Oliver Sacks on the Mind's Eye : What the Blind See
Frederick
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 28. 2003
A NEUROLOGIST'S NOTEBOOK
TITLE: THE MIND'S EYE
Subtitle: What the blind see.
BY OLIVER SACKS
In his last letter, Goethe wrote, "The Ancients said that the animals are taught through their
organs; let me add to this, so are men, but they have the advantage of teaching their organs in
return." He wrote this in 1832, a time when phrenology was at its height, and the brain was seen as
a mosaic of "little organs" subserving everything from language to drawing ability to shyness. Each
individual, it was believed, was given a fixed measure of this faculty or that, according to the
luck of his birth. Though we no longer pay attention, as the phrenologists did, to the "bumps" on
the head (each of which, supposedly, indicated a brain-mind organ beneath), neurology and
neuroscience have stayed close to the idea of brain fixity and localization - the notion, in
particular, that the highest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is effectively programmed from
birth: this part to vision and visual processing, that part to hearing, that to touch, and so on.
This would seem to allow individuals little power of choice, of self-determination, let alone of
adaptation, in the event of a neurological or perceptual mishap.
But to what extent are we - our experiences, our reactions - shaped, predetermined, by our brains,
and to what extent do we shape our own brains? Does the mind run the brain or the brain the mind -
or, rather, to what extent does one run the other? To what extent are we the authors, the creators,
of our own experiences? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness can cast
an unexpected light on this. To become blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge,
potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one's world, when the
old way has been destroyed.
A dozen years ago, I was sent an extraordinary book called "Touching the Rock. An Experience of
Blindness." The author, John Hull, was a professor of religious education who had grown up in
Australia and then moved to England. Hull had developed cataracts at the age of thirteen, and
became completely blind in his left eye four years later. Vision in his right eye remained
reasonable until he was thirty-five or so, and then started to deteriorate. There followed a decade
of steadily failing vision, in which Hull needed stronger and stronger magnifying glasses, and had
to write with thicker and thicker pens, until, in 1983, at the age of forty-eight, he became
completely blind.
"Touching the Rock" is the journal he dictated in the three years that followed. It is full of
piercing insights relating to Hull's life as a blind person, but most striking for me is Hull's
description of how, in the years after his loss of sight, he experienced a gradual attenuation of
visual imagery and memory, and finally a virtual extinction of them (except in dreams) - a state
that he calls "deep blindness."
By this, Hull meant not only the loss of visual images and memories but a loss of the very idea of
seeing, so that concepts like "here," "there," and "facing" seemed to lose meaning for him, and
even the sense of objects having "appearances", visible characteristics, vanished. At this point,
for example, he could no longer imagine how the numeral 3 looked, unless he traced it in the air
with his hand. He could construct a "motor" image of a 3, but not a visual one.
Hull, though at first greatly distressed about the fading of visual memories and images -- the fact
that he could no longer conjure up the faces of his wife or children, or of familiar and loved
landscapes and places - then came to accept it with remarkable equanimity; indeed, to regard it as
a natural response to a nonvisual world. He seemed to regard this loss of visual imagery as a
prerequisite for the full development, the heightening, of his other senses.
Two years after becoming completely blind, Hull had apparently become so nonvisual as to resemble
someone who had been blind from birth. Hulls loss of visuality also reminded me of the sort of
"cortical blindness" that can happen if the primary visual cortex is damaged, through a stroke or
traumatic brain damage - although in Hull's case there was no direct damage to the visual cortex
but, rather, a cutting off from any visual stimulation or input.
In a profoundly religious way, and in language sometimes reminiscent of that of St. John of the
Cross, Hull enters into this state, surrenders himself, with a sort of acquiescence and joy. And
such "deep" blindness he conceives as "an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own....
Being a whole-body seer is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions."
Being a "whole-body seer," for Hull, means shifting his attention, his center of gravity, to the
other senses, and he writes again and again of how these have assumed a new richness and power.
Thus he speaks of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, can now delineate a
whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path is different from its sound as it drums
on the lawn, or on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the road. "Rain," he
writes, "has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over
previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily
falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience ... presents the fullness of an entire
situation all at once ... gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part
of the world to another."
With his new intensity of auditory experience (or attention), along with the sharpening of his
other senses, Hull comes to feel a sense of intimacy with nature, an intensity of
being-in-the-world, beyond anything he knew when he was sighted. Blindness now becomes for him "a
dark, paradoxical gift." This is not just "compensation," he emphasizes, but a whole new order, a
new mode of human being. With this he extricates himself from visual nostalgia, from the strain, or
falsity, of trying to pass as "normal," and finds a new focus, a new freedom. His teaching at the
university expands, becomes more fluent, his writing becomes stronger and deeper; he becomes
intellectually and spiritually bolder, more confident. He feels he is on solid ground at last.
What Hull described seemed to me an astounding example of how an individual deprived of one form of
perception could totally reshape himself to a new center, a new identity.
It is said that those who see normally as infants but then become blind within the first two years
of life retain no memories of seeing, have no visual imagery and no visual elements in their dreams
(and, in this way, are comparable to those born blind). It is similar with those who lose hearing
before the age of two: they have no sense of having "lost" the world of sound, nor any sense of
"silence," as hearing people sometimes imagine. For those who lose sight so early, the very
concepts of "sight" or "blindness" soon cease to have meaning, and there is no sense of losing the
world of vision, only of living fully in a world constructed by the other senses.
But it seemed extraordinary to me that such an annihilation of visual memory as Hull describes
could happen equally to an adult, with decades, an entire lifetime, of rich and richly categorized
visual experience to call upon. And yet I could not doubt the authenticity of Hull's account, which
he relates with the most scrupulous care and lucidity.
