This is a true story featured in a rather well-known book about a man who lost his sight around the age of three and regained it around the age of forty. He could perceive light and theoretically had adequate vision, but because the very act of "seeing" was completely new to him (his memories from around age three were long gone), he had no idea what the things in front of him actually were. To him, it was just a flood of light. He couldn't grasp distance, nor could he focus his eyes anywhere. In the end, it was easier for him to just walk with a cane. Since the glare was painful, he ended up wearing sunglasses. As years passed, he grew somewhat used to it and could read text a little (at about a kindergartener's pace), but he still couldn't walk alone without a cane. Over those forty years, parts of his brain other than the optic nerves had developed too much, so his brain simply couldn't adapt. Amidst all this, his eye condition relapsed or something similar, and he ultimately went blind once again.
I've heard about this—the struggles of blind people whose vision is suddenly restored. A blind father had surgery to regain his sight, and his young daughter said, "I want to go to the zoo together." The daughter wanted her father to see a big elephant, but since the father had never seen an elephant before, he couldn't form an image of one. If he touched a toy elephant, he could say, "This is an elephant toy," but he couldn't connect it to the real thing. To avoid disappointing his daughter's expectations before going to the zoo, the father tried to drill it into his head beforehand using pictures and photos of elephants. However, on the day of the visit, the father still couldn't recognize the elephant when he stood in front of its enclosure. It seemed he still didn't have a concept of scale. Even when his daughter told him, "Daddy, that's the elephant," it only confused him more. People talk about barrier-free accessibility, but there's just no helping those fundamental differences.
Comments (-)