8 ms·

As someone who has been blind since birth this is accurate. I know that people who go blind later in life continue to dream in color since they have the memory

by jareds 12y ago

As someone who has been blind since birth this is accurate. I know that people who go blind later in life continue to dream in color since they have the memory of color to reference while I do not. I wonder if someone who goes blind later in life experiences things differently, possibly by automatically filling in what they assume they would see based on what they know of there surroundings from there other sences.

mey 12y ago
Have you considered a haptic device like the one in the article?
- jareds 12y ago
  No. I've found that a GPS on a smart phone works fairly well for me if it's an area I am generally familiar with.
hentrep 12y ago
I've always wondered how someone born blind is able to wrap their mind around the concept of color. It appears you've done so -- how would you describe color?
- Chinjut 12y ago
  Why should the concept of color be harder to wrap one's mind around or describe than the concept of sight itself? Or, considering any animal with any kind of sensory receptors other than those you yourself have, wrapping your mind around or describing the concept of the data produced by such receptors? [A bat's echolocatory sense, say, or magnetoception...] ["Oh, it's easy to understand the PHYSICS and BIOLOGY of color, but can the blind really comprehend the EXPERIENCE of color?", some might say. Alright, fine, shades of "What Mary Didn't Know", but I'm not keen to get into that.]
  - hentrep 12y ago
    I suppose what I was getting at is this: How do you explain what color is to a natively-blind person in a non-mathematical, non-physics based approach? In other words, the way most of the world learns about color (qualitatively). You can't use words like "shade" or "hue", because the very definition of those words are themselves tied to color. For example, attempt to describe a baseball. Descriptions invoking roundness and texture can be easily understood because the individual retains his/her sense of feel. But saying "it's white in color... white is actually the presence of all colors..." obviously doesn't work. I'd be curious to hear an example of how you would explain color to someone who has been blind for life.
    - dandelany 12y ago
      I've thought about this before, and concluded that the best analogy to draw would likely be that of sound pitch or timbre. When a sound is close to you, it seems louder. When it's far away, it seems quieter. But sounds have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - pitch being the most recognizable. And a sound's pitch changes how you perceive it unconsciously - that is, there is a "qualia" to hearing a low sound vs. a high sound that cannot really be explained. Similarly, visible objects which are close appear larger and those far away appear smaller. But visible objects have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - namely color. And an object's color also has a certain "qualia" that unconsciously affects how you feel about it. This has the added advantage of making it easy to explain Doppler shift vs. redshift :)
    - LeoPanthera 12y ago
      Assuming they can still hear, I would probably try to explain the colour of light to be analogous to the pitch of sound.
    - aliakbarkhan 12y ago
      Try looking into qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
    - jimmaswell 12y ago
- jareds 12y ago
  I don’t have any meaningful concept of color. I do have some light perception so assume that white is what I see if you shine a light in my eye, black is what I see when all the lights are turned off and gray is the middle ground when there are some lights turned on but not enough for the light to actually be painful. Intellectually I realize there are other colors but the only way I can explain them is in reference to objects. Grass is green, the ocean is blue, etc. I realize that this is meaningless since I don’t have a frame of reference to compare the ocean to grass from a visual perspective.
  - lisper 12y ago
    If you have some light perception, what happens if you shine different colors of light in your eye?
    - jareds 12y ago
      Nothing, it looks the same to me.
      - Rapzid 12y ago
