[accessibleimage] Fw: Sacks, The Mind's Eye

Greetings all,

Here, below my signature,  is the article,
"THE MIND'S EYE. (blindness)" by Oliver Sacks,
The New Yorker, July 28, 2003 v79 i20 p048..
When the article first appeared, I shared it with a number of people, and I
wrote a small preliminary note, telling about my own experiences. I am
copying my note here, before the article text.
If I previously sent this article and my note to this list, please excuse
the repetition.
Sylvie


Beginning of my note:
I began life with normal vision and gradually lost vision until the age of
38, when I lost all, even light perception. Like some of the folks discussed
in the article, I was also very visually
oriented. When I had vision, I loved to draw pictures and look at the
pictures created by others, such as Picasso. I began to learn to read and
write in print and do math when my father came upon me drawing at the age of
three, and showed me the letters and numbers. I went on to practice reading
and writing and drawing by myself with the aid of my older sister's comic
books. I have sewed since I was a child, and, when I had vision, I could
look at a piece of cloth and envision it as a piece of clothing, then make
it, with little or no need for patterns. When I could see I could see very
differences and variations in colors; I could distinguish all aspects of
colors very acutely. I have always enjoyed colors.

I have been totally blind since 1981, and still have many visual images,
just like Arlene Gordon. If I move my arms back and forth in front of my
eyes, I also see them. And like her, I choose all my own clothing, with the
help of sighted friends who tell me the colors in the stores. once I am told
the color of a piece of clothing, I can figure out what other articles of
clothing it will go with.

Now that I am totally blind, I always have a visual image of a room I am in,
whether or not I try to have it. The visual image is clearer if I have had
the opportunity to explore it than if I have not had the opportunity to
explore it.

I learned braille as a child, but I. didn't become proficient in it until my
twenties. But now I can read and write in braille quite competently, and I
also envision the dots in my mind's eye.

And I have always been and continue to be very interested in visual aspects
of the world, including art.

I think the article is very good in illustrating the tremendous variability
in capacities between people with blindness. We all definitely need to
rethink the role of sight and the other senses in learning about and
interacting with the world.

Sylvie Kashdan
Instructor/Curriculum Coordinator
KAIZEN PROGRAM for New English Learners with Visual Limitations
810-A Hiawatha Place South
Seattle, WA  98144
phone:  (206) 784-5619
email:  kaizen_esl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


THE MIND'S EYE.(blindness)

by Oliver Sacks

The New Yorker, July 28, 2003 v79 i20 p048.

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. Hull's 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 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
travelled, 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 vermillion.... 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 Hull's 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" for
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
signalled 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
heightenings 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
Hull's 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 to 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.

Electronic Collection:  A105980879
 RN:  A105980879

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