[bookshare-discuss] Re: Fwd: Fw: If a blind person gained sight,could they recognize objects previously touched?
- From: "Basler, Ellen LRN" <EBasler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:17:11 -0600
When I was a teen, I read the Wilkie Collins novel, Poor Miss Finch.
It's intrigued me ever since.
Miss Finch has been blind since birth but regains her sight. This causes
complications in her love life that are only resolved when she loses it
again. The vignette that has stayed in my memory though, is a
description of her, sitting at a table running her hands around a plate,
trying to reconcile the sight of roundness with the feel of roundness.
Collins was a friend of Dickens, so that tells you how long ago this was
written. Collins must have been talking to medical people though, as
other plot twists deal with an epilepsy treatment and its side effects -
also with some basis in fact.
Ellen Basler
Alternate Format Librarian
Saskatchewan Learning Resource Centre
-----Original Message-----
From: Cindy [mailto:popularplace@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: April 20, 2006 8:28 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;
Louise
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Fwd: Fw: If a blind person gained
sight,could they recognize objects previously touched?
I found this a fascinating article. Is this something
those of you who are blind already know or feel, or is
it interesting to you, too?
Cindy
--- Louise <bookscanner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: "Louise" <bookscanner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Louise Gourdoux" <bookscanner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Fw: If a blind person gained sight,could
> they recognize objects previously touched?
> Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 21:17:15 -0500
>
>
>
> PhysOrg.com
> Thursday, April 20, 2006
>
> If a blind person gained sight, could they recognize
> objects previously
> touched?
>
> By Source: Research/Penn State, By Joe Anuta
>
> Most people conceptualize the world largely based on
> sight, and would find
> it difficult to function using touch alone. Think
> about finding the keyhole
> on your car door at night, or locating that light
> switch in a dark room.
> Even if it's too dark to see, a seeing person uses
> his or her visual memory,
> along with the tactile sense, to navigate the
> physical world and accomplish
> the task at hand.
>
> However, the interconnectedness of sight and touch
> is not a given for the
> blind.
>
> Cathleen Moore, associate professor of psychology,
> explains that the areas
> processing visual and tactile information are
> located on the wrinkly,
> outermost shell of the brain, called the
> neurocortex. "Sight is located on
> the back of the brain, and touch along the sides,
> near the top."
>
> A connection was verified between the two senses in
> sighted people, Moore
> says, through a test using functional Magnetic
> Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to
> analyze brain activity. Without looking, the
> subjects described objects they
> could only examine with their hands. "Despite being
> blindfolded, their
> visual areas were very active. It's as if they
> translated tactile sensations
> into visual terms," states Moore. "Obviously, these
> are integrated."
>
> But although sighted people can picture tactile
> information in their head,
> the neurocortex is configured slightly differently
> for those who can't see.
>
> "It's not like the visual area just atrophies for
> blind people," explains
> Moore. Instead, the visual area gets taken over by
> the tactile. This concept
> is called neuroplasticity, the ability of the
> neurosystem to reconfigure
> itself.
>
> Because of this different brain configuration, blind
> people who regain their
> sight may find themselves in a world they don't
> immediately comprehend. "It
> would be more like a sighted person trying to rely
> on tactile information,"
> Moore says.
>
> Learning to see is a developmental process, just
> like learning language, she
> continues. "As far as vision goes, a
> three-and-a-half year old child is
> already a well-calibrated system."
>
> As an example of the process, she referenced two
> case studies where blind
> men regained their sight later in life. Their
> experiences illustrate some of
> the difficulties in making the transition from
> blindness to the world of
> visual imagery, as well as the surprising importance
> of one's age at the
> onset of blindness to one's successful adaptation to
> sight.
>
> One man known as S.B., in a study conducted by
> British neuropsychologist
> Richard Gregory and reported in the journal Nature,
> lost his sight at 10
> months old, only to regain it 50 years later through
> cornea transplants. He
> could recognize several objects despite never having
> seen them, but other
> aspects of vision left him bewildered, Moore says.
>
> S.B. could tell time from the hands of a clock from
> previously feeling an
> open-faced watch, and identify cars and trucks from
> having repeatedly washed
> his relative's car.
>
> "I would infer that he just formed a generally
> applicable spatial
> representation of these, so conceptualizing the
> position of hands on a clock
> or the shape of a car didn't matter if it came
> through visual or tactile
> sources," Moore says. "When he gained vision, it was
> easier for him to
> interpret them."
>
> "What he wasn't good at was drawings. He basically
> couldn't extract depth
> from them," she adds. For S.B., a painting of a
> countryside landscape was
> simply a collage of colors and a drawing of a cube
> simply a series of lines
> on a page. Gregory's study tentatively attributed
> this problem to a part of
> the brain inappropriately scaling objects, causing
> S.B. to misjudge their
> size.
>
> The other man, American Michael May, whose case was
> reported by CBS News in
> 2003, went blind at 3 1/2 and regained sight at 43.
> Surprisingly, although
> losing sight much later in his childhood, he had a
> harder time adjusting to
> vision than S.B. "He can't recognize the faces of
> his wife and children,"
> Moore says. "One possible explanation for this is
> that while May was blind,
> he was essentially trying to compare tactile
> sensations to visual images he
> obtained as a child, instead of forming a general
> spatial representation
> like S.B., who could only recall the colors red,
> black, and white.
>
> So while we might think giving sight to the blind
> would be akin to taking
> off a blindfold, it is not that simple. The
> acquisition of sight for S.B.
> and May brought hardship along with opportunity.
> "After surgery, some people
> who regain their sight can become very depressed,"
> Moore states. "For S.B.,
> he expected the visual world to hold all of this
> promise, but it didn't. It
> was dull, and bland." S.B. never learned to read,
> and sometimes wouldn't
> bother flipping on the light at night.
>
> Although S.B. died two years after his surgery, May
> has since gotten better
> at understanding his vision, confirms Moore. "He is
> learning to see like an
> adult learns a second language, slowly and through a
> lot of hard conscious
> work. It's very unlike the way a child learns a
> language -- quickly and
> seemingly effortlessly. The intriguing difference
> between S.B.'s and May's
> cases implies that there are critical periods for
> learning to see, just as
> there are heightened periods for language learning."
>
>
> http://www.physorg.com/news64769651.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
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