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Significance of blindness
Consequences of blindness
Consequences of blindness
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The family and medical staff who attended Vincent, blinded since childhood by thick cataracts, had high hopes that, for the first time in nearly 45 years, he would be able to see following a surgery to remove the cataracts. When the bandages came off, Vincent saw colors, movement and shape. He even saw details and isolated features of objects. What he could not do, to their dismay, was to make sense of what he saw: he could not form coherent perceptions of objects in his world from the parts and features, and he had no sense of space, depth, or distance. (1)
That Vincent could perceive color, motion and shape directly following surgery is not surprising, given that the eye comes equipped to transduce signals relating to color, motion and shape. (2)These signals leave the eye, converging and diverging along neural pathways to other visual processing centers in the brain. (3) Eventually, many end up at the occipto-temporal region, which is specialized for object recognition, and the posterior parietal area, which is specialized for spatial perception. Interestingly, Vincent's pattern of impairment seems to roughly correspond to these "what" and "where" processes in the brain. (8) What interests me mainly is the failure of Vincent's "what" process, his inability to organize the various percepts into meaningful, whole representations. (4)
Early in the 20th century, Gestalt psychologists explored how organization governs perception by grouping parts into coherent wholes. They discovered laws of grouping, including similarity, proximity, good continuation, and closure. (5) From his pattern of visual perceptive deficits, it appears that Vincent's brain does not group visual input into wholes according to the Gestalt principles. The visual stimulus remains fragmented, disorganized. If there is a center in the brain for perceiving objects (like the "what center"), is it somehow related to the Gestalt-like integration of objects into wholes? And if so, how does that mechanism work, and why does it not seem to work for Vincent?
Unfortunately, although the Gestalt principles did predict with great accuracy how objects tend to be perceptually grouped as wholes, it was mainly a descriptive theory. It didn't try to link the observed regularities with biological substrates or explain how the phenomena arose. It could be that the brain comes equipped with Gestalt-like mechanisms (such as a bias to group pieces into a whole based on how much relative space is between the pieces - the principle of "proximity").
Another speaker, Margaret Livingstone delves into the visual aspect of our senses. Livingstone mentions how artists recognize things about vision that neuroscientists are not privy to until years later. Livingstone discussed the differentiation between color and lightness, and how the two contribute differently to a work of art. Color is thought of as “comparing activity” whereas light is thought of as “summing them.” Livingstone indicates that the visual system is subdivided into a ventral system and a dorsal system.
Within Oliver Sacks, “To See and Not See”, the reader is introduced to Virgil, a blind man who gains the ability to see, but then decides to go back to being blind. Within this story Sacks considers Virgil fortunate due to him being able to go back to the life he once lived. This is contrasted by Dr. P, in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat”, Sacks states that his condition is “tragic” (Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (13) due to the fact that his life will be forever altered by his condition. This thought process can be contributed to the ideas that: it is difficult to link physical objects and conceptualized meanings without prior experience, the cultures surrounding both individuals are different, and how they will carry on with their lives.
By becoming close with Robert, the man in this story experienced what was necessary to gain an understanding of what life is like for the blind. The man began to draw the cathedral to try and help Robert visualize what one looked like. What he didn't realize at the time was that Robert was helping him to visualize what blindness felt like. Bibliography: Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral".
Levine states that children have two ways in which they organize the information they receive from the world around them. He refers to these methods as sequential ordering and spatial ordering. He defines spatial patterns as, “assembled parts that occupy space and settle on the doorsteps of our minds all at once” (Levine, p.151). Many examples are given of when spatial ordering is prevalent, for instance, when a student draws a map or recognizes the features of a person’s face. Levine defines sequential patterns as information gaining “admission to the minds one bit at a time and in an order that’s meant not to be missed” (Levine, p.151). He says that sequential ordering is used when students try to master a science project or learn a telephone number. Neurologically, Levine states that sequential ordering is carried out on the left side of the brain and spatial ordering is carried out on the right side of the brain. He also makes references to the possibility of childr...
In the short story Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, there is a direct contrast between a blind man named Robert, and the narrator. The narrator has full use of his senses, and yet he is limited to the way he sees things, and the way he thinks. Robert however, has a very different outlook on life and how he sees things, as well as the use of his senses. At the end of the story, Robert has the narrator close his eyes to try and get him to experience the world the way he does. The narrator ends up being able to not only see the way Robert does, but he also is able to feel the world in a completely different way. The author suggests that the mind is most important in how people view things, and the judgements we make are based on what we see in our heads, instead of what is really there.
prove to be blind when it comes to the world they are in. By looking
In Raymond Carver?s ?Cathedral?, the conventional ideas often associated with blindness and sight are challenged. By juxtaposing his two male characters, Carver is able to effectively explore sight and its seemingly simplistic relationship with learning and knowledge. As well, he addresses the barriers imposed by the human tendency to rely on vision as the sole means of experiencing the world.
