
What Do Blind People Actually See? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/what-do-blind-people-actually-see
======
jareds
As someone who has been blind since birth this is accurate. I know that people
who go blind later in life continue to dream in color since they have the
memory of color to reference while I do not. I wonder if someone who goes
blind later in life experiences things differently, possibly by automatically
filling in what they assume they would see based on what they know of there
surroundings from there other sences.

~~~
gliese1337
I am not blind, but I do occasionally get migraines with visual auras, as do
my wife & mother. Exactly once in my life that I recall, I had a migraine that
caused total perceptual blindness (oddly, this has also happened exactly once
to my wife, before we knew each other). It's extremely odd- one's visual field
(at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left.
It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you
can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there
always isn't. Like what the back of your head looks like, as the article says.

In the end, you literally see Nothing. It's truly bizarre[1]. It's not an
experience I particularly want to repeat, but I'm kinda glad it happened just
once, for the empathy value. It's not really something that can be effectively
described if you haven't (not) seen it yourself; even now, I have trouble re-
imagining the experience, 'cause my memory wants to fill in blackness or
grayness or whatever. But at least in theory I now know exactly what the
Nothing from _The Neverending Story_ (doesn't) look(s) like. :)

[1] What makes it even more bizarre is that migraine blindness is a strictly
neurological effect- there's no damage to your eyes or optic nerves- which
means you can get temporary blindsight. In my wife's case, this meant she
managed to walk a couple blocks home from a friend's house, crossing suburban
streets and so forth, totally normally, while all the while convinced that she
was completely blind. Which, as far as conscious perception goes, was the
truth!

~~~
sillysaurus3
_It 's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily
contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness
closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's
still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't._

This is the first time I've heard of anyone else experiencing this phenomenon
besides myself. Have there ever been any long-term effects on you?

Mine is slightly different. I don't have migranes, for one. Also, in addition
to experiencing exactly what you described (minus the migrane), sometimes I
experience the inverse: I can no longer see whatever I look at, but I retain
peripheral vision. For example, if I were to look at the "o" in the word
"for," I wouldn't be able to see the entire word. I could still read, with
difficulty, until the effect became so strong that reading was impossible. (I
still had peripheral vision, sort of, but eventually paragraphs became
unseeable rather than individual words.)

Whenever any of these things occurred, I was completely normal again within
two hours. It was bizarre, and it's mystified myself and two eye doctors. It's
only happened less than a dozen times, but it's been happening since I was
very young, and my most recent was less than a year ago.

The "blindness" was exactly as you describe: not a blackness, but a
nothingness.

Do you happen to have any more info about the condition? It's very elusive.

~~~
skygazer
I suffered something similar, just once, about twenty years ago, in high
school, and never since. Although, instead of an impression of nothingness, it
felt more like a Photoshop content aware fill, similar to the optic nerve
blind spot, but moved to the fovea.

I was walking the hall to my first period, mainly looking at the bland floor
tiles, and didn't realize anything was abnormal. When I happened to look up at
the faces of fellow students, I noticed they had no faces, just skin colored
smoothness. My hands, and text on the posters on the walls appeared in my
peripheral vision, but as soon as I looked directly at anything, it seemed to
disappear into an average of it's surrounding colors. I didn't freak out, but
calmly walked to my first period, where I was scheduled to take a test. I made
way to my desk, and marveled at this oddness, but didn't say anything, until
the test was passed out and I could tell it was a page of text, but, of
course, the words disappeared upon inspection. I was really impressed how
useless my peripheral vision was in dealing with text or faces.

I had an awkward conversation with the teacher, who I feared thought I'd
invented a disorder to get out of the test, before being allowed to visit the
nurse.

The condition lasted maybe an hour. The ophthalmologist I saw shortly after
found nothing wrong with my retinas or eye pressure, and declared it a visual
migraine and let me go, with a newfound empathy for those with macular
degeneration.

~~~
jtheory
The content-aware fill is what I get as well -- I have some permanent blind
areas in my right eye due to optic nerve damage; I lost a lot of peripheral
vision, but also the normal optic nerve blind spot is quite a bit larger in
that eye -- about 1/4 of the height of my visual field, and half as wide --
fortunately still not affecting the central point of focus.

Obviously no black patch or anything like that; I first noticed the missing
section (before I had visual field tests done to detect it properly) while
driving, stopped at a light; I rubbed my other eye momentarily, and the
traffic light vanished.

