Do the blind understand what the sighted see?

Being an out-outspoken visually impaired blogger and author has one annoying side effect. I get asked the darnedest questions. 

The latest one was this zinger, "How do blind people know they are blind?" Taken at face value it's ridiculous and my first inclination was to give it a flippant, humorous reply that would put the assumption that blind people are stupid in it's place. But the inquirer followed up with a bit of explanation and I saw a deeper question in the botched phrasing.

How do little blind children know they are different from sighted children? How do blind people know about what sighted people experience through sight? Those aren’t such silly questions, so I let them have it.

When I was a baby and they found out that I was almost entirely blind, my parents decided that they would act like it wasn’t true or at the very least didn’t matter. We lived on 20 acres in remote, rural mountains in Oregon. We built our own cabin, grew a lot of our own food and rode long distances to a small school on yellow buses that made it up the gravel road most of the year.

Creative Commons image by Neticola Sny

I had two rambunctious brothers and my dad was always building something. There were hand tools, boards and debris scattered all around the cabin and beyond that there were the woods and the rocky high prairie. Many days in our middle childhood, we spent the whole day outside and didn’t come back until evening. We’d eat miner’s lettuce and camus roots or sit down under a pastured cow and drink milk right out of the udder.

I don’t remember realizing that my eyes were different. It seems like it was a fact that was always there. I could see some but very little. I ran after my brothers. I was a loud, complaining child and I was always yelling, “Wait for me.” They didn’t. I learned to keep up.

I don’t know when or how but I discovered that if I picked up pebbles and threw them ahead of me, I could run faster and avoid most scrapes. There were irrigation ditches in the lower areas that my brothers would jump across and run on without slowing down. I threw my pebbles, listened for how far I had to throw before they stopped dropping into the bottom of the ditch and then I jumped too.

I was slower sometimes. But not on a bike. I could see enough to make out the basic contours of the road and our gravel road was so rarely frequented that a car came along once in a few hours. And when one did, my brothers and I would not only scramble to the side but well off of the road, skittish as the deer.

So I had a bike, just like my brothers. One brother is two years older than me and one is four years younger. My older brother once rode his bike five miles to the tiny down of Summerville, population 250. I copied him the next day, insistent that he wouldn’t outdo me.

Then a few months later, I decided I would ride ten miles to the town of Imbler which was bigger. My brother laughed. But I got up in the morning and packed water and food. That was one of the first times I remember my mother showing any concern about what I did from a safety standpoint. She wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea but didn’t seem to forbid it. My older brother jumped up from his place by the woodpile and grabbed his bike and rode off fast. I scrambled onto my bike and followed. He wasn’t going to beat me. We eventually agreed to cross the city-limits line together.

I wore huge thick, coke-bottle-bottom glasses to slightly improve my vision. Think of it this way: without the glasses I saw about five percent of what most people see. With them it was closer to eight or ten percent. My family obviously didn’t have much money and the glasses were worth an entire month’s income.

I lost them, of course. I hated the glasses for one thing. As a toddler I threw them away willfully. Later I lost them a couple of times because i put them down. The glasses were so heavy they carved red sores into my face. But by the time I was old enough to remember, I knew I had to have them and I didn’t resent them.

Whenever my family rode in a car, they were constantly pointing out deer, hawks and eagles as we drove along the country roads. I listened from the time I was a baby and there must have come a time when I realized that they were seeing things I wasn’t. I wanted to see those things too but there was never a moment when I asked to see.

Sometimes my mom tried to describe something like that to me, but I knew what a deer and an eagle looked like. I could see them up close in picture books. Of course, what I saw even there was indistinct and lacking in detail. I just didn’t know it.

I remember one conversation in the car in particular. My mother was talking about the new leaves on a tree with my older brother. I think they were discussing whether or not the leaves were healthy. This was at some small distance. I could see only fuzzy green blobs on the sides of the road where the trees were. I imagined that my family could see those blobs better. They could see their exact shapes and maybe some branches in them, like I could in a picture book. But I stopped my mom in the middle of the conversation and demanded that she not jump to conclusions about the health of the tree unless she examined it close up.

“You can’t possibly see the individual leaves, let alone what spots are on them,” I said.

There was silence for a moment. And then she told me somewhat sternly, somewhat in awe, that in fact she could. She said she saw each leaf, individually, etched against the background, each twig, each blade of grass. I thought about that for a long time afterwards. I couldn’t imagine. It seemed like it would hurt to have to absorb that much detail. The image i tried to imagine was so sharp it was painful.

I knew about blurry and sharp because I had the glasses. When I took my glasses off the world looked blurry. When I put them on the world looked sharp and clear and brand new. I was still seeing a world that was blurred beyond recognition for sighted people. If a sighted person suddenly saw what I see even with the best correction, it is unlikely they could walk even a few steps. It would be blurry, disorienting, distorted and lacking in all depth perception.

But to me, that was the best and clearest image I could imagine. I asked my parents how things could be clearer. They said they just are and that what I saw was actually still blurry.

I didn’t entirely believe them until I was nine years old. That was the year I first tried on contact lenses. Because they were closer to my retina the contact lenses could correct my vision a little bit more. I will never forget the moment I first blinked my eyes open in a doctor’s office and looked at the opposite wall. I had been to that office countless times during my childhood. My parents may not have wanted to pay much attention to my vision impairment, but they didn’t neglect my care.

I knew that wall all too well. It was green. Or it was supposed to be green, a kind of muddy, unpleasant green. But when I blinked my eyes open with the contact lenses in I saw for the first time that the green wall was actually a much brighter green. The muddy impression I got was caused by the fact that there were thin orange and purple stripes on the wallpaper. I had always seen it as one muddy color.

