Well, as I've said in a previous post, I can accept the possibility that
blind people can understand visual prospective, or at least some blind
people can, because some blind people have an uncanny sense of physical
layout and those are the people who are the most successful cane travelers.
The people who had retinal blastoma, as my husband did, seem to have this
special capability. Fred could remember routes, move easily through various
environments, and hear where lamp posts were located. But he depended on
sighted people to choose color coordinated clothing which he then labeled so
he was always impeccably dressed. When he was a very young man, he rejected
using a cane and traveled around New York City without one and without
serious mishap. When he matured a bit, he chose safety above pride. He was
able to travel with me to Great Britain on an Evergreen trip in, perhaps
1981 and he reveled in all of the auditory, and tactual experiences that
were accessible to him on that trip. He loved experiencing places that he'd
read about in books. However, there was never any confusion about how his
information was being accessed and sight was never involved.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2015 1:34 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Senses special: The art of seeing without
sight
I think my real name must be Thomas, and I come from Missouri Over the years
I've seen or heard of several real, honest to goodness methods of teaching
the blind how to see. We had a gentleman South of Seattle, years ago, who
told me of his experiments in teaching blind people to walk among colored
circles, identifying their colors and also avoiding walking on them. A
couple of our students in the adult training center decided to try. They
spent several visits without any noticeable change.
Then there was the fellow in England...I think, who had his eyes plastered
shut and bandages placed over them. He was filmed riding a bicycle around
London and other places, with no problem. One would think such talent, if
shared, would make a fellow very wealthy. I do not know what ever happened
to him, but I still am convinced that it was all a clever trick. I've known
folks who whistled, clicked their tongues, snapped their fingers and tapped
their canes in order to find their way among obstacles. But none of them
claimed to tell color by these means, let alone to define objects.
I've had students and blind friends who have informed me that they can,
"feel" color. Red, orange, yellow are bright colors and give off varying
degrees of heat. Blue, green, purple are "cool" colors and can be
differentiated by the feel of the colder surfaces. While I never challenged
these folks, I did observe a couple of men who swore they had the skill. In
both cases the fellows had some limited sight.
By "feeling" the coolness or warmth of an object, they put their face close.
And while they were, "feeling" the temperature of the item, they were also
getting an eyeful.
Now, just to play Devil's Advocate, I sat in my dining room talking to my
mother. This was back when she was still alive. She was sorting out little
bundles of yarn which she was using to crochet a blanket.
I picked up one of the bundles, sniffed it and announced, "it's green".
Then, one by one I went through about 7 or 8 more skeins, identifying each
color as if I could actually see them. Just my mother and I. But Cathy was
watching from the kitchen. She thought we were playing a trick on her. But
it was for real. I always believed my mother to be a little psychic. But
whatever the cause, it remains an unsolved puzzle for over 25 years.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/22/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
absolutely amazing! But I suspect that this ability varies widely fromstomach.
person to person. They'll find out a lot from studying this man. But I
doubt that everyblind person has the same ability because abilities
vary from one person to another.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 2:24 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Senses special: The art of seeing without
sight
Articles separated by +++
Senses special: The art of seeing without sight
Artist Focus
Esref Armagan
"I started painting when I was five or six ... I think of myself as an
artist ... and I will probably die drawing," says Esref Armagan, a
congenitally blind figurative artist from Turkey. Art Education for
the Blind, Inc. organized Mr. Armagan's one-man art show in New York
City this past May.
Mr. Armagan has been working for the past 35 years. As a child and
young adult he never received any formal schooling or training; he
taught himself to write and print. He paints primarily in oil. First,
using a braille stylus, he etches an outline of what he will paint. He
needs to feel that he is "inside" his painting -in fact, when he is
drawing a picture of the sea, he often wonders if he should wear a
life jacket so as not drown! When he is satisfied with his drawing, he
starts to apply the oils with his fingers, allowing each color to dry
before adding the next. He receives no assistance or training from any
individual. He has learned to draw perspective, and, also, developed
methods of doing portraits. For more information and images of his
remarkable work, go to
www.armagan.com
[Image, titled "Boat with Fish" is a oil-color painting. The upper
half of the painting is dominated by a large, green sailboat , with
blue sky and white, gray and dark blue clouds behind the boat. In the
lower half, two fish swim in water that is divided into three colored
areas: red, blue and brown. The fish look up at the boat.]
+++
Senses special: The art of seeing without sight
By Alison Motluk
New Scientist Thursday, January 27, 2005
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.700
IT IS an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing
pictures of hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special
clipboard, which is balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample
everything just right.
A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his
neck to make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and
chants instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet
another translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in
a corner to assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around
watching, and trying not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a
practice run for an upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get
Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blindaway," Kennedy says.
painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering.