------
bramd
First of all, be aware that the group that's actually totally blind is
relatively small. Most people who are legally blind have some form of light
perception, or can see something. I've been totally blind since birth.

Blind people can have a good or bad sense of direction, just like their
sighted peers. I think the device described in the article might be more
useful on short distances and less relevant for knowing where your home is
while you're far away from it. This because blind people don't have the visual
queues to determine if they're walking in a straight line for example. Getting
immediate feedback could help with such skills and learn them how to verify
the signals from the device with other senses.

Sensory substitution, aka how to replace input from one sense with input from
another is a quite interesting topic.

~~~
eranation
> I've been totally blind since birth.

Please forgive me for the naive question, I'm probably full of misconceptions
about blindness, but out of pure curiosity, how do you read and write so well
without seeing? Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen
reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the
reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the
same)

You really didn't have any typos, and as well your indentation and styling are
perfect (much better than me but I'm not a native English speaker)

Can you read and write code without seeing? Are there any blind programmers
that you know of.

again asking out of pure naivety

tl;dr, I'm impressed with your reading and writing considering that you said
your are totally blind, and curious how do you do it. (I always was afraid of
going blind for some reason, and afraid I will never be able to write code
again)

~~~
bramd
I'm not a native English speaker either.

> Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a
> regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do
> you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the same)

Yes, I'm using a regular keyboard and a screenreader. Besides speech output I
use a device called a refreshable braille display which can display up to 40
or 80 characters at a time depending on the model being used. I'm sure you
will find some pictures if you Google it. However, those devices are quite
expensive and many blind people just use speech output. Even with just speech
there are options for reading letter by letter, word by word etc. However, I
see some people make much spelling mistakes because they just listen and not
rreally read how a word is spelled.

> Can you read and write code without seeing? Are there any blind programmers
> that you know of.

Sure you can. I make a living by programming and doing web accessibility
consultancy. Another nice example is the free and open source NVDA
screenreader[0], which is developed by two blind guys.

[0]: [http://www.nvaccess.org/](http://www.nvaccess.org/)

~~~
stevenrace
Fascinating, thanks.

At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better
experience?

~~~
bramd
> At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Approximately the speed that the guy at the beginning of this video uses:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo)

> Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better
> experience?

It just what you're used to I guess, I know lots of people who can get by
without one. I especially like it when doing coding and doing stuff in a
terminal. Easier to see indentation, parenthesis, quotes etc.

------
deanclatworthy
A great article. I recently visited the "Blind Exhibition" in Warsaw. They
show you some items that blind and visually impaired people use on a daily
basis and then you have to guess what they are for. I'd never contemplated how
blind people know when a coffee cup is full, or pair their socks.

They then take you into a series of rooms (bathroom, the street, art gallery,
kitchen etc.) which are completely black. Not a shred of light. You are blind.
I can't describe how it felt other than terrifying. I didn't know if my eyes
were open or not. It wasn't the black that I saw when closing my eyes, or am
sleeping in a dark room. It was this empty hollow of nothingness.

As someone who has always wondered what it's like to be blind then closed my
eyes for a few minutes and stumbled around my home - it's nothing like that at
all. I left having found a new sense of understanding for the struggles that
blind and visually impaired people go through on a daily basis.

An interesting but harrowing statistic they mentioned at the end of our trip
was that the majority of people go blind, instead of are born blind. And the
main cause is diabetes. It's not uncommon that those with diabetes lose their
sight and then their sense of touch. Imagine not being able to _feel_ your way
around after going blind.

I highly recommend the exhibition if you're ever in Warsaw, and I think they
have it in a couple of other cities:
[http://niewidzialna.pl/en/](http://niewidzialna.pl/en/)

------
eru
I still want that vibrating compass belt.

~~~
baddox
I wonder if it could be done more subtly, perhaps with a few vibrating motors
embedded in the skin around one ankle.

~~~
gabriel34
There is something similar to this that is already reality: people use a
magnet on one finger to be able to perceive EM fields.

We have the ability to turn our senses off when we are going to sleep, so any
"sixth sense" prosthetics should be switchable or at least not strong enough
to disturb sleep.

------
steffan
> “When the belt experiment was over, Wächter felt lost”

It seems slightly cruel to me to give someone a device to augment their senses
without some provision for them to continue using it if the experiment is
successful.