Important studies of adaptation in the brain were begun in the nineteen seventies by, among others,
Helen Neville, a cognitive neuroscientist now working in Oregon. She showed that in prelingually
deaf people (that is, those who had been born deaf or become deaf before the age of two or so) the
auditory parts of the brain had not degenerated or atrophied. These had remained active and
functional, but with an activity and a function that were new: they had been transformed,
"reallocated," in Neville's term, for processing visual language. Comparable studies in those born
blind, or early blinded, show that the visual areas of the cortex, similarly, may be reallocated in
function, and used to process sound and touch.
With the reallocation of the visual cortex to touch and other senses, these can take on a
hyperacuity that perhaps no sighted person can imagine. Bernard Morin, the blind mathematician who
in the nineteen-sixties had shown how a sphere could be turned inside out, felt that his
achievement required a special sort of spatial perception and imagination. And a similar sort of
spatial giftedness has been central to the work of Geerat Vermeij, a blind biologist who has been
able to delineate many new species of mollusk, based on tiny variations in the shapes and contours
of their shells.
Faced with such findings and reports, neurologists began to concede that there might be a certain
flexibility or plasticity in the brain, at least in the early years of life. But when this critical
period was over, it was assumed, the brain became inflexible, and no further changes of a radical
type could occur. The experiences that Hull so carefully recounts give the lie to this. It is clear
that his perceptions, his brain, did finally change, in a fundamental way. Indeed, Alvaro
Pascual-Leone and his colleagues in Boston have recently shown that, even in adult sighted
volunteers, as little as five days of being blindfolded produces marked shifts to nonvisual forms
of behavior and cognition, and they have demonstrated the physiological changes in the brain that
go along with this. And only last month, Italian researchers published a study showing that sighted
volunteers kept in the dark for as little as ninety minutes may show a striking enhancement of
tactile-spatial sensitivity.
The brain, clearly, is capable of changing even in adulthood, and I assumed that Hull's experience
was typical of acquired blindness - the response, sooner or later, of everyone who becomes blind,
even in adult life.
So when I came to publish an essay on Hull's book, in 1991, I was taken aback to receive a number
of letters from blind people, letters that were often somewhat puzzled, and occasionally indignant,
in tone. Many of my correspondents, it seemed, could not identify with Hull's experience, and said
that they themselves, even decades after losing their sight, had never lost their visual images or
memories. One correspondent, who had lost her sight at fifteen, wrote, "Even though I am totally
blind ... I consider myself a very visual person. I still 'see' objects in front of me. As I am
typing now I can see my hands on the keyboard.... I don’t feel comfortable in a new environment
until I have a mental picture of its appearance. I need a mental map for my independent moving,
too."
Had I been wrong, or at least one sided, in accepting Hull's experience as a typical response to
blindness? Had I been guilty of emphasizing one mode of response too strongly, oblivious to the
possibilities of radically different responses?
This feeling came to a head in 1996, when I received a letter from an Australian psychologist named
Zoltan Torey. Torey wrote to me not about blindness but about a book he had written on the
brain-mind problem and the nature of consciousness. (The book was published by Oxford University
Press as "The Crucible of Consciousness," in 1999.) In his letter Torey also spoke of how he had
been blinded in an accident at the age of twenty-one, while working at a chemical factory, and how,
although "advised to switch from a visual to an auditory mode of adjustment," he had moved in the
opposite direction, and resolved to develop instead his "inner eye," his powers of visual imagery,
to their greatest possible extent.
In this, it seemed, he had been extremely successful, developing a remarkable power of generating,
holding, and manipulating images in his mind, so much so that he had been able to construct an
imagined visual world that seemed almost as real and intense to him as the perceptual one he had
lost-and, indeed, sometimes more real, more intense, a sort of controlled dream or hallucination.
This imagery, moreover, enabled him to do things that might have seemed scarcely possible for a
blind man.
"I replaced the entire roof guttering of my multi-gabled home single-handed," he wrote, "and solely
on the strength of the accurate and well-focused manipulation of my now totally pliable and
responsive mental space." (Torey later expanded on this episode, mentioning the great alarm of his
neighbors at seeing a blind man, alone, on the roof of his house and, even more terrifying to them,
at night, in pitch darkness.)
And it enabled him to think in ways that had not been available to him before, to envisage
solutions, models, designs, to project himself to the inside of machines and other systems, and,
finally, to grasp by visual thought and simulation (complemented by all the data of neuroscience)
the complexities of that ultimate system, the human brain-mind.
When I wrote back to Torey I suggested that he consider writing another book, a more personal one,
exploring how his life had been affected by blindness, and how he had responded to this, in the
most improbable and seemingly paradoxical of ways. "Out of Darkness" is the memoir he has now
written, and in it Torey describes his early memories with great visual intensity and humor. Scenes
are remembered or reconstructed in brief, poetic glimpses of his childhood and youth in Hungary
before the Second World War: the sky-blue buses of Budapest, the egg-yellow trams, the lighting of
gas lamps, the funicular on the Buda side. He describes a carefree and privileged youth, roaming
with his father in the wooded mountains above the Danube, playing games and pranks at school,
growing up in a highly intellectual environment of writers, actors, professionals of every sort.
Torey's father was the head of a large motion-picture studio and would often give his son scripts
to read. "This," Torey writes, "gave me the opportunity to visualize stories, plots and characters,
to work my imagination - a skill that was to become a lifeline and source of strength in the years
ahead."
