Blind Leading the Blind
Imagine trying to walk through the streets of New York City during rush hour — cars whizzing by and pedestrians pacing with purpose towards their next destination — all with your eyes closed. For most of us, it would be a terrifying prospect, but for a certain population, they can do this trip any day of the week.
Who needs street signs when you can simply count how many intersections you have walked between the blocks? What about the moving vehicles? The flow of traffic can be heard — the hiss of a brake, the rumble of an engine, the wail of a police siren — you can tell whether it’s passing right in front of you (stop), or parallel to your walking path (go). Some of these people actually keep their eyes wide open when making this trip, but it doesn’t really help considering the fact that these people are blind.
Blinded By the Truth
According to the National Federation of the Blind, the USA is estimated to have 10 million blind or visually impaired people. Of these, about 1.3 million are legally blind. There is a wide spectrum between being sighted and completely blind, it is not a binary. Some of the visually impaired can see, but have extremely poor acuity (scoring below a 20/200 in central visual acuity means not being able to read the top line of an eye chart with your best eye and the best possible corrective lenses), or have blind spots in their eyes that their brain fills in (having a field of view spanning less than 20 degrees also qualifies as legally blind. From the person’s perspective, however, they believe they have the standard 180 degrees of vision). This can lead to us sighted folk to a series of questions in an attempt to gain perspective:
Question: How is it possible to be blind and still see?
Answer: Our popular understanding of blindness tends to refer to those with no vision. Legal blindness incorporates multiple groups of the visually impaired, being completely blind is actually quite rare.
Question: How would a person not notice that their field of view is shrinking?
Answer: Sight and visual feedback is constructed in the brain. We don’t see everything that is in our range of sight with perfect detail. Take your nose for example, it is always within your range of sight, but your brain edits it out because it’s a constant. Also, because you tend to look at things further than your nose, your nose becomes out of focus. As such, blind people’s brains will stitch together whatever image they receive at whatever quality, and fill in the gaps until it makes a range of sight.
Question: If I were blind, would I still be able to see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
Answer: Yes. Much like the fine, soft finish of a Merlot or the bold, oaky notes of a mature scotch, the cinnamon sugar swirls in every bite transcend all sensory perception. At optimal milk saturation, a spoonful of cereal transforms into a crystalline yet creamy crunch of euphoria that can seamlessly blend into any complete breakfast. With its elegant balance of cinnamon, toast, and crunch, this genuine masterpiece of the General Mills breakfast cereal collection can be enjoyed with or without sight.
In the English language, we have many idioms for the blind, many of which are generally unflattering. To turn a blind eye to someone is to ignore them. Robbing someone blind is not robbing a person so aggressively that they lose their vision as the verbiage suggests, but rather stealing from someone indiscriminately and mercilessly. Third Eye Blind is a 1990’s pop rock band that looks like this:
As we can all see, blind culture is not necessarily a revered one. We as a society tend to shelter the disabled from danger, especially someone as “helpless” as the blind. The blind are supposed to stay put and stay safe, while letting more “able” people take care of everything else for them. However, this promotes a culture of over-protecting a population that is more than capable; they just function in their own unique way without relying on sight.
Batman
Echolocation at first glance can seem like a technique reserved for bats, submarines, and kids in the pool playing Marco Polo, but there are people on earth that use it daily to navigate the world. Daniel Kish was one of the first human pioneers of the technique, using his tongue to “click”.
After a surgery left him blind at 13 months old, several people advised his mother to wrap him up in blankets and keep him indoors to prevent him from hurting himself, but instead his mother let him roam free. As any parent is well aware, the curiosity of a child is boundless, and young Daniel spent his youth climbing and exploring without his sight when he discovered that he could click. Clicking and listening for the type of response helped him contextualize his surroundings, giving him a “picture” of what the world looked like around him. Eventually he was allowed to walk to school alone, cross the street, and even ride a bike.
While his skill drew national media attention and claims of a supernatural ability, to Daniel, it was just his perception of sight. Neuroscientists put Daniel in an fMRI to see how his brain interprets these objects that he “sees” with his echolocation and saw that his brain lit up in the same areas that process visual stimuli for sighted people: the visual cortex.
The visual cortex makes up about 30% of the brain and the popular belief was that this region remained dormant and unused in the blind. More recent discoveries in neuroplasticity reveal that the brain can reconfigure neural pathways to bolster behaviors and habits that it finds useful, even if those regions are not typically used for that function.
