Virgil

Do we see with our eyes?

If our brains never grasped the concepts of volume, depth, shape, distance, height and context, would we be living in a huge flat picture? And if we were, then what would photos be?

bits I picked of:
To See and Not To See
by Oliver Sacks
The New Yorker (like a hundred yrs ago)

...who told me about his daughter's fiance, a fifty-year-old man named Virgil, who had been virtually blind since early childhood.
Forward to a surgery that enables him to see with his right eye.

"Virgil can SEE!... entire office in tears, first time Virgil has sight for forty years..."
But the following day she (his fiance, Amy) remarks, "Trying to adjust to being sighted, tough to go from blindness to sighted. Has to think faster, not able to trust vision yet...Like baby just learning to see, everything new, exciting, scary, unsure of what seeing means." (and no, she doesnt' speak in note form:) this is from her diary.)

So what would vision be like in such a patient? Would it be "normal" from the moment vision was restored? This is the commonsensical notion- that the eyes will be opened, the scales will fall from them, and (in the words of the New Testament, and why nit the old, freg mir nit, I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere too) the blind man will "receive" sight.

But could it be that simple? Was not experience necessary to see? Did one not have to learn to see? ... the bandage on his eye was finally removed, and Virgil's eye was finally exposed, without cover, to the world. The moment of truth had finally come.

Or had it? The truth of the matter was infinitely stranger. The dramatic moment stayed vacant, grew longer, sagged. No cry, "I CAN SEE!" burst from Virgil's lips. He seemed to be staring blankly at the surgeon, who stood before him, still holding the bandages. Only when the surgeon spoke- saying "Well?"- did a look of recognition cross Virgil's face.

Virgil later said that int his first moment he had no idea what he was seeing. There was light, there was movement, there was color, all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur. Then out of the blur came a voice that said, "Well?" Then, and only then, he said, did he finally realize that this chaos of light and shadow was a face- and the face of his surgeon.

When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make the world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection. But when Virgil opened his eye, after being blind for 45 years- having little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten- there were no visual memories to support a perception, there was no world of experience and meaning awaiting him. He saw, but what he saw had no coherence.

And blah blah blah, it goes on for 20 more pages, giving examples and little stories...and he ends up losing his sight at the end. wala! how's that for a spoiler?!:)

I love school. I love to learn. I love to know.
and duh, I love to spoil good stories:-p