None so blind...
In 1904 H. G. Wells wrote ‘The Country of the Blind”. Wells placed
his village “300 miles from Chimborazo, 100 from the snows of Cotopaxi,
in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes.” For over fifteen generations
all the villagers had been blind. A man falls into this hidden valley, a
man with all his normal senses intact. He finds houses built in neat
rows, cleanest of streets, irrigation channels and lush vegetation. The
houses had doors, but no windows and had walls of irregular plastering.
The man Nunez, realizes that they are blind and “In the country of the
blind, the one-eyed man is king”. When he says he has sight, that he can
see, the blind ask what he means, and they say “his senses are still
imperfect”. “There is no such word as ‘see’.” The blind men want to hold
his hand and lead him across the village. The home of the elders was
pitch dark and Nunez could not see anything. For these people their
night was day, when they stayed up and did their work and the day was
for rest and sleep. Nunez tried to rebel, to take over the village. But
he could not fight the ‘blind’ men. When they asked him if he thought he
could still ‘See’, he answered, “No, that was folly. The word means
nothing-less than nothing”.
The complete story can be read free on-line at Gutenberg and other
sites.
It all depends on what we mean by vision, what we sense through our
eyes. Perhaps the villagers described by Wells had ‘Blindsight’. The
term introduced by the neurologist Lawrence Weiskrantz in his book
‘Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications’. ‘Blindsight’ is also a
documentary film made about six blind kids who attempt the Everest
climb, motivated by Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to climb
Mount Everest in 2001. The film became a hit, but Peter Bradshaw in The
Guardian, questioned, “What precisely is the blind child’s experience of
‘climbing Everest’ anyway?”. To that we can also add the question, would
any blind child be able to ‘see’ this film? “In people who are blind,
the brain reroutes other sensory inputs to unused portions of the brain
to compensate for the loss of sight. ...part of the blind visual cortex
is being re-wired to support hearing or touch for the localization of
objects in space....for the sighted, sound and touch stimulation
resulted in reduced visual cortex activation.” claims a report of the
U.S. National Science Foundation researchers. Yet H. G. Wells apparently
was aware of this 108 years ago.
Albert Rosenfeld wrote in the 12th June 1964 issue of ‘Life’, about
Rosa Kuleshova, a young woman in Russia, who could see with her fingers.
She could identify colours with her finger-tips, and she was even able
to read the business card of Life Correspondent Bob Brigham, not with
her eyes, but with her elbow. The Soviet scientists called it
‘Dermo-Optical Perception’ or DOP., ‘skin-vision’ in simpler terms. The
American experimental psychologist Gregory Razzan too had believed DOP
was possible, that people could be trained to see with their skin. The
studies are still continuing, as reported by Peter Brugger and Peter H.
Weiss in 2008.
In 1877, Michel de Montaigne, in his 2nd Book of Essays, wrote about
a man who was blind but refused to admit the fact. “I have seen a
gentleman of a good family who was born blind, or at least blind from
such an age that he knows not what sight is; who is so little sensible
of his defect that he makes use as we do of words proper for seeing, and
applies them after a manner wholly particular and his own. They brought
him a child to which he was god-father, which, having taken into his
arms, “Good God,” said he, “what a fine child! How beautiful to look
upon! what a pretty face it has!”
Montaigne continues, “The first consideration I have upon the subject
of the senses is that I make a doubt whether or not man be furnished
with all natural senses. I see several animals who live an entire and
perfect life, some without sight, others without hearing; who knows
whether to us also one, two, three, or many other senses may not be
wanting?”
Anton’s syndrome. “Patients with this syndrome behave as if they can
see despite their obvious lack of sight”, is the explanation given in
the Journal of Clinical Neurology. It could be just one more example of
the Syndrome Syndrome, where the medical profession tries to find a new
syndrome for every symptom of man. Yet the above definition covers a
symptom found in most of us, because we do not really see anything of
the universe and life around us. The name is after the neuropathologist
Gabriel Anton, for his explanation of visual anosognosia. Patients deny
their blindness despite objective evidence of visual loss. It was later
named Anton-Babinski Syndrome, after the neurologist Joseph Francois
Babinski.
The idea crept into creative fiction in Rupert Thomson’s novel ‘The
Insult’, and Peter Watts’ ‘Blindsight’. The concept appeared in Raj
Patel’s book on the 2008 Economic crisis, ‘The Value of Nothing’, and in
the film Dogville by Lars von Trier. But long before that it was Plato
who wrote about it in the Allegory of the Cave, in his Republic, book
VII, where men chained to a bench facing a wall saw the shadows of
artificial objects created by a fire behind them. They believed what
they saw was reality. That is why Aldous Huxley had said, “Most
ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to
know”.
What is really important is not whether we see with our eyes, or our
skin or our ears, but to see and understand things as they really are.
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