The Mind's Eye

by Oliver Sacks

  In this, he said, 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 a virtual visual world that seemed as real and intense to him as the perceptual one he had lost—indeed, sometimes more real, more intense. 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—at night (even though, of course, darkness made no difference to him).

  And he felt that his newly strengthened visual imagery enabled him to think in ways that had not been available to him before, allowed him to project himself inside machines and other systems, to envisage solutions, models, and designs.

  I wrote back to Torey, suggesting 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 way. A few years later, he sent me the manuscript of Out of Darkness. In this new book, Torey described the early visual memories 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 railway on the Buda side. He described 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 wrote, “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, by this time 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. At nineteen, feeling that he needed to immerse himself in biology, engineering, neuroscience, and psychology, but knowing that there was no chance of an intellectual life in Soviet Hungary, Torey made his escape and 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 imagery in a deliberate way, lost it within 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 sub-operations in different colors.

  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 wrote, “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.” 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 new view of the brain-mind problem by visualizing the brain “as a perpetual juggling act of interacting routines.”

  Soon after receiving the manuscript of Out of Darkness, I received proofs of yet another memoir about blindness: Sabriye Tenberken’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 decade or so, devising a form of Tibetan Braille, establishing the first schools for the blind there, 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 loved painting and had a particular predilection for colors, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms, she could still use colors to identify objects.3

  Though she had been totally blind for a dozen years when she went to Tibet, Tenberken continued to use 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 related in one incident when she and a companion drove to Nam Co, the great salt lake in Tibet. Turning eagerly towards the lake, Tenberken saw, in her imagination, “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.” It then turned out that she had not been “looking” at the lake at all, but facing in another direction, “staring” at rocks and a gray landscape. These disparities do not 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, whereas Torey’s imagination is that of an engineer, and has to be factual, accurate down to the last detail.

  Jacques 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.”

  At first
, Lusseyran began to lose his visual imagery:

  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 wrote, “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 began to construct and to use an imaginary visual world more like Torey’s. He came to identify himself as belonging to a special category, the “visual blind.”

  Lusseyran’s inner vision 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. (Such a phenomenon is 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 found himself in possession of great powers of visual imagery, and not just a formless luminosity.

  The visual cortex, the inner eye, having been activated, his 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 wrote.

  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, and in his brilliant successes at school. Visualization was no less crucial in the real, outside world. Lusseyran described 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 to Jean:

  “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, 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 positions and movements, the topography of any space, visualizing strategies for defense and attack—coupled with his charismatic personality (and seemingly infallible “nose” or “ear” for detecting possible traitors) that later made Lusseyran an icon in the French Resistance.

  I had now read four memoirs, all strikingly different in their depictions of the visual experience of blinded people: Hull with his acquiescent descent into “deep blindness”; Torey with his “compulsive visualization” and meticulous construction of an internal visual world; Tenberken with her impulsive, almost novelistic visual freedom, along with her remarkable and specific gift of synesthesia; and Lusseyran, who identified himself as one of the “visual blind.” Was there any such thing, I wondered, as a typical blind experience?

  · · ·

  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. When we met a few years ago, he told me that his experience was completely 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 former social worker in her seventies, told me that things were very similar for her. She said, “I was stunned when I read [Hull’s book]. His experiences are so unlike mine.” Like Dennis, she 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.

  She still had a great deal of visual imagery, she continued: “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 into a visual image. Listening to talking books, she added, made her eyes ache if she listened too long; she felt 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.4

  Arlene’s comment reminded me of Amy, a patient 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 absentmindedly 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 the way he had, or consciously tried to make an entire virtual world of sight.

  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 thoughts, memories, and emotions.

  Torey, unlike Hull, played a very active role in building up his visual imagery, took control of it the moment the bandages were removed. 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.)

  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 from the start. Perhaps this was because Lusseyran was not yet eight when blinded (while Torey was twenty-one), and his brain was, accordingly, more able to adapt to a new and drastic contingency. But adaptabili
ty does not end with youth. It is clear that Arlene, who became blind in her forties, was able to adapt in quite radical ways, too, developing 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. 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.

  How much do these differences reflect an underlying predisposition independent of blindness? Do sighted people who are good visualizers, who have strong visual imagery, maintain or even enhance their powers of imagery if they become blind? Do people who are poor visualizers, on the other hand, tend to move towards “deep blindness” or hallucinations if they lose their sight? What is the range of visual imagery in the sighted?

  I first became conscious of great variations in the power of 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. 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.5