What do Blind People See?

[vegetation]

Originally posted by: mrCide
going along the same lines, a person who's born deaf, what do they hear in their head? you teach them sign language, do they think in sign?

weird thought.

Even the most profoundly deaf people can actually hear. They just can't hear the frequencies needed for everyday life in any meaningful way so they are classified as deaf. However, you take a deaf person to a concert and they'll 'hear' the music just fine - they can know sound is eminating but generally cannot distinguish melody. Of course, what it actually 'sounds' like to them is a philosophical question.

As far as sign language, that depends which sign language it is. ASL is classified as a real language, so one who learns it is learning a different way of communicating. There are a lot of old generation folks who learned ASL but not a whole lot of written English so they do have a hard time reading and writing standard English unless they took it upon themselves to learn it. On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of younger deaf people in the US who have learned to lip read and talk using standard English as they have been mainstreamed into regular schools so they haven't learned ASL much if at all. BTW, lip reading deaf people are generally shunned by the deaf community as not fitting into their deaf culture.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: Armitage

Originally posted by: Peter
I've spoken to a mate who is partially blind (after suffering a brain cancer that damaged the visual nerve). He's "lost" the upper left corner of his field of vision. He says there's just plain nothing there, not any color or black or white or whatever. Vision there is just totally gone. So I guess the answer is, you don't see - there's nothing there because there is no "there". Or somesuch.

I've read some interesting articles about mapping out how the brain works by studying people who have had brain injuries. Some really interesting stuff on what it really means to see. There was stuff like you describe - people that couldn't "see" anything in the lower half of their visual field. People that couldn't "see" vertical lines, or such. They'd look at at letter 'L' and only see the horizontal part. Really interesting.

linkage by any chance?

Read this several years ago in a magazine - probably Discover or Scientific American

 

[Matthias99]

A question that has always bothered me is that what if the color as my eyes see to be red is actually blue to everyone else or something like that. I wouldnt know because the color I see as red was called blue my whole life. I wonder if there are people that actually never figure this out.

Well, as long as you could still distinguish all the colors properly (ie, you're not color-blind or something like that), then two points should be apparent if you think about it:

1) There's no way to truly know if you experience colors exactly the same way that somebody (or everybody) else does. Of course, there's no way to know if you experience *anything* the same way that somebody (or everybody) else does.

2) Conclusion 1 doesn't matter at all anyway. The "experience" of color (or any kind of sensory input) is unique to each individual. "Red" is just a label given to a particular wavelength of electomagnetic radiation that our eyes are capable of picking up; what that wavelength "looks like" to you is irrelevant. 'A rose by any other name...', or something like that.