        I suppose it is possible you're perceiving the light as a particular color, but if you can only perceive that color you would mistaken it for white?
        gohrt 12y ago
        I don't know what jareds's situation is, but normal humans have light sensors that are not color sensors, and also have color sensors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell
- marcosscriven 12y ago
  This reminds me of musicians, particularly those with perfect pitch, who talk of 'colours' of keys. While it's not a direct analogy, perhaps one way to think of colour, if you've never seen it before, is to think of different wavelengths of sounds being a bit like different wavelengths of light.
- furyofantares 12y ago
  I imagine a blind person can study light just as well as anyone else, and can learn about the eye and can understand that sighted people are able to detect both wavelength and intensity differences. Just like a deaf person could learn about pressure waves in the air and how they can be detected by functional ears. But it's probably difficult or impossible to understand what the perception is like, and how rich it is, except by analogy when thinking about how they'd try to describe the senses the do have to someone that doesn't have them. Our understanding of echolocation in bats or the magnetic field in birds is probably similar. We understand what they detect and how they detect it. But I don't think we have any understanding of what it's like to experience that perception.
  - jes5199 12y ago
    There's a classic essay by Thomas Nagel that makes this exact point in great detail: "What is it like to be a bat" http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
gliese1337 12y ago
I am not blind, but I do occasionally get migraines with visual auras, as do my wife & mother. Exactly once in my life that I recall, I had a migraine that caused total perceptual blindness (oddly, this has also happened exactly once to my wife, before we knew each other). It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't. Like what the back of your head looks like, as the article says. In the end, you literally see Nothing. It's truly bizarre[1]. It's not an experience I particularly want to repeat, but I'm kinda glad it happened just once, for the empathy value. It's not really something that can be effectively described if you haven't (not) seen it yourself; even now, I have trouble re-imagining the experience, 'cause my memory wants to fill in blackness or grayness or whatever. But at least in theory I now know exactly what the Nothing from _The Neverending Story_ (doesn't) look(s) like. :) [1] What makes it even more bizarre is that migraine blindness is a strictly neurological effect- there's no damage to your eyes or optic nerves- which means you can get temporary blindsight. In my wife's case, this meant she managed to walk a couple blocks home from a friend's house, crossing suburban streets and so forth, totally normally, while all the while convinced that she was completely blind. Which, as far as conscious perception goes, was the truth!
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't. This is the first time I've heard of anyone else experiencing this phenomenon besides myself. Have there ever been any long-term effects on you? Mine is slightly different. I don't have migranes, for one. Also, in addition to experiencing exactly what you described (minus the migrane), sometimes I experience the inverse: I can no longer see whatever I look at, but I retain peripheral vision. For example, if I were to look at the "o" in the word "for," I wouldn't be able to see the entire word. I could still read, with difficulty, until the effect became so strong that reading was impossible. (I still had peripheral vision, sort of, but eventually paragraphs became unseeable rather than individual words.) Whenever any of these things occurred, I was completely normal again within two hours. It was bizarre, and it's mystified myself and two eye doctors. It's only happened less than a dozen times, but it's been happening since I was very young, and my most recent was less than a year ago. The "blindness" was exactly as you describe: not a blackness, but a nothingness. Do you happen to have any more info about the condition? It's very elusive.
GabrielF00 12y ago
