Blindness In The Mind's Eye By Oliver Sacks

Does your brain represent you?

If one’s brain has being taken out from one’s body and being graft to another body. The brain is unscathed and active under careful measurements. It is the same brain with the same function, same memory. Can that body with the brain be define as the same person? In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver sacks explores how human brains reallocated sensory system to recall and recreate the world after eyesight has being deprived. When the real world is no longer visible. Two categories of blindness appear: deep blindness and visual blindness. If someone is deep blindness, he or she went completed blind. His or her brain cannot create images for one to “see”. Visual blindness, however, allows the person to “see” hypothetically

via their memories and imaginations. The brain can reorganize one’s memories and recreate images and visual sense with no perceived through senses. That action is most being called “imagination”. Things one’s brain creates come from one’s experience. Although the brain seems to create things by an unexpected new way, those creations all come from the person’s experiences. Those experiences do not have to be sensory, but all kinds of experiences includes languages and minds What the brain dose not push you any further from being your author of your experience. Being author of one’s experience refers to experience what ever the person wants to feel without being limited. Blindness or deafness will not limit someone from feeling what they wanted to feel because, the brain make those changes based on what the person has already experienced. Even if the brain reallocates in order to accommodate sensory trauma, it does not necessarily mean that the brain has took the person’s position over as an author of his or her own experience

Becoming blindness or deafness will not limit anyone from experiencing their life because the brain would “reallocated” the sensory system and improve other sensory, such as touch, smell, taste due to lacks of one sensory.

The brain can do more than what people thought it can do. The brain reallocates in order to accommodate sensory trauma. All other sensory, includes hearing, touch, feeling, smell, taste and even intuition, will “transformed” into visual images. Blind people seems to be unable to “see” things, however, in Zoltan’s mind, “he had been able to construct a virtual visual world that seemed as real and intense to him as the perceptual one he had lost (332). He has not been limited by losing his sight, on the contrast, he felt he has expanded a new way of thinking. He could touch and feel the shapes and contours, which enable him to delineate an image in his mind. Also, he could feel height, temperature, humidity and texture which can provide him a better sense of the surrounding environment and the feature of the thing he is touching than simple look at it. Although, blind people may not read, but they can still gain information by hearing from others. Descriptions through other’s languages not only provide a better sense understanding of things he need to see and others’ mind. The oral languages “transformed” into “eyes” for blind people to “see” not only physical things, but also for people’s mind. Without visually seeing things, imagination in brains help

blind people to experience their life freely. Due to imagenations, blind people can experience a world that is as compete as the real one. He can still feel and “see” things as much as he wants and even experience his life in a new way. Therefore, losing sight does not distance him from being author of his own experiences. The situation appears on people who lose other sensory, such as hearing. Due to latent intersensory connections, the brain can reorganize cortical circuitry and transform other inputs into sounds. The sounds may not be heard by anyone For example, Amy, who had been totally deaf since nine-years-old, “still constructed the sound of speech in her mind” (336). She “hears” by reading lips and transform it into sounds in her mind. Thanks for the transform processing by the brain, people can still experience their life as much as possible after suffer a sensory trauma.
Even if human brain is flexible and it can find a new way of experiencing his or her life does not necessarily mean that the person cannot control his or her experiences, because one’s imaginations come from inputs the person received.

Images in people’s brain would be something that is being reorganized based on their memories. Moreover, the imaginations they have is also be relevant to their earlier experiences. “[Dennis] see myself visually-but it is as I last law [himself], when [Dennis] was thirteen……[Dennis] see the Braille notes visually-they are visual images, not tactile” (336). The person went blindness after the ago thirteen, therefore he “see” himself base on his latest visual memory. The changes of brain in order to deal with challenges of losing sight does not create some fancy images in his mind with no evidence or reasons. The brain does not go too far from the real world, but organize inputs and create an images in people’s mind based on those inputs. Inputs includes one’s experience, memory and sensory inputs such as touch. Dennis “see notes visually” based on inputs from touching, then the brain transforms feelings into visual images. Another person who become blind at the age of fifteen wrote “I still ‘see’ objects in front of me. As I typing now I can see my hands on the keyboard” (331). She may use her memory of keyboard and touch as inputs which allow the brain to imagine and create images. Therefore, imaginations in one’s brain do not come for no

reason, it being created based on inputs the brain has. The brain does not have the ability to “write” one’s life story, but it can only organize those inputs and provide a new way of reading one’s life stories. The person who experiences his or her life is the one who supply those inputs, such as touch, small, hearing, taste and memory. The person has full control to explore their life, rather than the brain.
All in all, in order to suffer the challenge of disabled, the brain is flexible. The brain can reallocate, reorganize sensory system and create the sensory sense that the person has lost. However, to any extent, the person is the author of his or her experience, because sensory trauma does not limit the person to experience his or her life in any ways. Actually, creation the brain brings may expand more ways of experiencing life than one has before. Also, since the imagination has been created based on one’s earlier memory and sensory inputs, the brain can never be the “author” of one’s experience. Rather, the brain is more likely to be a processor of a person or a CPU of a computer. The brain process inputs that the person received and putted into the “computer”. The “CPU” can never decides what to put in, it can only receive and process. Indeed, “process” the brain can do is all rely on the person, who can decide what part of his of her life to be put into the brain and what to be ignored. The person is the one to experience his or her life and to write his or her life stories.