For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  Gregory noticed that Bradford, like many people in his position, was reluctant to admit mistakes in his perceptions and was uncomfortable expressing surprise at certain phenomena in his newly sighted life. When presented with various geometrical optical illusions printed on paper, Bradford failed to see the illusions, which Oliver Sacks in a similar case attributed to the fact that his brain had only a “rudimentary” ability of visual construction, a direct result of his not having had enough visual experience at the beginning of his life. Looking at pictures, Bradford had great difficulty identifying what they contained and had no idea whether a particular object lay in front of or behind other objects. In his own drawings of objects, Bradford could not include any object that he had not previously touched with his hands; his conception of the world had been formed by touch, a conception that was nearly impossible to alter.

  Once Bradford was released from the hospital, his mood predictably declined. Driving in a car, he was unresponsive to the scenery that passed by, because, he explained, it moved too quickly for him to understand it; he also seemed to find the appearance of the world “drab.” When Gregory took him on a tour around London, Bradford appeared bored; he was uninterested in the buildings and was drawn only by moving objects. As a blind man, he had crossed busy streets by himself with complete confidence and without the aid of a cane, but now that he could see, he refused to try to cross by himself, and even when led by a sighted person, he expressed uncharacteristic fear. Gregory wrote, “We began to see that his assurance had at least temporarily left him; he seemed to lack confidence and interest in his surroundings.”

  Because Bradford had an interest in tools, Gregory thought that a visit to London’s science museum would lift his spirits. Looking at the famous Maudslay screw-cutting lathe within its glass display case, Bradford had no idea what it was and could correctly identify nothing but the handle. His inability to recognize the parts of the machine frustrated and upset him. It was not until the lid of the glass case was opened and Bradford was allowed to run his hands over the machine that he could make any sense of it. Once he had felt the device to his satisfaction (with his eyes closed) and understood it, he declared that having felt it, he could stand away from it and his eyes would now be able to see it. In order for him to really see, information had to be transmitted through his hands first.

  Gregory took Bradford to the zoo at Regent’s Park, where Bradford was able to identify roughly half the animals by sight; the other half he couldn’t name, in some cases because he was unfamiliar with the animal. Bradford was highly amused by the sight of two giraffes looking down at him from over the top of a fence, and on this Gregory remarked, “This was the only visual situation noted which ever made him laugh.” Bradford responded well to the animals, seemed to enjoy touching them, and he was able to toss cabbages to the hippopotamuses with accurate aim. (And yet when Gregory engaged him in a game of darts—which Bradford had played when he was blind—it was determined that his newfound vision had no significant beneficial effect on his dart game.) Gregory’s general observations after spending two days with Bradford were that he could walk down a staircase with confidence and ease without holding the banister but that if the flight of steps was short, he was inclined to step off the top step without anticipating the rest. He could also walk directly past an object eminently worthy of notice—an elephant, for example—without seeing it at all, and yet when asked if he could see Big Ben from outside Buckingham Palace (a distance of perhaps a quarter mile), he was able to see the tower. “He only looked at faces when spoken to,” Gregory wrote, “and then in a rather ‘blind’ fashion, though there was some evidence on the second day that he was beginning to look at faces with more curiosity. At a meal, one would look up and find him rather tentatively studying one’s face.”

  Six months after the surgery, Gregory made another visit to Bradford in his home and found that he seemed “dispirited” and that his sight seemed to be “almost entirely disappointing.” Eyesight had not given him the opportunities he had imagined it would. He continued to perceive the world around him as drab and stated, “I always felt in my own way that women were lovely, now I can see them I think they’re ugly.” Bradford told Gregory that more and more he had begun to notice the “blemishes in things,” and he would fixate on these blemishes or irregularities with consternation and distaste. The physical world did not live up to his imaginings of it. He was puzzled also as to why things seemed to change shape and appearance as he walked around them and viewed them from different angles.