All of this came to a brutal end with the Nazi occupation, the siege of Buda, and then the Soviet
occupation. Torey now an adolescent, found himself passionately drawn to the big questions -- the
mystery of the universe, of life, and above all the mystery of consciousness, of the mind. In 1948,
nineteen years old, and feeling that he needed to immerse himself in biology, engineering,
neuroscience, and psychology, but knowing that there was no chance of study, of an intellectual
life, in Soviet Hungary, Torey made his escape and eventually found his way to Australia, where,
penniless and without connections, he did various manual jobs. In June of 1951, loosening the plug
in a vat of acid at the chemical factory where he worked, he had the accident that bisected his
life.
"The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to
engulf my face and change my life. It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of
the drumface, less than a foot away. This was the final scene, the slender thread that ties me to
my visual past."
When it became clear that his corneas had been hopelessly damaged and that he would have to live
his life as a blind man, he was advised to rebuild his representation of the world on the basis of
hearing and touch and to "forget about sight and visualizing altogether." But this was something
that Torey could not or would not do. He had emphasized, in his first letter to me, the importance
of a most critical choice at this juncture: "I immediately resolved to find out how far a partially
sense-deprived brain could go to rebuild a life." Put this way, it sounds abstract, like an
experiment. But in his book one senses the tremendous feelings underlying his resolution - the
horror of darkness, "the empty darkness," as Torey often calls it, "the grey fog that was engulfing
me," and the passionate desire to hold on to light and sight, to maintain, if only in memory and
imagination, a vivid and living visual world. The very title of his book says all this, and the
note of defiance is sounded from the start.
Hull, who did not use his potential for imagery in a deliberate way, lost it in two or three years,
and became unable to remember which way round a 3 went; Torey, on the other hand, soon became able
to multiply four-figure numbers by each other, as on a blackboard, visualizing the whole operation
in his mind,"painting" the suboperations in different colors.
Well aware that the imagination (or the brain), unrestrained by the usual perceptual input, may run
away with itself in a wildly associative or self-serving way as may happen in deliria,
hallucinations, or dreams -- Torey maintained a cautious and "scientific" attitude to his own
visual imagery, taking pains to check the accuracy of his images by every means available. "I
learned," he writes, "to hold the image in a tentative way, conferring credibility and status on it
only when some information would tip the balance in its favor." Indeed, he soon gained enough
confidence in the reliability of his visual imagery to stake his life upon it, as when he undertook
roof repairs by himself. And this confidence extended to other, purely mental projects. He became
able "to imagine, to visualize, for example, the inside of a differential gearbox in action as if
from inside its casing. I was able to watch the cogs bite, lock and revolve, distributing the spin
as required. I began to play around with this internal view in connection with mechanical and
technical problems, visualizing how subcomponents relate in the atom, or in the living cell." This
power of imagery was crucial, Torey thought, in enabling him to arrive at a solution of the
brain-mind problem by visualizing the brain "as a perpetual juggling act of interacting routines."
In a famous study of creativity, the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked many scientists
and mathematicians, including Einstein, about their thought processes. Einstein replied, "The
physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are ... more or less clear images
which can be, ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. [Some are] of visual and some of muscular
type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary
stage." Torey cites this, and adds, "Nor was Einstein unique in this respect. Hadamard found that
almost all scientists work this way, and this was also the way my project evolved."
Soon after receiving Torey's manuscript, I received the proofs of yet another memoir by a blind
person: Sabriye Tenberked's "My Path Leads to Tibet." While Hull and Torey are thinkers,
preoccupied in their different ways by inwardness, states of brain and mind, Tenberken is a doer;
she has traveled, often alone, all over Tibet, where for centuries blind people have been treated
as less than human and denied education, work, respect, or a role in the community. Virtually
single-handed, Tenberken has transformed their situation over the past half-dozen years, devising a
form of Tibetan Braille, establishing schools for the blind, and integrating the graduates of these
schools into their communities.
Tenberken herself had impaired vision almost from birth but was able to make out faces and
landscapes until she was twelve. As a child in Germany, she had a particular predilection for
colors, and loved painting, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms she could
still use colors to identify objects. Tenberken has, indeed, an intense synesthesia. "As far back
as I can remember," she writes, "numbers and words have instantly triggered colors in me .... The
number 4, for example, [is] gold. Five is light green. Nine is vermilion.... Days of the week as
well as months have their colors, too. I have them arranged in geometrical formations, in circular
sectors, a little like a pie. When I need to recall on which day a particular event happened, the
first thing that pops up on my inner screen is the day's color, then its position in the pie." Her
synesthesia has persisted and been intensified, it seems, by her blindness.
Though she has been totally blind for twenty years now, Tenberken continues to use all her other
senses, along with verbal descriptions, visual memories, and a strong pictorial and synesthetic
sensibility, to construct "pictures" of landscapes and rooms, of environments and scenes - pictures
so lively and detailed as to astonish her listeners. These images may sometimes be wildly or
comically different from reality, as she relates in one incident when she and a companion drove to
Nam Co, the great salt lake in Tibet. Turning eagerly toward the lake, Tenberken saw, in her mind's
eye, "a beach of crystallized salt shimmering like snow under an evening sun, at the edge of a vast
body of turquoise water... And down below, on the deep green mountain flanks, a few nomads were
watching their yaks grazing." But it then turns out that she has been facing in the wrong
direction, not "looking" at the lake at all, and that she has been "staring" at rocks and a gray
landscape. These disparities don't faze her in the least - she is happy to have so vivid a visual
imagination. Hers is essentially an artistic imagination, which can be impressionistic, romantic,
not veridical at all, where Torey's imagination is that of an engineer, and has to be factual,
accurate down to the last detail.