The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a
peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can
paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise and even admire. He
paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but
he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and
perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these
things either. How does he do it?
Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted
person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains
construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in
seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other
senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really
understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much
"seeing" does a blind person actually do?
Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods.
One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other
is stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision
as an infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain
detects no light now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were
formally educated, and like them, he spent his early years playing in
the streets. But Armagan's blindness isolated him, and to pass the
time, he turned to drawing. At first he just scratched in the dirt.
But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper.
At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on
canvas with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.
"He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies,
but he's never seen any of these things"His paintings are disarmingly
realistic.
And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades,"
says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I
have never seen a performance like his." Kennedy's first opportunity
to meet and test Armagan in person was during a visit to New York last
May, for a forum organised by a group called Art Education for the
Blind. Armagan, who is something of a celebrity in Turkey, has become
used to touring with his canvases to the Czech Republic, China, Italy
and the Netherlands. What made this visit different was the interest
shown by scientists both Kennedy and a team from Boston.
Kennedy put Armagan through a battery of tests. For instance, he
presented him with solid objects that he could feel a cube, a cone and
a ball all in a row (dubbed the "three mountains task") and asked him
to draw them. He then asked him to draw them as though he was perched
elsewhere at the table, across from himself, then to his right and
left and hovering overhead.
Kennedy asked him to draw two rows of glasses, stretching off into the
distance. Representing this kind of perspective is tough even for a
sighted person. And when he asked him to draw a cube, and then to
rotate it to the left, and then further to the left, Armagan drew a
scene with all three cubes. Astonishingly, he drew it in three-point
perspective showing a perfect grasp of how horizontal and vertical
lines converge at imaginary points in the distance. "My breath was taken
picture of it.
Kennedy has spent much of his career exploring art from the
perspective of blind people. He has shown that people who are
congenitally blind understand outline drawings when they feel them
just as seeing people do. They understand and can draw in three
dimensions. In fact, blind children develop the ability to draw, he
has found, much as sighted children do but all too few blind children
ever get the opportunity to explore this ability. Even knowledge about
perspective, he has come to believe, is acquired in similar ways for
both. "Where a sighted person looks out, a blind person reaches out,
and they will discover the same things," says Kennedy. "The geometry
of direction is common to vision and touch."
Lines and one-liners
It is the night before the Boston team's first brain scan. Armagan is
sitting at a long table at an inn, entertaining everyone with
one-liners, trying to explain how he does his artwork. Alvaro
Pascual-Leone, the Harvard neurologist who invited him here, and Amir
Amedi, his colleague, are challenging him with more and more complex
tasks. Draw a road leading away, says Pascual-Leone, with poles on
either side and with a source of light underneath. Armagan smiles
confidently.
He uses a special rubberised tablet, called a "Sewell raised line
drawing kit". This device allows him to draw lines that rise off his
paper as tiny puckers, so that he can detect them with his fingertips.
And so he draws the road and the poles: one hand holding the pencil,
the other tracing along behind, like surrogate eyes, "observing" the
image as it is being laid down.
A minute or so later, the picture is done. Pascual-Leone and Amedi
shake their heads in wonder.
So, we ask, how do you know how long these poles should be as they recede?
I
was taught, he says. Not by any formal teacher, but by casual comments
by friends and acquaintances. How do you know about shadows? He
learned that too. He confides that for a long time he figured that if
an object was red, its shadow would be red too. "But I was told it
wasn't," he says. But how do you know about red? He knows that there's
an important visual quality to seen objects called "colour" and that
it varies from object to object. He's memorised what has what colour
and even which ones clash.
Scanning the mind's eye Next day, and the time has come for Armagan to
get into the scanner. The Harvard scientists are collaborating with
scanning experts at Boston University. In addition to taking a
structural snapshot of Armagan's brain and establishing if it can
perceive any light (they confirmed it cannot), this morning's
experiment will have him doing some odd sequences of tasks. He'll have
a set number of seconds to feel an object, imagine it and draw it. But
he has also been asked to scribble, pretend to feel an object and
recall a list of objects that he learned days earlier.
Pascual-Leone and Amedi want to see what Armagan's brain can tell them
about neural plasticity. Both scientists have evidence that in the
absence of vision, the "visual" cortex the part of the brain that
makes sense of the information coming from our eyes does not lie idle.
Pascual-Leone has found that proficient Braille readers recruit this
area for touch. Amedi, along with Ehud Zohary at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, found that the area is also activated in verbal memory
tasks.