I've been blind in my left eye since birth and kids often asked me what I saw, assuming that it was just blackness. In my case if you shine a flashlight in my left eye at the right angle I can see a flash of color, but otherwise there's just no perception at all. It's probably worth clarifying what we mean by blind. The article and the parent comment are talking about having no light perception at all. However, many (I think most) people who are considered legally blind do have at least some light perception. The legal standard in the US is vision that can be corrected to at best 20/200 in the better eye.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I've heard it described that blind people see what we see out of our left eye when we only have our right eye open. It's not blackness, it's just no perception.
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    I've been struggling to comprehend what "nothingness" would look like, but I think this comment has helped. It's very hard to imagine pure blindness.
    - einhverfr 12y ago
      But that's a question of focus. If you close your one eye and ask "what do I see out of it" you get a different answer than if you don't ask the question.
      - seanp2k2 12y ago
        It's the difference between int(0), None, and undefined :)
      - Rapzid 12y ago
        Yeah, the brain just prioritizes the right eye. If you concentrate you can perceive the blackness in the left eye. That kinda leads me to wonder if eyes send a signal for black? If not and no signal is interpreted as black by the brain and your eyes are damaged then you would "see" black; even if you can't tell it because you have no point of reference?
einhverfr 12y ago
Also since blindness is a lack of sight as we know it, it is a very large category of phenomenon. Someone who goes temporarily blind from a blow to the head may experience something differently from someone with retinal damage. Someone who has never been able to see may experience things differently from someone who has recently suffered blindness as a result of injury or illness (and these themselves might have different experiences).
- jtheory 12y ago
  Right! I felt like no one was quite pointing this out. Your brain is expecting certain input in given situations, and you have layers and layers of habits based on those expectations. If you are accustomed to NOT having that input, you don't expect it. You don't fake it (imagining a black space of the size a visual field would be...), you just don't have it, and it's not a part of your interactions with the world. If the shape of your visual field changes suddenly -- you're about to pass out and you get "tunnel vision" -- it's obvious and startling. If it changes gradually, you don't even notice; you just start hitting your head on low beams more often, or bumping into table edges as you go by, until you adjust (this is from experience...).
V-2 12y ago
I once read about a blind guy who got his eyesight - thanks to a surgery - after a life-long blindness of about 30 years. He did see, but couldn't process visual information like a normal person (eg. he would only recognize a human face to be a human face after the person began talking)
- ygra 12y ago
  I wonder whether that changes over time. After all, people with eyesight have to learn that as well, I guess. They just do it at the beginning of their life.
  - V-2 12y ago
    Yes they learn, but the opportunity might be a one off for all we know. Not the same, but similar: According to the Nobel Prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in which to develop binocular vision, in which both eyes are used together. Their studies in cats, and many other studies since, suggest that if the developing brain isn’t exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes, it will never form the connections it needs to process a three dimensional scene See the entire article: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-wo...
agumonkey 12y ago
I am fascinated by the notion of color and tone. I suppose you're not deaf so you can feel tone (low and high pitch). I thought that these two 'abstraction' were conceptually the same and hardwired into our brain. But then there might be different roots for blindness and maybe childhood-blind people are having issues at that level (as opposed to eye / optic nerve level).