I had now read three memoirs, strikingly different in their depictions of the visual experience of
blinded people: Hull with his acquiescent descent into imageless "deep blindness," Torey with his
"compulsive visualization" and meticulous construction of an internal visual world, and Tenberken
with her impulsive, almost novelistic, visual freedom, along with her remarkable and specific gift
of synesthesia. Was there any such thing, I now wondered, as a "typical" blind experience?
I recently met two other people blinded in adult life who shared their experiences with me.
Dennis Shulman, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who lectures on Biblical topics, is an
affable, stocky, bearded man in his fifties who gradually lost his sight in his teens, becoming
completely blind by the time he entered college. He immediately confirmed that his experience was
unlike Hull's: "I still live in a visual world after thirty-five years of blindness. I have very
vivid visual memories and images. My wife, whom I have never seen -- I think of her visually. My
kids, too. I see myself visually ~ but it is as I last saw myself, when I was thirteen, though I
try hard to update the image. I often give public lectures, and my notes are in Braille; but when I
go over them in my mind, I see the Braille notes visually ~ they are visual images, not tactile."
Arlene Gordon, a charming woman in her seventies, a former social worker, said that things were
very similar for her: "If I move my arms back and forth in front of my eyes, I see them, even
though I have been blind for more than thirty years." It seemed that moving her arms was
immediately translated for her into a visual image. Listening to talking books, she added, made her
eyes tire if she listened too long; she seemed to herself to be reading at such times, the sound of
the spoken words being transformed to lines of print on a vividly visualized book in front of her.
This involved a sort of cognitive exertion (similar perhaps to translating one language into
another), and sooner or later this would give her an eye ache.
I was reminded of Amy, a colleague who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of nine but
was so adept a lip reader that I often forgot she was deaf. Once, when I absent-mindedly turned
away from her as I was speaking, she said sharply, "I can no longer hear you."
"You mean you can no longer see me," I said.
"You may call it seeing," she answered, "but I experience it as hearing."
Amy, though totally deaf, still constructed the sound of speech in her mind. Both Dennis and
Arlene, similarly, spoke not only of a heightening of visual imagery and imagination since losing
their eyesight but also of what seemed to be a much readier transference of information from verbal
description - or from their own sense of touch, movement, hearing, or smell - into a visual form.
On the whole, their experiences seemed quite similar to Torey's, even though they had not
systematically exercised their powers of visual imagery in the way that he had, or consciously
tried to make an entire virtual world of sight.
There is increasing evidence from neuroscience for the extraordinarily rich interconnectedness and
interactions of the sensory areas of the brain, and the difficulty, therefore, of saying that
anything is purely visual or purely auditory, or purely anything. This is evident in the very
titles of some recent papers ~ Pascual-Leone and his colleagues at Harvard now write of "The
Metamodal Organization of the Brain," and Shinsuke Shimojo and his group at Caltech, who are also
exploring intersensory perceptual phenomena, recently published a paper called "What You See Is
What You Hear," and stress that sensory modalities can never be considered in isolation. The world
of the blind, of the blinded, it seems, can be especially rich in such in between states - the
intersensory, the metamodal-states for which we have no common language.
Arlene, like Dennis, still identifies herself in many ways as a visual person. "I have a very
strong sense of color," she said. "I pick out my own clothes. I think, Oh, that will go with this
or that, once I have been told the colors." Indeed, she was dressed very smartly, and took obvious
pride in her appearance.
"I love travelling," she continued. "I 'saw' Venice when I was there." She explained how her
travelling companions would describe places, and she would then construct a visual image from these
details, her reading, and her own visual memories. "Sighted people enjoy travelling with me," she
said. "I ask them questions, then they look, and see things they wouldn't otherwise. Too often
people with sight don't see anything! It's a reciprocal process ~ we enrich each other's worlds."
If we are sighted, we build our own images, using our eyes, our visual information, so instantly
and seamlessly that it seems to us we are experiencing "reality' itself. One may need to see people
who are color-blind, or motion-blind, who have lost certain visual capacities from cerebral injury,
to realize the enormous act of analysis and synthesis, the dozens of subsystems involved in the
subjectively simple act of seeing. But can a visual image be built using nonvisual information -
information conveyed by the other senses, by memory, or by verbal description?
There have, of course, been many blind poets and writers, from Homer on. Most of these were born
with normal vision and lost their sight in boyhood or adulthood (like Milton). I loved reading
Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico' and "Conquest of Peru' as a boy, and feel that I first saw these
lands through his intensely visual, almost hallucinogenic descriptions, and I was amazed to
discover, years later, that Prescott not only had never visited Mexico or Peru but had been
virtually blind since the age of eighteen. Did he, like Torey, compensate for his blindness by
developing such powers of visual imagery that he could experience a "virtual reality' of sight? Or
were his brilliant visual descriptions in a sense simulated, made possible by the evocative and
pictorial powers of language? To what extent can language, a picturing in words, provide a
substitute for actual seeing, and for the visual, pictorial imagination? Blind children, it has
often been noted, tend to be precocious verbally, and may develop such fluency in the verbal
description of faces and places as to leave others (and perhaps themselves) uncertain as to whether
they are actually blind. Helen Keller's writing, to give a famous example, startles one with its
brilliantly visual quality,
When I asked Dennis and Arlene whether they had read john Hulls book, Arlene said, "I was stunned
when I read it. His experiences are so unlike mine." Perhaps, she added, Hull had "renounced" his
inner vision. Dennis agreed, but said, "We are only two individuals. You are going to have to talk
to dozens of people.... But in the meanwhile you should read Jacques Lusseyran's memoir."