  Gregory concluded that Bradford’s exhaustion and his disillusionment with his newly restored vision had led him to return to his life as a blind man. At night, he often did not turn on the lights in his house, because he was more comfortable in the dark. He had poor relationships with his neighbors, who “regarded him as ‘odd,’” and at work he was teased for being unable to read despite the fact that he now had sight. Gregory determined that Bradford’s vision recovery had been psychologically damaging and had cost him his self-respect. Previously, he had appeared to his acquaintances a happy, powerful person. Now, Gregory wrote, “it seemed to all of us that he was deeply disturbed; yet too proud to admit or discuss it.” After some time, Bradford’s wife wrote to Gregory to tell him that Bradford had been ill with “internal shingles and nerve pain” and that he was “disappointed about everything.” Five months later she wrote to say that he had not improved. “I wish you could help him. His nerves are so bad. I can see his hands trembling even as he ate his porridge this morning, and he could not cut even sausages on his plate.…I want to get him well again, as he was a cheerful help to me and lots of people, and he had great faith and patience, which has now gone. It seems to me our world is not as grand as we thought, and Mr. B did not know the way people acted—until he got his sight.”

  Nearly two months later, at the age of fifty-four, Bradford died. Richard Gregory wrote of him:

  His story is in some ways tragic. He suffered one of the greatest handicaps, and yet he lived with energy and enthusiasm. When his handicap was apparently swept away, as by a miracle, he lost his peace and his self-respect. We may feel disappointment at a private dream come true: SB found disappointment with what he took to be reality.

  The most recent case of sight regained in a person with lifetime blindness is that of Mike May, who, after being blinded at age three by an accidental explosion, acquired sight in 2000 in an experimental corneal epithelial stem-cell transplant. With his book Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See, Robert Kurson gives a detailed report of May’s case. By all accounts May was, though blind, a fearless child. He ran about and played games like any other child; he roller-skated, skateboarded, rode a bicycle with the assistance of friends. In high school he rode a motorcycle around a track, and, later, he took up downhill skiing, which he managed to do with the vocal guidance of a coach who skied alongside him. May skied so well he won international downhill competitions for disabled skiers, skiing with the tips of his skis eighteen inches behind the skis of a sighted guide in front of him, who led the way with commands. Eventually May married, had two sons, and founded an innovative technology company.

  After much careful deliberation, May decided to go through with the pair of surgeries that his doctors believed would restore vision to his eye. (He had only one eye; the other one had been removed years earlier due to an infection.) The surgeries were a success, and when the bandages were removed from his eye, he could see. Like Bradford and so many other patients, May was able to see color and motion very well but was unable to recognize faces or make sense of facial expressions. In fact, people’s facial movements and expressions were so distracting to him that he had difficulty concentrating on what they were saying and felt he had to close his eyes in order to really listen to them. Kurson writes of May: “When the women spoke their heads bobbed, their lips flapped, their hands gestured. This bedlam at once amused and distracted him, and try as he
might he could not keep track of what they were saying, so long as their faces ran spastic like that.” Faces held no meaning for May, and all faces looked the same. He could not tell his sons apart by looking at their faces. He could distinguish the letters of the alphabet but had a hard time reading. A flight of stairs looked like nothing more than a set of horizontal lines, and on a walk to a local doughnut shop with his guide dog, he had trouble differentiating the rise of a curb from the street and nearly tripped over it. The only step he was able to see and anticipate was a step down near the doughnut shop, which he had learned to expect. He found it difficult to differentiate shadows from solid objects. He could see clearly a line of cereal boxes on a supermarket shelf but couldn’t separate one box from the next. He began to feel frustrated that he could determine color easily and catch a ball easily and yet couldn’t tell who was male and who was female when he sat in a coffee shop and looked at the customers’ faces. Like Bradford and countless others, May could be certain he was identifying an object correctly only if he felt it with his hands.