In this case, the echoes that Daniel produced had sound waves reflecting off of objects to return information on size and location, which the visual cortex then can try to match to an object. The interesting part is that when he used this technique, the portion of the brain that computes these echoes is solely the task of the visual cortex rather than one for the auditory cortex. To a third party observing the brain of Daniel Kish juxtaposed to the brain of a sighted person, both brains “see”.
Daniel founded the World Access for the Blind organization that aims to teach blind people to echolocate so as to increase the level of independence through what Daniel calls “perceptual navigation”. Through training, students are able to echolocate and navigate using clicks and sticks, and within weeks are able to interpret 3-D objects, move independently, and even climb trees.
While general wisdom suggests that people with limited capabilities for sensory perception need help and guidance, students of Kish’s method prove otherwise. When a psychology or expectation is so deeply ingrained in a person’s perception, it transforms into their reality, and becomes the lens from which they see the world. While one reality states that without vision, one is hopeless, the other reality enables the possibility of “sight” and forces us to take a long hard look at what “seeing” really is.
Dippin’ Dots
Before the implementation of the Braille system, blind school children read books by using their fingers to trace raised individual Latin letters, one letter per page. How many pages would the previous sentence take up in a book? (Answer: 166)
The limitations of the reading system were apparent, and one of many educational obstacles for a young Louis Braille. Learning in a classroom without sight was an enormously difficult task for Louis and his blind classmates at the Royal Institute for the Blind Youth. Imagine having to take a class, but only by listening to the teacher’s voice, with no view of a chalkboard for visual demonstrations and no reliable way to take notes (other than finding the correct wire framed letter and pressing it into the page to emboss a single letter). For Louis Braille, learning in the classroom was an arduous and cumbersome ordeal, and he was determined to find a way to improve the communicative barrier between the blind and sighted.
The inventor of the system was Valentin Hauy, an exceedingly well-intentioned philanthropist for the blind, who dedicated a majority of his wealth to the cause. He was also the founder and principal teacher at the Royal Institute for the Blind Youth. Hauy was sighted, however, and his reading system spoke the language of people who could see. Shapes that our eyes can quickly scan across and extract the meaning of are not very useful for the blind.
Luckily, the Hauy system wasn’t completely absent of valuable ideas; it introduced the notion of a tactile method of reading and writing. Braille drew inspiration from a military code used in the French Army known as night writing. The code was a series of dots and dashes pushed into a piece of paper for soldiers to send and receive messages without the use of light or sound. The system was ultimately too complicated to learn and implement within the military, but Braille, recognizing the implication of raised dots, worked relentlessly to simplify this code into a rudimentary version of the Braille system that is used today. He was 15.
Braille went on to expand the reaches of his raised dot system to other areas of education, from arithmetic to music. He revolutionized the way that blind people could access information, and even invented a method of transfiguring Braille into a raised dot system called decapoint that sighted people could read, reiterating his mission of bridging the communicative gap.
In Braille’s own words:
Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we [the blind] are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals — and communication is the way this can be brought about.
Braille began teaching at the Royal Institute for the Blind Youth at age 19 and promoted the use of system within the curriculum. While he had his first braille book published in 1837, he died at the age of 43, and would not live to see his system grow to become widely accepted across the world.
Braille Today
Decades following the invention of Braille, hundreds of thousands of blind people have been given comprehensive access to written text, and has Louis to thank for developing a simple and elegant solution to extracting and expressing meaning from words without visual representation.
Similar to research with the echolocators, there have also been neurological studies on people reading in Braille. Sighted people have a designated area in their brains for tactile information, and when they read braille with their fingers, this is the region that is activated. Blind people reading in braille with their fingers activate their visual cortex to “read” the letters, similar to how a sighted person does with their eyes.
In addition, their tactile sensitivity and consequently spatial acuity are enhanced greatly. Objects find a place in the blind person’s “visual” working memory and can be a sole subject of interest, it is easier to remember the shape and location of the object without the clutter of surrounding sights interfering with the integrity of the object’s spatial status.
Our eyes are not the only method by which we as humans can “see”. It’s clear that visual medium can be constructed and configured in the brain, even without using the body’s designated organic structures to do so. While we most commonly associate vision with our eyes, we have to remember that even with our sighted eyes, it is easy to take our sight for granted and mistake our own sighted perspective as the only possible truth.
