see a flash of color, but otherwise there's just no perception at all.
It's probably worth clarifying what we mean by blind. The article and the parent comment are talking about having no light perception at all. However, many (I think most) people who are considered legally blind do have at least some light perception. The legal standard in the US is vision that can be corrected to at best 20/200 in the better eye.
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#18I still want that vibrating compass belt.
There's a small version that goes on your ankle, called a North Paw. Get directions or order a kit here http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#19This reminded me of the language of the Guugu Yimithirr [1] who always describe left/right/forward/back with cardinal directions. Thus, they always have a great sense of direction, and know where north is, even indoors. In that case, it's like the vibrating belt is built into the language.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...
Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?
#20A very interesting take on the perceptions of blind people. I don't think I am acquainted with anyone who has been entirely blind from birth (which is a rare condition of life). I know a professor of psychology (who indeed does much of his research on human visual perception)[1] who has very limited vision, and thus is "legally blind." He began life, I think, with a bit more vision than he has now, but has long been…
Originally from SF area, I have been living in Tokyo for over a year now, and since moving I rarely speak with native English speakers anymore. I've been told by friends and family on occasion my accent and grammar is slowly deteriorating.
The Americans I knew when I lived overseas for three years (on each of two stays that long) definitely had trouble with vocabulary retrieval, the more trouble the longer they had been away from native speakers of English. Correspondingly, Chinese people I know who have been away from places with lots of Chinese printed text often have a lot of trouble writing Chinese characters that everyone learns in school. Even "overlearned" skills that become second nature can degrade through lack of continued practice.