by jareds 12y ago

mey 12y ago

Have you considered a haptic device like the one in the article?

jareds 12y ago
No. I've found that a GPS on a smart phone works fairly well for me if it's an area I am generally familiar with.

hentrep 12y ago

I've always wondered how someone born blind is able to wrap their mind around the concept of color. It appears you've done so -- how would you describe color?

Chinjut 12y ago
Why should the concept of color be harder to wrap one's mind around or describe than the concept of sight itself? Or, considering any animal with any kind of sensory receptors other than those you yourself have, wrapping your mind around or describing the concept of the data produced by such receptors? [A bat's echolocatory sense, say, or magnetoception...] ["Oh, it's easy to understand the PHYSICS and BIOLOGY of color, but can the blind really comprehend the EXPERIENCE of color?", some might say. Alright, fine, shades of "What Mary Didn't Know", but I'm not keen to get into that.]
- hentrep 12y ago
  I suppose what I was getting at is this: How do you explain what color is to a natively-blind person in a non-mathematical, non-physics based approach? In other words, the way most of the world learns about color (qualitatively). You can't use words like "shade" or "hue", because the very definition of those words are themselves tied to color. For example, attempt to describe a baseball. Descriptions invoking roundness and texture can be easily understood because the individual retains his/her sense of feel. But saying "it's white in color... white is actually the presence of all colors..." obviously doesn't work. I'd be curious to hear an example of how you would explain color to someone who has been blind for life.
  - dandelany 12y ago
    I've thought about this before, and concluded that the best analogy to draw would likely be that of sound pitch or timbre. When a sound is close to you, it seems louder. When it's far away, it seems quieter. But sounds have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - pitch being the most recognizable. And a sound's pitch changes how you perceive it unconsciously - that is, there is a "qualia" to hearing a low sound vs. a high sound that cannot really be explained. Similarly, visible objects which are close appear larger and those far away appear smaller. But visible objects have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - namely color. And an object's color also has a certain "qualia" that unconsciously affects how you feel about it. This has the added advantage of making it easy to explain Doppler shift vs. redshift :)
  - LeoPanthera 12y ago
    Assuming they can still hear, I would probably try to explain the colour of light to be analogous to the pitch of sound.
  - aliakbarkhan 12y ago
    Try looking into qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
  - jimmaswell 12y ago
jareds 12y ago
I don’t have any meaningful concept of color. I do have some light perception so assume that white is what I see if you shine a light in my eye, black is what I see when all the lights are turned off and gray is the middle ground when there are some lights turned on but not enough for the light to actually be painful. Intellectually I realize there are other colors but the only way I can explain them is in reference to objects. Grass is green, the ocean is blue, etc. I realize that this is meaningless since I don’t have a frame of reference to compare the ocean to grass from a visual perspective.
- lisper 12y ago
  If you have some light perception, what happens if you shine different colors of light in your eye?
  - jareds 12y ago
    Nothing, it looks the same to me.
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      I suppose it is possible you're perceiving the light as a particular color, but if you can only perceive that color you would mistaken it for white?
      - gohrt 12y ago
        I don't know what jareds's situation is, but normal humans have light sensors that are not color sensors, and also have color sensors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell
marcosscriven 12y ago
This reminds me of musicians, particularly those with perfect pitch, who talk of 'colours' of keys. While it's not a direct analogy, perhaps one way to think of colour, if you've never seen it before, is to think of different wavelengths of sounds being a bit like different wavelengths of light.
furyofantares 12y ago
I imagine a blind person can study light just as well as anyone else, and can learn about the eye and can understand that sighted people are able to detect both wavelength and intensity differences. Just like a deaf person could learn about pressure waves in the air and how they can be detected by functional ears. But it's probably difficult or impossible to understand what the perception is like, and how rich it is, except by analogy when thinking about how they'd try to describe the senses the do have to someone that doesn't have them. Our understanding of echolocation in bats or the magnetic field in birds is probably similar. We understand what they detect and how they detect it. But I don't think we have any understanding of what it's like to experience that perception.
- jes5199 12y ago
  There's a classic essay by Thomas Nagel that makes this exact point in great detail: "What is it like to be a bat" http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

gliese1337 12y ago

I am not blind, but I do occasionally get migraines with visual auras, as do my wife & mother. Exactly once in my life that I recall, I had a migraine that caused total perceptual blindness (oddly, this has also happened exactly once to my wife, before we knew each other). It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't. Like what the back of your head looks like, as the article says. In the end, you literally see Nothing. It's truly bizarre[1]. It's not an experience I particularly want to repeat, but I'm kinda glad it happened just once, for the empathy value. It's not really something that can be effectively described if you haven't (not) seen it yourself; even now, I have trouble re-imagining the experience, 'cause my memory wants to fill in blackness or grayness or whatever. But at least in theory I now know exactly what the Nothing from _The Neverending Story_ (doesn't) look(s) like. :) [1] What makes it even more bizarre is that migraine blindness is a strictly neurological effect- there's no damage to your eyes or optic nerves- which means you can get temporary blindsight. In my wife's case, this meant she managed to walk a couple blocks home from a friend's house, crossing suburban streets and so forth, totally normally, while all the while convinced that she was completely blind. Which, as far as conscious perception goes, was the truth!