I suppose it's also possible that Wächter didn't want to continue using /
being reliant upon the belt despite the loss of the spatial sense it had
provided.

~~~
gabriel34
I think the experiment was still in progress when they took it away, since
they observed his reactions to this. Later they might have given him the
device.

------
tempestn
This made me realize that while it is instinctively difficult to imagine a
lack of sight or touch, a lack of sound, smell, or taste, seems relatively
easy to imagine. Sight vs sound is especially interesting; we tend to think of
lack of sight as blackness, as the article describes, but there doesn't seem
to be an instinctive parallel for lack of sound (at least in my mind). I guess
it would be "silence", but that's much more akin to lack of sound than the
concept of blackness is to lack of sight (even if blackness is technically
lack of light).

Although having written that, I now wonder whether a person who _loses_ their
hearing might be plagued by phantom hums or such things, as can sometimes
happen to hearing people when exposed to extended silence.

------
tylerpachal
For me this raises a question on a slightly different topic: if you're born
deaf, what languages do you think in? I can consciously think in English and
French, but if you have never heard a spoken language before, what would your
thoughts be like?

------
tallanvor
I'm mostly blind in one eye. --The center of the pupil was destroyed by a
parasite when I was very young, and I have no memories of normal sight. I do
have some peripheral vision in that eye, but not enough to read or perform
normal activities, especially because I have to turn my head to see, such as
it is - I can make out certain objects and get a sense of colors, but nothing
is clear - reading would be out of the question, for example.

Describing my lack of sight is difficult, because few people have the
necessary frame of reference to understand. The best way I've found to
describe it is to say that I can only see one side of my nose. Now, I know the
other side is there, obviously, because I can look in a mirror and see it with
my good eye. But without a mirror, that side of my nose doesn't exist to my
vision. --There's not a dark blob or anything like that - it simply does not
exist.

It also means I have no real depth perception. I have to try and estimate the
distance of an object based on what I know of it's true size - when it's
moving towards me, I don't get a real sense that it's actually coming at me,
just that it's getting larger at some rate. Needless to say, that makes
playing games like baseball very diffciult as there is not necessarily other
objects around that make it easier for me to recognize the rate at which the
ball is flying towards me.

~~~
cmiller1
Can't you move your head side to side to judge depth by parallax movement? At
least a little bit?

------
jamesjyu
This reminded me of the language of the Guugu Yimithirr [1] who always
describe left/right/forward/back with cardinal directions. Thus, they always
have a great sense of direction, and know where north is, even indoors. In
that case, it's like the vibrating belt is built into the language.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all)

------
netcan
There's an analogy I like to bring up. I don't remember where I heard it, but
It would be great to find a better articulation, but here it goes.

Gregor Mendel is called "father of modern genetics" for his work on plant
hybridization and discoveries in the area of hereditary traits. He's called
that because he described "invisible factors" producing "traits." We would now
say that he discovered genes and their expression.

Around the same time Charles Darwin produced his great works on evolution. He
was also essentially relying on invisible factors inherited from previous
generations producing discernible traits in subsequent generations. He went
beyond that and hypothesized about how constant sexual and natural selection
would allow certain traits to be more common in the species as a whole.

Both of these men were essentially studying and describing genes, geneplexes &
DNA. But, DNA was unknown to them. They knew that traits are handed down from
one generation to another. But, if you asked them what the physical form of
these traits was, they would have no answer.

DNA & Genes were not observable to them. They had placeholders in their mind.
I guess they new that the seed produced by the parent plant contained the
traits, but they might have also used "spirit" or "essence" as their
placeholder.

We are at this stage when it comes to cognition. We don't know what a thought,
memory or emotion looks like. We don't know what their physical form is. We
know it has something to do with neurons and the brain, but we don't really
know the how and what.

There is an obvious hole in our knowledge. It' missing in discussions like
this.