When Amedi analysed the results, however, he found that Armagan's
visual cortex lit up during the drawing task, but hardly at all for
the verbal recall. Amedi was startled by this. "To get such
extraordinary plasticity for [drawing] and zero for verbal memory and
language it was such a strong result," he says. He suspects that, to a
certain extent, how the unused visual areas are deployed depends on
who you are and what you need from your brain.
Even more intriguing was the way in which drawing activated Armagan's
visual cortex. It is now well established that when sighted people try
to imagine things faces, scenes, colours, items they've just looked at
they engage the same parts of their visual cortex that they use to
see, only to a much lesser degree. Creating these mental images is a
lot like seeing, only less powerful. When Armagan imagined items he
had touched, parts of his visual cortex, too, were mildly activated.
But when he drew, his visual cortex lit up as though he was seeing. In
fact, says Pascual-Leone, a naive viewer of his scan might assume
Armagan really could see.
That result cracks open another big nut: what is "seeing" exactly?
Even without the ability to detect light, Armagan is coming incredibly
close to it, admits Pascual-Leone. We can't know what is actually
being generated in his brain. "But whatever that thing in his mind is,
he is able to transfer it to paper so that I unequivocally know it's
the same object he just felt,"
says Pascual-Leone.
"We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality
through our eyes. But is it?"In his own life, too, Armagan seems to
have a remarkable grasp of space. He seldom gets lost, says his
manager Joan Eroncel. He has an uncanny sense of a room's dimensions.
He once drew the layout of an apartment he had only visited briefly,
she says, and remembered it perfectly nine years later.
We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality
through our eyes. But is it? How much of what we think of as seeing
really comes from without, and how much from within? The visual cortex
may have a much more important role than we realise in creating
expectations for what we are about to see, says Pascual-Leone. "Seeing
is only possible when you know what you're going to see," he says.
Perhaps in Armagan the expectation part is operational, but there is
simply no data coming in visually.
Conventional wisdom suggests that a person can't have a "mind's eye"
without
ever having had vision. But Pascual-Leone thinks Armagan must have
one. The researcher has long argued that you could arrive at the same
mental picture via different senses. In fact he thinks we all do this
all the time, integrating all the sensations of an object into our mental
"When we see a cup," he says, "we're also feeling with our mind's hand.surrounded by beauty."
Seeing is as much touching as it is seeing." But because vision is so
overwhelming, we are unaware of that, he says. But in Armagan,
significantly, that is not the case.
I sit across from the source of all this mystery and I ask him about
the birds he loves to paint. They are brightly coloured and exotic and
I wonder aloud how he knows how to depict them. He tells me about how
he used to own a parakeet shop. "They come to your hand," he says.
"You can easily touch them." He pauses and smiles and says: "I love being
Canada"
+++
From: "John M. Kennedy, Chair, Department of Life Sciences, University
of Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, ON M1C1A4,
kennedy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxfantastic.
To: "Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research"
art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research@xxxxxxxxxx Cc:
accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: [Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research]
art by Esref and others
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 7:36 AM
Morton Heller wrote:
Hi All I just looked at the Art Beyond Sight web site, and it is
I check back there frequently, but not often enough. I was especiallyCanada"
interested in the fine art produced by Esref Armagan. I wish that I
had been able to attend his reception when he had an exhibit recently.
Does anyone know how he does it? I am a Mac user, and could not view
the video on the site. Does he use raised-line drawings before adding
pigments? This is what I would expect from the paintings. Does he have
any useful light perception?
Regards, Morty Heller
Dear colleagues, last night I had a telephone conversation with Joan
Eroncel and asked her about Morty's email. She said Esref used to make
raised line drawings before colouring his pictures. Now he adds the
colours directly to the surfaces without the preliminary step of
making the raised drawing . He has no useful light perception. Medical
opinion is that he never had light sensitivity. John
From: "John M. Kennedy, Chair, Department of Life Sciences, University
of Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, ON M1C1A4,
kennedy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: "Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research"
art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research@xxxxxxxxxx Cc:
accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: [Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research]
art by Esref and others
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 10:02 AM
Lisa Yayla wrote:
Hi, I was just reading Oliver Sacks book An Anthropologist on Mars and
wondered Could drawing be divided in three parts. 1. the inherent,
that which is "hardwired" in everyone includes eg math, information
component need (contours need in the same way one needs vitamins, as a
component for
development) Contour perception likely has a great deal that is
hardwired
2. the intake: senses Yes: And do notice some development occurs for
sure, though much is hardwired (eg sensitivity improves, some shapes
become
familiar)
3. the output:ability to draw, coordination Yes: And do notice that
we could become more and more coordinated but stay at the same level
in drawing (eg using true form and parallel projection) or we can
shift levels (eg using convergent lines to show receding parallels)
while still being rather rough in our coordination. In this way
sophistication is distinct from coordination.
John