Lusseyran was a French Resistance fighter whose memoir, 'And There Was Light," deals mostly with
his experiences fighting the Nazis and later in Buchenwald but includes many beautiful descriptions
of his early adaptations to blindness. He was blinded in an accident when he was not quite eight
years old, an age that he came to feel was "ideal" for such an eventuality, for, while he already
had a rich visual experience to call on, "the habits of a boy of eight are not yet formed, either
in body or in mind. His body is infinitely supple." And suppleness, agility, indeed came to
characterize his response to blindness.
Many of his initial responses were of loss, both of imagery and of interests:
A very short time after I went blind I forgot the faces of my mother and father and the faces of
most of the people I loved.... I stopped caring whether people were dark or fair, with blue eyes or
green. I felt that sighted people spent too much time observing these empty things.... I no longer
even thought about them. People no longer seemed to possess them. Sometimes in my mind men and
women appeared without heads or fingers.
This is similar to Hull, who writes, "Increasingly, I am no longer even trying to imagine what
people look like.... I am finding it more and more difficult to realize that people look like
anything, to put any meaning into the idea that they have an appearance."
But then, while relinquishing the actual visual world and many of its values and categories,
Lusseyran starts to construct and to use an imaginary visual world more like Torey's.
This started as a sensation of light, a formless, flooding, streaming radiance. Neurological terms
are bound to sound reductive in this almost mystical context. Yet one might venture to interpret
this as a "release" phenomenon, a spontaneous, almost eruptive arousal of the visual cortex, now
deprived of its normal visual input. This is a phenomenon analogous, perhaps, to tinnitus or
phantom limbs, though endowed here, by a devout and precociously imaginative little boy, with some
element of the supernal. But then, it becomes clear, he does find himself in possession of great
powers of visual imagery, and not just a formless luminosity.
The visual cortex, the inner eye, having now been activated, Lusseyran's mind constructed a
"screen" upon which whatever he thought or desired was projected and, if need be, manipulated, as
on a computer screen. "This screen was not like a blackboard, rectangular or square, which so
quickly reaches the edge of its frame," he writes. "My screen was always as big as I needed it to
be. Because it was nowhere in space it was everywhere at the same time .... Names, figures and
objects in general did not appear on my screen without shape, nor just in black and white, but in
all the colors of the rainbow, Nothing entered my mind without being bathed in a certain amount of
light .... In a few months my personal world had turned into a painter's studio."
Great powers of visualization were crucial to the young Lusseyran, even in something as nonvisual
(one would think) as learning Braille (he visualizes the Braille dots, as Dennis does), and in his
brilliant successes at school. They were no less crucial in the real, outside world. He describes
walks with his sighted friend Jean, and how, as they were climbing together up the side of a hill
above the Seine Valley, he could say:
"Just look! This time we're on top.... You'll see the whole bend of the river, unless the sun gets
in your eyes!" Jean was startled, opened his eyes wide and cried: "You're right." This little scene
was often repeated between us, in a thousand forms.
"Every time someone mentioned an event," Lusseyran relates, "the event immediately projected itself
in its place on the screen, which was a kind of inner canvas.... Comparing my world with his,
[Jean] found that his held fewer pictures and not nearly as many colors. This made him almost angry
'When it comes to that,' he used to say, 'which one of us two is blind?"
It was his supernormal powers of visualization and visual manipulation - visualizing people's
position and movement, the topography of any space, visualizing strategies for defense and attack -
coupled with his charismatic personality (and seemingly infallible "nose" or "ear" or detecting
falsehood, possible traitors), which later made Lusseyran an icon in the French Resistance.Dennis,
earlier, had spoken of how the heightening of his other senses had increased his sensitivity to
moods in other people, and to the most delicate nuances in their speech and self-presentation. He
could now recognize many of his patients by smell, he said, and he could often pick up states of
tension or anxiety which they might not even be aware of. He felt that he had become far more
sensitive to others' emotional states since losing his sight, for he was no longer taken in by
visual appearances, which most people learn to camouflage. Voices and smells, by contrast, he felt,
could reveal people's depths. He had come to think of most sighted people, he joked, as "visually
dependent."
In a subsequent essay, Lusseyran inveighs against the "despotism," the "idol worship" of sight, and
sees the "task' of blindness as reminding us of our other, deeper modes of perception and their
mutuality. "A blind person has a better sense of feeling, of taste, of touch," he writes, and
speaks of these as "the gifts of the blind." And all of these, Lusseyran feels, blend into a single
fundamental sense, a deep attentiveness, a slow, almost prehensile attention, a sensuous, intimate
being at one with the world which sight, with its quick, flicking, facile quality, continually
distracts us from. This is very close to Hull's concept of "deep blindness" as infinitely more than
mere compensation but a unique form of perception, a precious and special mode of being.
What happens when the visual cortex is no longer limited, or constrained, by any visual input? The
simple answer is that, isolated from the outside, the visual cortex becomes hypersensitive to
internal stimuli of all sorts: its own autonomous activity; signals from other brain areas -
auditory, tactile, and verbal areas; and the thoughts and emotions of the blinded individual.
Sometimes, as sight deteriorates, hallucinations occur ~ of geometrical patterns, or occasionally
of silent, moving figures or scenes that appear and disappear spontaneously, without any relation
to the contents of consciousness, or intention, or context.
Something perhaps akin to this is described by Hull as occurring almost convulsively as he was
losing the last of his sight. "About a year after I was registered blind," he writes, "I began to
have such strong images of what people's faces looked like that they were almost like
hallucinations."These imperious images were so engrossing as to preempt consciousness: "Sometimes,"
Hull adds, "I would become so absorbed in gazing upon these images, which seemed to come and go
without any intention on my part, that I would entirely lose the thread of what was being said to
me. I would come back with a shock ... and I would feel as if I had dropped off to sleep for a few
minutes in front of the wireless." Though related to the context of speaking with people, these
visions came and went in their own way, without any reference to his intentions, conjured up not by
him but by his brain.