  After he had had vision for six weeks, his wife asked him how he felt about it. May answered, “It seems like I have to process every little thing consciously to understand what I’m seeing. Everything is interesting to me, but sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything in peace.” He had to think very hard to make sense of what he saw. Every new object, he had to study and work at to understand. And like Bradford, May was disturbed when he saw aspects of the world that appeared ugly to him. Garbage in the street, cracked windows, and a homeless person lying on the sidewalk upset him inordinately. Like most newly sighted people, May found his vision was better when he was in familiar environments. When he saw the television remote control lying in its usual place on the coffee table in his house, he recognized it, and yet if the remote appeared in an unexpected place, he could not say what it was. After four months, he began to find his restored vision overwhelming and exhausting. He worried that this would continue for the rest of his life.

  The only difference between Bradford’s story and May’s is that the fields of ophthalmology and neuroscience have advanced enormously since 1959, and in the year 2000, May’s case presented an invaluable opportunity for ophthalmologists and neurologists, who were aided by the latest medical and technological innovations. Kurson writes, “Today it is virtually impossible to find a vision scientist, researcher, or psychologist who does not agree that knowledge and vision are highly related, and that without our knowledge about the visual world, our ability to understand visual scenes would fall apart.” He goes on to explain that an infant learns how to see the world by interacting with it, by touching whatever appears before him, by grabbing it, putting it in his mouth if he can, exploring it with his fingers, drawing it closer and pushing it farther away. Touch and vision inform each other, and without this partnership of constant practice and experiment, it is impossible for the human brain to learn to make sense of what it sees. In the same way, the ability to distinguish one human face from another and to comprehend subtle facial expressions comes only after much repeated exposure to faces, which infants and young children experience every day. To human beings, one monkey’s face tends to look pretty much like any other monkey’s face, although, as Kurson points out, one monkey’s face differs from the next to essentially the same degree that one human’s face differs from the next. The reason we can’t make the distinction is that most of us have no experience interacting with monkeys. “Children are still developing their face-perception skills at five or six years of age,” Kurson notes. Humans have much early practice, so the gift of seeing becomes automatic; as adults, we don’t need to think about or work at it. If the neurons meant for vision aren’t used at an early stage of development, they learn other tasks, but they lose their flexibility and cannot later revert to their original purpose. Magnetic resonance imaging of May’s brain during an array of visual tests confirmed that the areas of his brain that should have been recognizing faces and objects simply did not respond to them. Kurson succinctly frames the basic problem behind May’s—and, indeed, all the newly sighted patients’—confused vision: “It was likely he would never perceive faces, depth, or objects normally because he, like all adults, no longer had the available neural networks to learn them.”

  In 1606, when the philosopher William Molyneux asked his friend John Locke if he thought that a person born blind who had learned to distinguish a cube from a sphere simply by touching them with his hands could, upon regaining his sight, distinguish the two simply by looking at them, he was essentially asking whether sight regained (or, more accurately, first gained) in a blind adult would be an instantly effective tool. Locke surmised that it would not be. The question was debated for centuries. With Mike May’s case, the question has been definitively answered. Those who do not have the early childhood experience of seeing and interacting will not, if they gain sight in adulthood, know how to see.

  1Von Senden, Space and Sight, 61.

  2In his memoir Planet of the Blind, the poet Stephen Kuusisto did say that as a blind person, “you are watched everywhere you go,” and that as a watched blind person, he sometimes felt “buried beneath the graffiti of other people’s superstitions.” Yet, after years of sufferring caused by his trying to pass as a sighted person, Kuusito finally chose to present himself to the world as a proud, self-directed blind man, and in doing so he found that “there’s power that comes with admitting how little I can see because the world is more open and admits me far more graciously that it did when I was in the closet.” The blind author Georgina Kleege pointed out that there was discomfort on both sides. While the sighted were indeed in a position to observe the blind freely, they also tended to feel a vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of that persistent myth about the supernatural powers of the blind. “They seem to secretly suspect an unseen force prompting our responses…extra accurate hearing and perfect pitch…a finer touch, a bloodhound’s sense of smell. We allegedly possess an unfair advantage that we could use against the sighted, hearing the secrets in their sighs, smelling their fear.”