------
janus
This story reminded me of the guy that had a magnet implanted in his pinky
finger, who was then able to sense electromagnetic fields and other stuff

[http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-
fin...](http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-finger)

~~~
gohrt
Implant seems extreme. One could do well with, say, compass armbad with a
strong magnet and a pokey attacmhent.

------
mkoryak
A couple of years ago I read a non-fiction book called Crashing Through[1] -
about a guy who was blinded by some chemical at a very young age (<1y) and was
able to have his vision restored in his 40s via a new procedure.

It went on about some difficulties he had processing the new data. His brain
had to "learn" how to see. It was so difficult that he would sometimes close
his eyes and and rely on his echolocation skills to navigate.

Very interesting book if you want a first hand account of what it is like to
go from being blind to being able to see. (and also about being blind)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Through-Extraordinary-
Story-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Through-Extraordinary-Story-
Dared/dp/0812973682)

------
dkresge
I was born (40 some odd years back) with an underdeveloped optic nerve in my
left eye. An early surgery for Amblyopia corrected my gaze, but those first
years of wearing a patch over "my good eye" resulted in nothing more than a
lot of stress for my folks. And while I attempted to explain what I could see
(are they shadows?), I never really had an answer as to why I could count "how
many fingers" someone was holding up. Curiously, it was only within the past
few years that I realized my left eye renders what one perceives peripherally.
Hold your hand to the side of your head -- it's there, but do you really _see_
it? I can't imagine putting blindness into words.

~~~
inertia_lost
Wow, I think you might have a very similar vision issue as I do!

Left eye as well, although my eye is healthy, it was closed when I was a baby
so my vision never developed properly. Eye patching was tried on me as a kid,
but just resulted in a cranky toddler me. It took years and years for me being
able to verbalize what I could see out of my left eye--I basically have some
limited peripheral vision and no central vision. My eye doctor explained that
part of the issue is that peripheral vision primarily detects motion while
central vision is for detail--so while I can detect motion and light, it's
hard for me to put an image together.

I have so many memories of trying to read that big stupid E with my left eye
and not being able to explain what I saw. (Um, there's a light on, right?)

------
tokenadult
A very interesting take on the perceptions of blind people. I don't think I am
acquainted with anyone who has been entirely blind from birth (which is a rare
condition of life). I know a professor of psychology (who indeed does much of
his research on human visual perception)[1] who has very limited vision, and
thus is "legally blind." He began life, I think, with a bit more vision than
he has now, but has long been visually disabled. In a personal conversation,
he related that his originally intended research field was astrophysics, which
of course can be studied by analyzing instrument readings from radio
telescopes and other devices that don't necessarily have visual outputs. My
wife is his piano teacher, and she has had to adapt her teaching to her first
student who cannot read a printed musical score.

A much younger person I know who has very limited vision (and the prospect of
declining vision as she grows up) attends summer mathematics programs with
children running around playing soccer and Frisbee and seems to handle that
with aplomb. To not even be able to recognize shapes or moving human beings,
something that the blind people I know best are still able to do, would be
especially challenging.

Aside: Have you all noticed that people who have acquired profound deafness
that begins in adulthood have much less understandable speech than people with
normal hearing? Apparently we all rely on feedback from our own senses to keep
our speech behavior within the phonologically normal range of whatever
language we speak as a native language, and habit alone can't maintain the
fine tolerances necessary for readily understandable speech.

AFTER EDIT: Of course anyone can experience total lack of sight simply by
going into a totally unlighted place. The human eye doesn't emit vision rays,
after all (even though the ancient Greeks seemed to think otherwise), so if
you are where there is no light, you see nothing with your eyes.[2] Studies on
the human diurnal behavior cycle are sometimes done in deep caves with no
source of artificial light.

[1] [http://legge.psych.umn.edu/](http://legge.psych.umn.edu/)

[2] [http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/50-of-college-students-
thin...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/03/50-of-college-students-think-we-
see.php)

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/30/241906619/seeing-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/30/241906619/seeing-
in-the-pitch-dark-is-all-in-your-head)

~~~
pixelcort
Originally from SF area, I have been living in Tokyo for over a year now, and
since moving I rarely speak with native English speakers anymore. I've been
told by friends and family on occasion my accent and grammar is slowly
deteriorating.

~~~
tokenadult
The Americans I knew when I lived overseas for three years (on each of two
stays that long) definitely had trouble with vocabulary retrieval, the more
trouble the longer they had been away from native speakers of English.
Correspondingly, Chinese people I know who have been away from places with
lots of Chinese printed text often have a lot of trouble writing Chinese
characters that everyone learns in school. Even "overlearned" skills that
become second nature can degrade through lack of continued practice.

------
pje
Herzog's _Land of Silence and Darkness_ [0], which follows some elderly
members of the German deaf-blind community, is one of the most fascinating
documentaries I've ever seen. One quote in particular has stuck with me since
I saw it years ago:

“People think that deafness means silence, but they are wrong. It is a
constant noise that ranges from a gentle whisper going through some cracks to
a constant buzz, which is worse.”