The fact that Hull is the only one of the four authors to describe this sort of release phenomenon
is perhaps an indication that his visual cortex was starting to escape from his control. One has to
wonder whether this signaled its impending demise, at least as an organ of useful visual imagery
and memory. Why this should have occurred with him, and how common such a course is, is something
one can only speculate on.
Torey, unlike Hull, clearly played a very active role in building up his visual imagery, took
control of it the moment the bandages were taken off, and never apparently experienced, or allowed,
the sort of involuntary imagery Hull describes. Perhaps this was because he was already very at
home with visual imagery, and used to manipulating it in his own way. We know that Torey was very
visually inclined before his accident, and skilled from boyhood in creating visual narratives based
on the film scripts his father gave him. We have no such information about Hull, for his journal
entries start only when he has become blind.
For Lusseyran and Tenberken, there is an added physiological factor: both were attracted to
painting, in love with colors, and strongly synesthetic -- prone to visualizing numbers, letters,
words, music, etc., as shapes and colors - before becoming blind. They already had an
overconnectedness, a "cross talk" between the visual cortex and other parts of the brain primarily
concerned with language, sound, and music. Given such a neurological situation (synesthesia is
congenital, often familial), the persistence of visual imagery and synesthesia, or its heightening,
might be almost inevitable in the event of blindness.
Torey required months of intense cognitive discipline dedicated to improving his visual imagery,
making it more tenacious, more stable, more malleable, whereas Lusseyran seemed to do this almost
effortlessly from the start. Perhaps this was aided by the fact that Lusseyran was not yet eight
when blinded (while Torey was twenty-one), and his brain was, accordingly, more plastic, more able
to adapt to a new and drastic contingency.
But adaptability does not end with youth. It is clear that Arlene, becoming blind in her forties,
was able to adapt in quite radical ways, too, developing not exactly synesthesia but something more
flexible and useful: the ability to "see" her hands moving before her, to "see" the words of books
read to her, to construct detailed visual images from verbal descriptions. Did she adapt, or did
her brain do so? One has a sense that Torey's adaptation was largely shaped by conscious motive,
will, and purpose; that Lusseyran's was shaped by overwhelming physiological disposition; and that
Arlene's lies somewhere in between. Hull's, meanwhile, remains enigmatic.
There has been much recent work on the neural bases of visual imagery ~ this can be investigated by
brain imaging of various types (PET scanning, functional MRIs, etc.) - and it is now generally
accepted that visual imagery activates the cortex in a similar way, and with almost the same
intensity, as visual perception itself. And yet studies on the effects of blindness on the human
cortex have shown that functional changes may start to occur in a few days, and can become profound
as the days stretch into months or years.
Torey, who is well aware of all this research, attributes Hull's loss of visual imagery and memory
to the fact that he did not struggle to maintain it, to heighten and systematize and use it, as
Torey himself did. (Indeed, Torey expresses horror at what he regards as Hull's passivity, at his
letting himself slide into deep blindness.) Perhaps Torey was able to stave off an otherwise
inevitable loss of neuronal function in the visual cortex; but perhaps, again, such neural
degeneration is quite variable, irrespective of whether or not there is conscious visualization.
And, of course, Hull had been losing vision gradually for many years, whereas for Torey blindness
was instantaneous and total. It would be of great interest to know the results of brain imaging in
the two men, and indeed to look at a large number of people with acquired blindness, to see what
correlations, what predictions could be made.
But what if their differences reflect an underlying predisposition independent of blindness? What
of visual imagery in the sighted?
I first became conscious that there could be huge variations in visual imagery and visual memory
when I was fourteen or so. My mother was a surgeon and comparative anatomist, and I had brought her
a lizard's skeleton from school. She gazed at this intently for a minute, turning it round in her
hands, then put it down and without looking at it again did a number of drawings of it, rotating it
mentally by thirty degrees each time, so that she produced a series, the last drawing exactly the
same as the first. I could not imagine how she had done this, and when she said that she could
"see" the skeleton in her mind just as clearly and vividly as if she were looking at it, and that
she simply rotated the image through a twelfth of a circle each time, I felt bewildered, and very
stupid. I could hardly see anything with my mind's eye - at most, faint, evanescent images over
which I had no control.
I did have vivid images as I was falling asleep, and in dreams, and once when I had a high fever -
but otherwise I saw nothing, or almost nothing, when I tried to visualize, and had great difficulty
picturing anybody or anything. Coincidentally or not, I could not draw for toffee.
My mother had hoped I would follow in her footsteps and become a surgeon, but when she realized how
lacking in visual powers I was (and how clumsy, lacking in mechanical skill, too) she resigned
herself to the idea that I would have to specialize in something else.
I was, however, to get a vivid idea of what mental imagery could be like when, during the
nineteen-sixties, I had a period of experimenting with large doses of amphetamines. These can
produce striking perceptual changes, including dramatic enhancements of visual imagery and memory
(as well as heightening of the other senses, as I describe in "The Dog Beneath the Skin," a story
in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"). For a period of two weeks or so, I found that I could
do the most accurate anatomical drawings. I had only to look at a picture or an anatomical
specimen, and its image would remain both vivid and stable, and I could easily hold it in my mind
for hours. I could mentally project the image onto the paper before me - it was as clear and
distinct as if projected by a camera lucida -- and trace its outlines with a pencil. My drawings
were not elegant, but they were, everyone agreed, very detailed and accurate, and could bear
comparison with some of the drawings in our neuroanatomy textbook. This heightening of imagery
attached to everything - I had only to think of a face, a place, a picture, a paragraph in a book
to see it vividly in my mind. But when the amphetamine-induced state faded, after a couple of
weeks, I could no longer visualize, no longer project images, no longer draw ~ nor have I been able
to do so in the decades since.