Many people wonder what it would be like if they were to be invisible; stealthily walking around, eavesdropping on conversations, and living as if nothing is of their concern. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, is centred on an unnamed fictional character who believes himself to be, indeed, invisible to the rest of the world. He is not invisible in the physical sense, but socially and intellectually. As the book develops, readers are able to experience an authentic recollection of what life is as a black man living in a white man’s world. This man wants to achieve so much, but is severely limited by the colour of his skin. This novel, which has become a classic, addresses the themes of blindness in fighting stereotypes and predestined roles, lack of economic and social powers, and dealing with bondages.
Modern psychology’s gestalt principles identify this tendency with laws developed after much observation and experimentation with perception. A principle of gestalt’s organization that is important to understanding how we perceive the world around us is the Law of Pragnanz. This Gestalt principle describes how our brains interpret the world in the simplest form possible. We organize or reduce the sensory input we receive into the simplest possible form. Your eye-brain system wants to interpret stimuli in the simplest form possible, and often fills in blanks or ignores certain aspect of the stimuli to reduce the complexity of the image in front of you. Take for example the common example of words being easy to read, even when the order of the letters is wrong, as long as the first and last letter are correct. This is because the mind isn’t reading individual letters, it is reading the word as a whole. Or how many people will not notice double letters in sentences, this again is due to our brain phasing out bits of information that complicate the stimuli. Instead of noticing the second: “the” in the sentence, it is easier to read the sentence and only the the one “the” which makes the sentence make sense. In this way the pragnanz law illustrates our mind’s desire for minimalistic and easy interpretations to our world around us. Daniel Weintraub (April, 1971) writes the
There is a tendency for humans to be trapped by their own preconceptions and to resist anything that goes against those pre-established beliefs with denial, contempt, or outright (and often) violent rejection. In Margaret Atwood’s poem “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and Euripides’ The Bacchae, central characters refuse to accept and believe in the truth and instead decide to side with their individual delusions and beliefs. In particular, Pentheus (in The Bacchae) and the Narrator (in Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer) fail to accept and see Nature. Ultimately, both characters are blind to the power of nature and cannot see what is in front of them. There are several similar stages either character face in each work: an encounter, denial, resistance, underestimation, and finally, acknowledgement of nature.
Visual agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize familiar objects (Farah, 1990). Object recognition is the ability to place an object in a category of meaning. Most cases of visual agnosia are brought about through cerebral vascular accidents or traumatic brain injury typically inhibiting sufficient amounts of oxygen from reaching vital body tissues (Zoltan, 1996). There are a vast array of impaired abilities and deficits associated with individuals diagnosed with visual agnosia. These impairments vary considerably from individual to individual (Farah, 1990). Some patients cannot recognize pictures of things such as trees and birds, despite being able to describe such objects or recognize them through other senses such as sound and touch. Other patients demonstrate an inability to recognize faces of friends and family members (Goodale, 1995). The functional impairments experienced as a r...
The novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut displays a strong theme of sight, and lack thereof. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is an optometrist by trade. He deals with trying to make people see. However, after he goes to war, he becomes blind to the real world. One may speculate that the entire subplot of the Tralfamadorians, the aliens that supposedly kidnap him and keep him in a zoo, could be a figment of his imagination. Whether it is real or not, Billy learns many things from them. He learns about the fourth dimension, time, and tries to help other people to see like he does.
Many of us are born with the natural ability of sight, yet there lies a key difference between a person's ability to look at something and their ability to see. The ability to see an object requires both focus and engagement on said object while looking at something requires nothing more than the ability of sight. This metaphor plays a key part in Raymond Carver's Cathedral. This story, narrated by the main character Bub, centers around the theme of finally see things and not just brushing over them. The narrator Bub goes through an internal revolution, and learns to open his eyes. Bub is clotted by; ignorance, isolation, jealousy, insecurity, and once he meets the blind man Robert his view starts to change, and he could see things more clearly
The most concise way to characterize Gestalt psychology is to say that it deals with wholes and its given data are what have been called phenomena. It is because of their strong phenomenological orientation, which explains that wholes are experienced by conscious man and not in parts. For example, in perceiving a melody one gets a melodic form, not a string or a note, a unitary whole that is something more important than the total list of its parts. This is the way experience comes to man, organizing it into significant structured form.
There are many different Visual Perception principles in perception. The main principles are Gestalt. Gestalt is a German word meaning 'form' or 'shape'. Gestalt psychologists formulated a series of principles that describe how t...