  3Yoshimi had a good sense of humor and liked to joke, but she explained for me a general political resentment that many blind people have: the fact that the world is organized, philosophized about, and run according to the needs, terms, and demands of the sighted, while the needs and views of the blind are largely ignored. It is a resentment of the sighted people’s presumption that their perception of reality is the only perception. For Yoshimi, that was a corrupt racket.

  4“Each eye sends the brain a billion messages per second. Together the two eyes transmit twice as much information to the brain as the rest of the body combined” (Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen).

  5The details and outcome of this case are remarkably similar to those of the case of a man named Virgil, whom Oliver Sacks studied in 1991 and wrote about in his book An Anthropologist on Mars.

  6Again a distinction should be made between the profound blindness of those who have completely unresponsive retinas and the blindness of those who cannot see in any useful sense yet do have vital retinas that can perceive some light. Sight can be recovered only if the retina is vital.

  The Definition of Real

  Late one afternoon I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom at the institute when I heard some of the women returning from a shopping trip into the city. As they mounted the stairs to the second floor of the dormitory, their heads were momentarily level with the front window of my room, and Lucy took the opportunity to shout, as she always did, “Rose! Your girls are home!”

  Yoshimi was asleep in her bed with a bad cold; I stepped out onto the walkway to tell them not to wake her, but it was too late, they had already burst into her room to see how she was. I went in to find Jayne giving Yoshimi a rough pat on the forehead; Yoshimi sat up, and in the process, her thermometer fell from the bed to the desk. Jayne groped around the desk until she located the thermometer, held it up to her eyeglasses to see what it
was, and suddenly the thermometer emitted a few words of Japanese in a loud electronic voice. Jayne was so startled, she jumped, but when she began to comprehend what it was, her surprise turned to delight. “Eh!” she cried. “Yoshi’s thermometer speaks Japanese!”

  Lucy grabbed the instrument from her and examined it in the window light. “And it has Braille on it,” she said.

  “Ho! I never saw that before,” Jayne said. She gave Yoshimi a little shove on the shoulder. “Oh-la-la. Techno Japan is ahead!”

  Yoshimi smiled and blew her red nose on a hankie.

  Jayne turned and put her face close to mine. “Japan is ahead of everybody, eh, Rose?” She had just eaten a cookie or a biscuit; I could smell the sweetness of it on her breath. Around her neck she wore her dorm-room key on a string. She was wearing sandals, and I saw that she had painted her toenails. The terrible thought came to me that in Nairobi, each one of those pretty white toes had a monetary value.

  Standing at the foot of the bed were Holi; Karin; Yoshimi’s roommate, Kyila; and Chelsea, a blind Indian girl who had been working in the office of the institute. While Kyila’s side of the room was always tidy and orderly, Yoshi’s side was a riveting mess. Her desk was piled high with handbags, clothes, candy wrappers, computer equipment, Braille books, and electrical wires. Her closet doors were flung wide, and clothes spilled out onto the floor. There were stray shoes scattered everywhere. Her white cane lay crumpled by the leg of her desk. Once, when I commented on the disorder of her room and the fact that blind people usually like their surroundings to be neat, Yoshi replied that for her the room was perfectly organized, that she knew the location of every single item and rarely had to search for anything. One day I saw her pulling clothes from her drawers and dropping them onto the floor, and when I asked her why, she said, “So that I can separate the dark from the light so I can wash them.” I didn’t ask her how she could tell the dark from the light. I knew her well enough to know that she had probably memorized the feel of every item, and once she had been told its color, she retained it in her memory. Another time, I had run into her in the laundry room, where she was ironing some of her clothes, and when I praised the detailed embroidery on one of her handkerchiefs, she asked me what the word embroidery meant. I explained it to her and ran the tips of her fingers over the stitching. “Oh, that,” she had said. “Yes. Is it nice?”