Slashdot Mirror
Man Learns To See Again After 40 Years Of Blindness
MonTemplar writes "BBC News Online reports the story of Mike May, from California, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other at the age of three after an accident. Now, doctors have been able to restore the sight to his remaining eye by transplanting corneal and limbal stem cells. The operation, and their subsequent work with Mr May to monitor his recovery, in an attempt to better understand how the brain learns to interpret the signals from the eyes, have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Ironically, being able to see again has meant Mr May has had to re-learn some activities, such as skiing or crossing the road, where he had become proficient when blind."
His 3D perception and face and object recognition was still severely impaired. Mr May could only identify around a quarter of common objects shown to him. And he was also only able to tell if an unfamiliar face was male or female 70% of the time.
I thought this was really interesting. We tend to take so many things for granted. There must be millions of objects that he is very familiar with by touch and sound, but he's never had the chance to see what they look like. It must take a really long time to learn what everything looks like.
Reading this story, I feel very grateful that I can tell the difference between men and women (with a few exceptions).
Blind people even read Slashdot...
It's not so much "more acute" as "you learn to pay more attention".
If you're a sailor, you pay more attention to water currents, and exactly what the waves look like today. You learn that if there's 2 patterns of waves crossing like this, it means one thing, but if they're crossing like that it means another. No additional sensory ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as being able to look at the water, and know there's a storm coming...
If you happen to be a farmer or hunter, you learn there's a lot more in the sky than what the average city dweller thinks about. You'll learn to expect where the moon/planets/etc are any given time of night/year. Again, no ability needed, just experience and learning. It just manifests as knowing that the haze around the moon means something specific in the weather is coming...
Don't believe me? Next time you're a passenger in a car, roll down the window and LISTEN carefully - different things going by will sound different. Trust me - you can hear curb cuts and drains as you go by, if you're paying attention.
But if a blind person manages to pay attention to such things (mostly because they know they can possibly end up as roadkill if they don't), people for some reason conclude their hearing is "enhanced".
It's not enhanced, most people just don't pay attention, that's all.