[0]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Silence_and_Darkness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Silence_and_Darkness)

------
exch
Having congenital Glaucoma, I've always had to live with the possibility of
one day being blind. My left eye is already pretty much there.

What has always fascinated me about sight is how our brains augment and
outright invent things you think you see with your eyes. It's not at all about
believing what you see, but about seeing what you believe.

The Glaucoma has steadily been eating away at my retina and optic nerves over
the many years. Causing blind spots to form all over my visual field. In daily
life, I can't see those spots. As in, there are not actually black holes in
the images I perceive. The brain somehow manages to fill in those gaps with
visual information directly surrounding those gaps and combine it with what my
experiences/memories tell me should be there.

It's only when I start concentrating on really small details, that these holes
become apparent. Particularly when looking at small LED lights in a dark
environment. The LED keeps disappearing and reappearing as I slowly turn my
head in various directions. Everybody has a single blind spot like this in the
center of their visual field which behaves in the same way. Imagine this, but
multiplied over 60 - 80% of your visual field.

Additionally, my almost-blind left eye has caused me to lose depth perception
all together. This means those fancy stereoscopic 3D things are pointless to
me and one would expect I would have a hard time in traffic. Not being able to
judge the distance to an oncoming car can be deadly. But again, the brain
seems to draw on its memories and years of experience and somehow manages to
account for the lack of depth perception. It's not perfect, but enough to cope
in daily life and safely move from A to B. At least on foot, that is. I am not
allowed to drive a car for obvious reasons. A moped is technically permitted,
but I don't. It moves too fast for me to accurately judge my surroundings in
time. The same even goes for a bicycle. I only ride those in daylight. Not at
night.

As far as blindness goes, I've had this once. As a kid, I fell out of a tree
and landed flat on my back. For the following 45 minutes I was completely
blind. It freaked me out to no end, as I was terrified it would not go away.
Luckily it did. Not looking forward to that again!

------
gohrt
Strange that the article doesn't mention the blind spot that everyone as.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_\(vision\))

~~~
robhack
Mind Blown. Not by the fact we have a blind spot, but how, like in the article
it's not a black zone, but really the absence of any input that the brain
tries to fill in. Now I'm curious to test how the brain interpolate on this
area, like trying to put different background color or texture on each side of
the blindspot.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Having tested it, it seems to do a linear interpolation from the edges, often
retaining the surrounding texture. Kinda like the smart fill from Photoshop

------
_bdog
I have exotropia on one eye and completely lack binocular vision.

My right eye is my "main" eye (95%) and my left eye just submits the missing
parts from the left that my right can't see because of the nose being in-
between.

I always have the right side of my nose in my field of view, except that at
the same time it's somehow not there. Like 50% opacity. The left side of my
nose isn't visible.

When I "hide" a finger behind my nose for the right eye and look in it's
direction it's gone. When I stare straight forward, it appears again.

(My) vision is weird :).

------
xenophonf
Katawa Shoujo actually addresses this in-game. One of the game's characters, a
blind woman, describes her dreams including sensations from her other senses:
smell, taste, touch, hearing. As something I have wondered about, I was really
pleased that the game's authors thought of this.

------
3pt14159
A blind person once explained it to me:

> I see what sighted people describe as "white". When I ask a sighted person
> what they see out of their elbow they typically get it. They see "nothing",
> but if pressed will usually say "static" or "white".

------
gd1
I suspect you experience true blindness (briefly) during laser eye surgery,
when the flap is cut in the cornea. I remember how odd it felt - the feeling
of seeing nothing at all, not even darkness.

~~~
DigitalJack
I could see after the flap was lifted. This was 2005 so I don't know the
procedure anymore, but I was supposed to keep my eye trained on a flashing dot
while the laser ablated my cornea.

~~~
gd1
I meant when the blade goes into the eye. There were a few seconds after that
before vision came back.

------
joedevon
Tommy Edison, the Blind Film Critic's take:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDHJRCtv0WY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDHJRCtv0WY)

------
dicroce
They see what you see out of your elbow.

------
icantthinkofone
Many years ago, blind people might put their hands on your face to help them
get a sense of you. A blind friend of mine, Jim, got in the car with us, one
night, and sat next to a friend he did not know. He put his hands on the other
guy's face, then paused, then said, "Man, you are uuuuuugly!".