A few months ago, at a medical conference in Boston, I spoke of Torey's and Hulls experiences of
blindness, and of how "enabled" Torey seemed to be by the powers of visualization he had developed,
and how "disabled" Hull was - in some ways, at least - by the loss of his powers of visual imagery
and memory. After my talk, a man in the audience came up to me and asked how well, in my
estimation, sighted people could function if they had no visual imagery. He went on to say that he
had no visual imagery whatever, at least none that he could deliberately evoke, and that no one in
his family had any, either. Indeed, he had assumed this was the case with everyone, until he came
to participate in some psychological tests at Harvard and realized that he apparently lacked a
mental power that all the other students, in varying degrees, had.
"And what do you do?" I asked him, wondering what this poor man could do.
"I am a surgeon," he replied. "A vascular surgeon. An anatomist, too. And I design solar panels."
But how, I asked him, did he recognize what he was seeing?.
"It's not a problem," he answered. "I guess there must be representations or models in the brain
that get matched up with what I am seeing and doing. But they are not conscious. I cannot evoke
them."
This seemed to be at odds with my mother's experience - she, clearly, did have extremely vivid and
readily manipulable visual imagery, though (it now seemed) this may have been a bonus, a luxury,
and not a prerequisite for her career as a surgeon.
Is this also the case with Torey ~ is his greatly developed visual imagery, though clearly a source
of much pleasure, not as indispensable as he takes it to be? Might he, in fact, have done
everything he did, from carpentry to roof repair to making a model of the mind, without any
conscious imagery at all? He himself raises this question.
The role of mental imagery in thinking was explored by Francis Galton, Darwin’s irrepressible
cousin, who wrote on subjects as various as fingerprints, eugenics, dog whistles, criminality,
twins, visionaries, psychometric measures, and hereditary genius. His inquiry into visual imagery
took the form of a questionnaire, with such questions as "Can you recall with distinctness the
features of all near relations and many other persons? Can you at will cause your mental image ...
to sit, stand, or turn slowly around? Can you ... see it with enough distinctness- - - enable you
to sketch it leisurely (supposing yourself able to draw)?" The vascular surgeon would have been
hopeless on such tests - indeed, it was questions such as these which had floored him when he was a
student at Harvard. And yet, finally, how much had it mattered?
As to the significance of such imagery, Galton is ambiguous and guarded. He suggests, in one
breath, that "scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation" and, in
another, that "a vivid visualizing faculty is of much importance in connection with the higher
processes of generalized thoughts." He feels that "it is undoubtedly the fact that mechanicians,
engineers and architects usually possess the faculty of seeing mental images with remarkable
clearness and precision," but goes on to say, "I am, however, bound to say, that the missing
faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception ... that men who declare
themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give lifelike
descriptions of what they have seen, and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted
with a vivid visual imagination. They can also become painters of the rank of Royal Academicians."
I have a cousin, a professional architect, who maintains that he cannot visualize anything
whatever. "How do you think?" I once asked him. He shook his head and said, "I don't know." Do any
of us, finally, know how we think?
When I talk to people, blind or sighted, or when I try to think of my own internal representations,
I find myself uncertain whether words, symbols, and images of various types are the primary tools
of thought or whether there are forms of thought antecedent to all of these, forms of thought
essentially amodal. Psychologists have sometimes spoken of "interlingua" or "mentalese," which they
conceive to be the brain's own language, and Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to
speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth --
it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.
Galton's seemingly contradictory statements about imagery ~ is it antithetical to abstract
thinking, or integral to it? - may stem from his failure to distinguish between fundamentally
different levels of imagery. Simple visual imagery such as he describes may suffice for the design
of a screw, an engine, or a surgical operation, and it may be relatively easy to model these
essentially reproductive forms of imagery or to simulate them by constructing video games or
virtual realities of various sorts. Such powers may be invaluable, but there is something passive
and mechanical and impersonal about them, which makes them utterly different from the higher and
more personal powers of the imagination, where there is a continual struggle for concepts and form
and meaning, a calling upon all the powers of the self. Imagination dissolves and transforms,
unifies and creates, while drawing upon the "lower" powers of memory and association. It is by such
imagination, such "vision," that we create or construct our individual worlds.
At this level, one can no longer say of one's mental landscapes what is visual, what is auditory,
what is image, what is language, what is intellectual, what is emotional - they are all fused
together and imbued with our own individual perspectives and values. Such a unified vision shines
out from Hull's memoir no less than from Torey's, despite the fact that one has become "nonvisual"
and the other "hypervisual." What seems at first to be so decisive a difference between the two men
is not, finally, a radical one, so far as personal development and sensibility go. Even though the
paths they have followed might seem irreconcilable, both men have "used" blindness (if one can
employ such a term for processes which are deeply mysterious, and far below, or above, the level of
consciousness and voluntary control) to release their own creative capacities and emotional selves,
and both have achieved a rich and full realization of their own individual worlds.
END OF ARTICLE
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 28, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Dare
news:3F4021DD...@fuzzysys.com...
>
> THE NEW YORKER, JULY 28. 2003
>
> A NEUROLOGIST'S NOTEBOOK
>
> TITLE: THE MIND'S EYE
>
> Subtitle: What the blind see.
>
>........
> but most striking for me is Hull's description of how,
> in the years after his loss of sight, he experienced a
> gradual attenuation of visual imagery and memory,
> and finally a virtual extinction of them (except in dreams) -
> a state that he calls "deep blindness."