In that moment, I knew my mom was telling the truth.

Therefore, if there was ever one single moment when I realized how different my vision was all at once it was probably then. I got the contact lenses and could see a tiny bit better. Again the world seemed ultra crisp to me. Only going back to my old glasses at times made me realize that what I had thought was clear before had not been.

Creative Commons image by Mike Behnken

The older I got the more I realized how much other people could see that I couldn’t. They saw the blackboard at school and every detail on it. They saw details on people’s faces that allowed them to tell instantly which person was which, even if the people were the same height and gender and had about the same kind of hair. I could never see the details of faces and had a hard time understanding how people could recognize others so quickly and easily.

Later as an adult, I read about the special, neurological functions of the human brain, in which the exact specifications of human faces are prioritized so much that sighted people can tell minute differences not only individual to individual but in the same individual, the tiniest flicker of emotions or thoughts crossing a face.

I memorize who is who by painstakingly adding up what details I can get and cataloging them, like this: short, thin lady with the bouncy blond hair who has a tinkling laugh = Jane. Sighted people remember dozens of faces in that amount of time with their facial-recognition priority function. 

This isn’t just sight, it is specially enhanced sight made possible by the adaptations of our brains. Human touch and human voices are important to the brain, but there is nothing apparently with quite the power of eye contact. Looking into another person’s eyes is, according to science, profoundly important to humans. It supports social, psychological and neurological development.

Studies have documented the huge health problems experienced by babies in institutions, who do not receive enough human contact and no single, secure bond with a special caretaker. And one of the most important treatments for these problems is eye contact.

I have never known real eye contact, not the kind that imparts all those neurological benefits. My brain had to make do with the human touch and voice inputs, which can be enough if a child does grow up in a loving family. But not having known about eye contact from an early age, I did not behave “correctly” around sighted people. I didn’t look at people while they talked when I was a teenager. I would study my hands or stare off while listening.

No one really understood this or realized the difference. They just felt that I was rude and aloof. Those words were used a lot about me, though I was anything but aloof and desperately eager to please others. It was only when specialized teachers explained eye contact to me and trained me to try to aim my eyes at their eyes and pretend to make eye contact that things improved.

The exercise in faked eye contact is still exhausting for me because my eyes move erratically and it takes a lot of effort for me to get them to hold still and try to look like I am making eye contact. But like any other social courtesy it is worth doing, to show respect to the person I am talking to and to avoid conflicts.

Now after many years of study, I have a better idea of what normal sight is probably like. I have pressed my face close to video screens and watched expressions cross the faces of actors. I probably can’t see every detail, but I can have some idea of what other people’s expressions look like. I can see distant natural features and animals that I would otherwise not know in the same way--by looking close at photographs and using a magnifying glass. It isn’t the same of course. But there isn’t much else I feel the lack of.

I have experienced some amazingly beautiful sights and scenes in my life. Once as a young adult I had the opportunity to travel alone in Nepal. I went high up in the foothills of the Himalayas to a remote mountain-top village to deliver a letter from a Nepali friend to his wife and children.

I was still very good at navigating natural environments, camping out alone and all that, given that I grew up doing it. I slept outside the cabin of my friend’s family in my sleeping bag and in the morning I went out to the edge of a massive cliff to take in the sunrise and cook a cup of hot chocolate over my tiny alcohol-tab stove.

Before dawn the whole world was silver and blue. I could make out hazy ridge lines in front of me, jagged streaks of indigo against the silver, tapering down to the rose tinted mist above the plains of India to the south. To the north there were shining white peaks against an azure sky.

Then shivering streaks of gold, peach and pink began tracing out from the east like a painter’s brush bleeding into fabric. I watched in awe as the sun, emerged onto the horizon, like a jewel rising out of viscous honey. The light from it truly seemed to pour like slow liquid. Gold, rose and peach splashed over the ridges, turning the indigo lines to flame. The valleys and canyons were still dark and the mist that curled up out of them shown with color and light.

I am sure there are many details I missed. I missed the birds soaring in the canyon below me. I missed the leaves on the vines growing on the cliffs. I missed the detailed sparkling contours of the Himalayan peaks far to the north, that I could barely make out as white shining gods.

But what I saw was no less beautiful. And combined with what I heard and felt and tasted and smelled in that little village in a time and place in history when there were still little villages built with stone and branches with no electricity and no mail service… well, I experienced plenty.

I felt the rough grain of the wood under my hands, investigated the geology of the rocks, listened as the children taught me Nepali from their tattered school notebooks, ate the meager rice and lentils of the village, spiced with both sharp hunger and whatever the mothers put in it. And I never wanted for more.

I knew that I was visually impaired the way anyone knows their basic characteristics. You know your arms and legs and hair and senses. You learn your body, particularly if you live a physical and rugged life as a child. Later the tests of doctors told me exactly how different my eyes are. That is something no one could know without science and measurement. I had the good fortune of not knowing for the first several years of my life how the world would view me as different and lesser because of this minor physical difference.

Because my parents chose not to pay much attention to it, I gained an active, healthy body and great mobility skills and I lost a lot of early understanding of the social cues I was missing. It was a blessing and a curse. My mother now often regrets not paying more attention, not realizing how different the social experience of a blind person is, the lack of recognizing faces and expressions, the lack of eye contact.

And I agree that if I had the raising of a blind child, I would talk about that. I would train them in social courtesy and try to bring those key experiences in. But I would also let that child run wild too, as much as any child gets that these days.

I would never let understanding sight or what part of it was lost become a major topic or obsession. Because it is just one thing, one piece of life experience. And the others can and do make up for it more than society believes.