sillysaurus3 12y ago
It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't. This is the first time I've heard of anyone else experiencing this phenomenon besides myself. Have there ever been any long-term effects on you? Mine is slightly different. I don't have migranes, for one. Also, in addition to experiencing exactly what you described (minus the migrane), sometimes I experience the inverse: I can no longer see whatever I look at, but I retain peripheral vision. For example, if I were to look at the "o" in the word "for," I wouldn't be able to see the entire word. I could still read, with difficulty, until the effect became so strong that reading was impossible. (I still had peripheral vision, sort of, but eventually paragraphs became unseeable rather than individual words.) Whenever any of these things occurred, I was completely normal again within two hours. It was bizarre, and it's mystified myself and two eye doctors. It's only happened less than a dozen times, but it's been happening since I was very young, and my most recent was less than a year ago. The "blindness" was exactly as you describe: not a blackness, but a nothingness. Do you happen to have any more info about the condition? It's very elusive.

GabrielF00 12y ago

I've been blind in my left eye since birth and kids often asked me what I saw, assuming that it was just blackness. In my case if you shine a flashlight in my left eye at the right angle I can see a flash of color, but otherwise there's just no perception at all. It's probably worth clarifying what we mean by blind. The article and the parent comment are talking about having no light perception at all. However, many (I think most) people who are considered legally blind do have at least some light perception. The legal standard in the US is vision that can be corrected to at best 20/200 in the better eye.

StavrosK 12y ago
I've heard it described that blind people see what we see out of our left eye when we only have our right eye open. It's not blackness, it's just no perception.
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  I've been struggling to comprehend what "nothingness" would look like, but I think this comment has helped. It's very hard to imagine pure blindness.
  - einhverfr 12y ago
    But that's a question of focus. If you close your one eye and ask "what do I see out of it" you get a different answer than if you don't ask the question.
    - seanp2k2 12y ago
      It's the difference between int(0), None, and undefined :)
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      Yeah, the brain just prioritizes the right eye. If you concentrate you can perceive the blackness in the left eye. That kinda leads me to wonder if eyes send a signal for black? If not and no signal is interpreted as black by the brain and your eyes are damaged then you would "see" black; even if you can't tell it because you have no point of reference?

einhverfr 12y ago

Also since blindness is a lack of sight as we know it, it is a very large category of phenomenon. Someone who goes temporarily blind from a blow to the head may experience something differently from someone with retinal damage. Someone who has never been able to see may experience things differently from someone who has recently suffered blindness as a result of injury or illness (and these themselves might have different experiences).

jtheory 12y ago
Right! I felt like no one was quite pointing this out. Your brain is expecting certain input in given situations, and you have layers and layers of habits based on those expectations. If you are accustomed to NOT having that input, you don't expect it. You don't fake it (imagining a black space of the size a visual field would be...), you just don't have it, and it's not a part of your interactions with the world. If the shape of your visual field changes suddenly -- you're about to pass out and you get "tunnel vision" -- it's obvious and startling. If it changes gradually, you don't even notice; you just start hitting your head on low beams more often, or bumping into table edges as you go by, until you adjust (this is from experience...).

V-2 12y ago

I once read about a blind guy who got his eyesight - thanks to a surgery - after a life-long blindness of about 30 years. He did see, but couldn't process visual information like a normal person (eg. he would only recognize a human face to be a human face after the person began talking)

ygra 12y ago
I wonder whether that changes over time. After all, people with eyesight have to learn that as well, I guess. They just do it at the beginning of their life.
- V-2 12y ago
  Yes they learn, but the opportunity might be a one off for all we know. Not the same, but similar: According to the Nobel Prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in which to develop binocular vision, in which both eyes are used together. Their studies in cats, and many other studies since, suggest that if the developing brain isn’t exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes, it will never form the connections it needs to process a three dimensional scene See the entire article: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-wo...

agumonkey 12y ago

I am fascinated by the notion of color and tone. I suppose you're not deaf so you can feel tone (low and high pitch). I thought that these two 'abstraction' were conceptually the same and hardwired into our brain. But then there might be different roots for blindness and maybe childhood-blind people are having issues at that level (as opposed to eye / optic nerve level).