I find it interesting that even though Hull lost his
"conscious" visual imagery and memory, he still
retained them in dreams.
Thanks for posting this intriguing article..
My mother has lost her vision to macular degeneration
and has experienced many of the adaptations mentioned
in the article. She seems to have retained her visual memory
and uses it to evoke images....especially in relation to her
sense of touch or hearing, both of which have become much
more acute since her loss of sight.
What amazes me the most is how her ability to remember
things has increased. She has developed an incredible
memory because now she has to remember things that
previously she could "just look up"...such as phone numbers,
instructions and similar kinds of information.
Her attention to details and concentration have also increased.
One day I had misplaced my keys and couldn't find them
after looking high and low in all the usual likely places.
She, on the other hand, quietly went over the sequence of
events to determine what I had done differently that day and
thereby deduced where the keys must be. She was right!
We had a good laugh at how the blind person found the
keys while someone with 20/20 vision overlooked them.
We both love this quote from the article:
> He[Lusseyran] had come to think of most sighted people,
> he joked, as "visually dependent."
Vision often does seem to be the easiest "sense" to fool.
Thanks again...from me and my mother! :-)
Dare
Frederick
Tell your mother that I love you both.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
Dare
> Dare wrote:
> > Vision often does seem to be the easiest "sense" to fool.
> >
> > Thanks again...from me and my mother! :-)
> > Dare
>
> Tell your mother that I love you both.
She smiled her beautiful smile when I told her.
She's an extraordinary person.
Thinking more about the article made me wonder
how people blind from birth, without any visual
concept, dream. Can dreams be purely auditory...
or purely tactile? It seems that imagination or
hallucinations can focus on just sound, touch, etc...
but I can't quite imagine what sleep-dreaming would
be like without the visual aspect.
Thanks again for this interesting article....
Now I question my virtual reality more than ever! :-)
All the best,
Dare
Wordsmith
Read my tales to her. Maybe she'll like them.
Wordsmith :)
PS I've had purely auditory dreams before. Explosions, screaming demons, etc.
Dare
news:cddcc385.03081...@posting.google.com...
> > how people blind from birth, without any visual
> > concept, dream. Can dreams be purely auditory...
> > or purely tactile? It seems that imagination or
> > hallucinations can focus on just sound, touch, etc...
> > but I can't quite imagine what sleep-dreaming would
> > be like without the visual aspect.
> >
> > Thanks again for this interesting article....
> > Now I question my virtual reality more than ever! :-)
> > All the best,
> > Dare
>
> Read my tales to her. Maybe she'll like them.
>
> Wordsmith :)
Well, actually, I did! :-)
She also enjoyed them very much...then we discussed
them and explored the deeper philosophical meaning
of the stories. Thank you again for sharing them...the
images you paint really stick in the mind!
>
> PS I've had purely auditory dreams before. Explosions, screaming demons,
etc.
I was fascinated when I read this! That's neat!
I did a search and learned that people blind from
birth do dream in sound, touch, etc....
A couple of sites I found:
http://tinyurl.com/klgb
http://tinyurl.com/klgc
Thanks again!
Dare
Wordsmith
> "Wordsmith" <word...@rocketmail.com> wrote in message
> news:cddcc385.03081...@posting.google.com...
> > "Dare" <clyd...@UNSPAMhotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:<bht4a2$513v$1...@news3.infoave.net>...
> > > Thinking more about the article made me wonder
> > > how people blind from birth, without any visual
> > > concept, dream. Can dreams be purely auditory...
> > > or purely tactile? It seems that imagination or
> > > hallucinations can focus on just sound, touch, etc...
> > > but I can't quite imagine what sleep-dreaming would
> > > be like without the visual aspect.
> > >
> > > Thanks again for this interesting article....
> > > Now I question my virtual reality more than ever! :-)
> > > All the best,
> > > Dare
> >
> > Read my tales to her. Maybe she'll like them.
> >
> > Wordsmith :)
>
>
> Well, actually, I did! :-)
> She also enjoyed them very much...then we discussed
> them and explored the deeper philosophical meaning
> of the stories. Thank you again for sharing them...the
> images you paint really stick in the mind!
I *want* the images to stick there. That's why I spend lots of time
polishing my work. Cut the flab and the gab and get to the point.
Who has time to read 800 page novels? Pack as many ideas as you can
into as small a space as you can. My stories would make good movies,
assuming an intelligent filmmaker got hold of them.
> >
> > PS I've had purely auditory dreams before. Explosions, screaming demons,
> etc.
>
> I was fascinated when I read this! That's neat!
> I did a search and learned that people blind from
> birth do dream in sound, touch, etc....
> A couple of sites I found:
> http://tinyurl.com/klgb
> http://tinyurl.com/klgc
>
> Thanks again!
> Dare
Once I had an auditory nightmare consisting of one screamed sentence:
"THE UNIVERSE IS DESTROYED!"
Don't ask me what it means or who/what said it, but I woke up trembling.
Wordsmith :)
Stan R
> Once I had an auditory nightmare consisting of one screamed sentence:
>
> "THE UNIVERSE IS DESTROYED!"
>
> Don't ask me what it means or who/what said it, but I woke up
> trembling.
>
> Wordsmith :)
Whoa. Intense.
Where could one find these tales, Wordsmith?
Wordsmith
I'll e them to you.
Btw, the verb tense in the statement is interesting: it wasn't "The
universe *will be* destroyed," but "*is* destroyed". I suppose that
means the ruins of the old universe have encompassed me, and a new one
may be gestating. Hey, I'm just guessing. How can one analyse one's
own dreams objectively?
Wordsmith :)