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Hi All,
The appended book excerpt by Adam Piore came out on Wired today,
Wired: Meet the woman who can see with her ears
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/book-excerpt-body-builders/
Adam Piore's book "The Body Builders" is available from Amazon at
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Builders-Inside-Science-Engineered/dp/0062347144/
Peter
Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com
Wired: Meet the woman who can see with her ears.
By Adam Piore | Science | Date of Publication: 03.25.17.
The last thing twenty-one-year-old Pat Fletcher saw before the explosion
was the
chemical-filled steel tank beside her suddenly ballooning outward. With
alarm
she realized the plastic hose in her hand had grown unusually hot. Then the
world flashed blindingly bright and turned a brilliant blue, the color
of the
flames engulfing her body.
When she awoke, Pat thought she might be dreaming. The world around her was
featureless and dark, as though she were lost in a gray, smoky fog. The
sedatives and painkillers had something to do with it, as did the fact
that her
face was swathed in thick bandages. But soon a solemn doctor arrived at her
bedside. And Pat learned there was something more. She had been in an
industrial
accident caused by a reaction between two volatile chemicals at the grenade
factory where she worked. One of her eyeballs was gone; the other eye
remained,
but was permanently shut. Pat was lucky to be alive, the doctor told
her. But
there was no hope she would ever see again.
It would take nearly three decades, but, in a way, the doctor was wrong.
Twenty-five years later, the extroverted, gray-haired resident of
Buffalo, New
York, was surfing the Internet using a program that converts the text on the
screen into speech when she stumbled across a computer program designed by a
Dutch engineer. He claimed his program, which he called “vOICe,” could
convert
the pixels in images into sounds and allow blind individuals to “see”
the world
around them. Pat was dubious. She even chuckled when she played a sample
“soundscape,” a pastiche of scores of different tones at different
volumes and
pitches emitted simultaneously. It seemed absurd. An unintelligible
jumble of noise.
Then Pat cranked up a “picture” of a long, gated barn fence through a
pair of
stereo speakers in her study, and it just about took her breath away.
Something
was happening in her mind’s eye, something that felt fundamentally different
than simply “hearing” the sounds.
“I turned around and I could almost just see the fence going all the way
across
my study and I said, ‘Oh Lord, what is this?'” Pat recalls. “I just started
getting chills up my back.”
What made the feeling so unbelievable was that she could tell the sound
was out
there—beyond the reach of her cane bumping into something, beyond the
pull of
the leash on her hand as her dog guided her forward—beyond her touch.
From the
dynamic cacophony of sound, somehow, Pat had a sense of the fence’s
dimensions,
of its shape and where there were gaps between the slats. The world of
the blind
has often been described as profoundly claustrophobic, because all that is
knowable and perceivable about the shapes and the objects that surround them
ends abruptly at the end of one’s fingertips. But Pat’s world had just
expanded.
How could sound do this? she marveled.
“It felt like the image was real,” she says. “It’s a fence—‘see there is a
gate—and there’s a blackness there, like the gate is open...’ It was a
shock.
It just felt like you could walk along it and that really, really shook
me up.”
Pat went to the store and purchased the smallest webcam she could find,
attached
it to a baseball cap, and then hooked it up to a laptop computer. Then she
turned it all on, walked out into her hallway, and looked around.
“That almost took me to my knees,” she says. “I could tell that there was a
wall, and I walked up to the plastic window blinds and touched them and
I just
couldn’t believe it. You just forget what the world looks like.”
Pat soon discovered she could see patterns on drinking cups she’d been
blind to
for years. She got lost in the decorative wallpaper in her dentist’s waiting
room. She could see leaves moving on the trees. She could see faces,
though they
remained blurry. Pat sent away for a pair of spyglasses with a camera hidden
behind a tiny hole at eye level and upgraded her rig. She began to use the
device every day. Soon she carried her cane only so she would have it on
hand in
case of a technical malfunction.
And then one afternoon four years later, something even more amazing
happened.
Up until that day, when she gazed into rooms, or looked around, it was
almost as
if she were looking at a flat, two- dimensional photograph. She could
see there
was a couch in the living room, or the shape of a tree against the sky,
but she
had no sense of depth. But that day Pat was standing at the sink washing
dishes,
when she stepped back to dry her hands on a towel and looked down. The
sink had
always appeared to her as a simple square. But with her new device on, Pat
realized suddenly she had regained depth perception.
Pat Fletcher was looking into the sink.
Pat Fletcher’s experience sounds impossible, or at the very least like some
elaborate kind of mind trick. Maybe she’s convinced. But it can’t be
real—after
all, it flies in the face of conventional scientific theory. It flies in the
face of conventional wisdom. How can you “see” with your ears? How could the
brain suddenly rediscover the capacity for depth perception four years out,
seemingly as suddenly as if someone had flipped a light switch?
Yet Pat Fletcher’s claims have been verified by some of the world’s leading
scientists. Several years ago, the intrepid fifty-eight-year-old
technological
adventurer, wearing her jerry-rigged device, arrived in Boston for
testing at
Harvard Medical School. Pat lay down on a large table, which slid her
into the
cramped tube of an MRI machine capable of tracking the amount of oxygen
being
used by different parts of her brain. The doctors instructed her to
listen to
her soundscapes.
Pat Fletcher still had no eyeballs with which to gaze upon the world. Yet
somehow, when she listened to her “soundscapes,” the areas of the brain
associated with visual processing in the sighted—the areas of the brain
normally
activated when we point our eyeballs at an object in space—sprang to life.
Meanwhile, when Pat heard normal sounds, when, for instance, a researcher
jingled his keys nearby, Pat’s auditory cortex continued to light up like
normal. Her brain somehow was able to distinguish between normal sounds
and her
soundscapes and route the latter to the correct area of the brain for
processing
vision—even when these sounds entered her ears simultaneously.
A series of additional experiments appeared to confirm it. Pat Fletcher,
blind
for more than thirty years, was in some sense seeing (while sometimes
simultaneously hearing) with her ears. Her brain had rewired itself.
Excerpted from The Body Builders by Adam Piore. Copyright 2017 Adam Piore.
Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source URL:
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/book-excerpt-body-builders/
Adam Piore's book "The Body Builders" is available from Amazon at
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Builders-Inside-Science-Engineered/dp/0062347144/
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