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."

Comments

learning to recognize objects by sight

[amcnabb]

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).