THE NEW YORKER (July/28/2003)
The Mind's Eye, What the blind see.
by Oliver Sacks
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 mean astounding example of
how an individual deprived of one form of perception could totally
reshape
himself to anew 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 Hulls 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 onesided, 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 as 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 tide 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 lipreader 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 tides 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 inbetween 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. Be cause 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 mat 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 dearly 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 brains 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 this 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 "non-visual" 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.