Interpretive analysis of textual and contextual meaning

Sacks observes that perception and visual sight are related and, if such is the case, then we all 'see' in a certain way even though we may not literally see. Since perception and sight is related this explains how language can enable us to 'see' and communicate with the other even though we are not demonstratively seeing or literally looking at the stimuli in question. We are mentally visualizing them with 'our mind's eye'. Such being the case, this also explains why blind people can, frequently, describe objects and phenomena to a far more glaring and vivid description than sightful people can. They are not distracted by extraneous details. Rather, they absorb them in their' mind's eye' deliberate on them and deliver their final rendition. The result is a vivid and often intensely accurate similitude of the original. The fascinating conclusion of Sack's essay is that so-called blind people may actually be more sightful than sighted individuals themselves. Blind people are often encouraged to transfer their abilities to strengthening their other capacities (and thus to seeing that way). This may, however, be misleading. Blind people have often retained a great deal of their original sight and can still see in an internal way. This continues to serve them, and should likely be the talent that should be focused on. Lastly, each blind person, as does each individual in real life, sees in a different way. We are idiosyncratic and unique in our mental and physical visualization. Conclusions can never be drawn, but the visually impaired are more visually enhanced than we take them to be. They may be more visually enhanced than the sightful. They see in 'their mind's eye'.

Sack's experience: vision=perception

A renowned neurologist, Sacks was perplexed to find that the experience of the visually impaired differed to that which he believed it to be. It is commonly thought that vision enables one to see and that once vision is lost, the blind are impaired for life (unless vision is restored by surgery) and have to accept their impediment compensating by focusing on their other capabilities.

Sacks was, however, astonished to discover that not only did blind people reiterately tell him that they were able to see but, frequently, descriptions of their perceptions showed him that they saw as clearly as before and sometimes more vividly and graphically than did sighted people.

An example that Sacks gives is that of Prescott's "Conquest of Peru" and "Conquest of Mexico." Reading those when young, Sacks felt that he himself had visited those lands due to the author's "Intensely visual, almost hallucinogenic descriptions" (239). Years later, he was astonished to discover that not only had the author himself never visited those lands but that he had been virtually blind since the age of eighteen.

A clinical case of perception that lingers even after sight has been lost comes from the 1978 story of patients who could not see to their left side:

When they were asked to imagine themselves walking down a familiar street and describe what they saw, they mentioned only the shops on the right side of the street; but when they were then asked to imagine turning around and walking back, they described the shops they had not 'seen' before, the shops that were now ion the right side (p.228)

Equally as interesting is the clinical case of 1911 that reported that English neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes found blind spots within patients' visual field that exactly corresponded to the same blind spots "in exactly the same locations" (229) in the patients' mental imagery as well.

On the basis of this and similar instances, Sacks concluded that seeing is related to perception. The two are intimately connected. The blind person may have lost his vision; but his perception remains. And because the blind person ruminated over and again on his perception until he internalized it in his 'mind's eye', he has a clear picture of the target stimuli than a fully-sighted person may have had. Paradoxically, therefore, blind people may be more sighted than sighted individuals.

Sack's experience: we all see differently

Visual people import and translate stimuli according to their particular experiences. This provides each with a different context and each individual interprets the stimuli in a different way. People are apt to think of 'blind' people' as someone who has utterly lost his capacity of vision. The nomer has made its way into various analogies. For instance, we say that someone is 'blind' to reality or 'blindly' in love. What we mean by this and similar saying is that the person's vision is utterly colluded in a certain aspect so that he or she simply cannot see that which others can see so clearly. The image has disappeared. It is as though it does not exist.

Sacks shows that this is not the case. Not only can the blind still see -- and sometimes see better than us -- but they can also see in their own idiosyncratic way - i.e. sight differs in its manifestation from one to the other -- just as it does amongst sighted people.

I had now read four memoirs, all strikingly different in their depictions of the visual experience of blinded people: Hull with his acquiescent descent into 'deep blindness"; Torey with his "compulsive visualization' and meticulous construction of an internal visual world; Tenebrken with her impulsive, almost novelistic visual freedom… and Lusseryan, who identified herself as one of the 'visual blind'. Was there any such thing, I wondered, as a typical blind experience? (p.216)

The visual experience of the blind differs just as much as the visual experience of the sighted individual does.

Sack's experience: The 'mind's eye' may actually be a better way of Seeing

Sack does not say so explicitly, but his experiences leads me to conclude that blind people are actually at a greater advantage than sighted people due to their necessity of having to 'go into themselves' and internalize the image in their mind. Sighted people are often distracted by extraneous superficialities which impede them from seeing clearly. There is, for instance, the 1999 well-known psychological experiment of the group of people who did not see the woman dressed as a gorilla who passed amongst them. The perpetrators, cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated that people are duped by selective attention.

In the same way, people are often misled by their emotions or prejudices (for example) to perceive a situation, an object, or a person in a certain way. Emotions color our perceptions and often distort them to the extent that sometimes we 'see' things that have never occurred or fail to see things that actually do occur. The phenomena of 'false memory' where myriads of people falsely accused educators and parents of incest in the 1980s was a case in kind. Elizabeth Loftus in fact conducted numerous experiments that showed that memory is often misleading and that we frequently claim to have seen things that never occurred.

Taking all this in mind, the blind may actually be more sighted than we since they are enabled to see the phenomena as it is in its pure pristine essence. They replay this intrinsic essence in their mind. They are not distracted by extraneous substances and that which they really are, consequently, more correspondents to reality than the image that the sighted person may have had of reality.