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When you're blind, what do you see?


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#16
countryboypride77

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I went to bed one nite with normal vision in both eyes...woke up in the morning about 5 AM with one eye only seeing a narrow horizontal slit of vision ..aprox...5 % of what I should see...went to the hospital and by the the time they got a ophthalmologist there I had completely lost all vision in that eye...no fix for it...
if I shut my good eye I only see black...



wow, sorry to hear that. My brother several years ago was on the job and stapling a cable into a wall or something. The staple must have hit a knot in the wood or something causing the stable to ricochet and hit him in his eye. He went to the ER. The ER called a specialist who was on call but the specialist told the ER just to have my bro put a cold wash cloth on it and come back the next day. Needless to say, my bro lost his because apparently the specialist had more important things to attend to on his own time. He could have saved my bro's eye. Now my bro has a glass eye. It's actually pretty neat, the pupil moves. Anyways, dang the specialist... :)
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#17
ektor

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I think he or she will see flying monkeys if not i dont know but a person born blind cannot tell you since he has never seen black.
a person who becomes blind... what does he see?

Depends on how he becomes blind. I think if your eyes get messed up the right way, you do indeed see black at first. Gradually I think your brain would adapt and you wouldn't see anything anymore. If the nerves or parts of the brain get damaged, weirder things happen.

What do you see in your blind spot? There is a spot in your eye with no ability to detect light. It's toward the middle of your visual field so it should be obvious. But your brain fills in the spot as best it can. I know it sounds hard to believe that you would not be aware of a significant blind spot in the middle of your vision. Try this demo (http://en.wikipedia....d_spot_(vision)). The sudden realization of the blind spot is shocking!

Some people who get damage to only some part of their vision actually get an effect like a blind spot, and things get "filled in" by their brains. Some people who are totally blind hallucinate. The brain is weird, wild stuff. Check out some books by V. S. Ramachandran. I promise you won't be disappointed.
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#18
Chopin

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Gradually I think your brain would adapt and you wouldn't see anything anymore.

But you see, this is the question. What's the difference between seeing black and seeing nothing?
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#19
NomDeKeyz

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I suppose my take on this matter might be of interest? I have had periods of temporary blindness.
For me, my normal eyesight is slightly stunted in one eye, and severely in the other. I don't wear
glasses, but I probably should. I don't drive, but I probably should get some glasses and learn how.
My blind periods have been usually tied to a migraine, often lingering after the migraine, sometimes
for days or weeks. At first, my doctors thought that I was going blind, as the blind periods were
increasing in both frequency and duration. I was preparing to go blind. Funny how I was so eager to
learn how to cope with living blind that I didn't take time to grieve the expected loss or to revel
in the sight that I supposedly had left to me. I have always had light sensitivity, poor eyesight,
and exceptional other senses; I suppose that this new development in my ever-challenging state-of-
physical-being seemed natural. Turns out that it was mostly due to the migraines that were triggered
by an odd food allergy. I like birds well enough, but I should never eat them. No poultry for me.

I still have migraines, mostly managed. I still have blind periods, rarely; only for hours, not days.
What first happens to my sight is that everything becomes brighter, and the light hurts more during
the migraine. For that matter sound and smell and touch also seem amplified and hypersensitive/painful.
It's like the light being reflected off of every surface increases. Interestingly, the more reflective
surfaces (mirrors/windows/etc.) in a room, the more light I seem to register. The light isn't reflected
IN the reflected surface, but in the room itself - each object. Don't ask me to explain why; I have no
clue? Eventually the light takes over, and does it ever hurt! I think that after enough over-stimulation
my eyes begin to shut down/cease registering what is too painful to perceive. Sometimes its like tunnel
vision that eventually has no light at the end; other times I just dim several shades of grey, slowly going
black. The migraine pain often begins to ease after I have gone black, reduced other sensory stimuli, and
relaxed into a quiet breath-focused semi-meditative state or fallen asleep. Sadly, medication is mostly
ineffective. The black used to linger after the migraine pain was over, like I said, for days or weeks...
However, now that I am a pescatarian, the black doesn't linger; it fades back to sight as the pain eases.

While learning to adjust to living blind, I learned a lot. Many that I spoke with seemed to have a limited
sense of sight/light. If you held a light near their eyes, and then removed that light, there was a sense
of the light change for some. I had a mentor that was blind from birth; he had no sense of light or colour
of any visual kind, BUT he could read/see people better than anyone I have ever known.He was a psychologist.
I do think that the sense of visuality (yes I made that word up; Shakespeare did it all the time) may exist
for a blind person even if they were born blind, depending on what the cause for their blindness might be.
On another note, I have known folks who speak and think in more than one language. I have also known people
who do not normally think in words, rather more like impressions (so they say). Everyone is so different
that I have come to believe that we all think (and perceive) differently to some degree (synesthesia, for
example), but rarely are in a position to compare these sorts of abstract things.
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#20
Troy

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Gradually I think your brain would adapt and you wouldn't see anything anymore.

But you see, this is the question. What's the difference between seeing black and seeing nothing?

You can't see nothing, you always see something (even if it's nothingness).
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#21
whydie

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What's the difference between seeing black and seeing nothing?


I remember reading in a Alan Watts book where he said he knew a man (in real life) that was blind from birth. This blind man told Alan that he did not know what 'black' was.
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#22
sphoeninx

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Hi there pips,

my opinion on the matter?

I think 'black' is more of a description, 'nothingness' or emptiness is a state of being.
if you apply that to a blind person, he would 'see' black because no light is coming in, but it certainly not 'nothingness' though because he can still perceive or feel in a different way.

but as for me it's not a question of seeing black or seeing nothingness, but what makes 'seeing' happen. We see with our brain, not with our eyes. So, if your visually impaired, no 'data' gets through the brain. If your eyes is normal, 'data' gets through the brain and it is in our brain (somewhere in the back of our brain) that images are formed.

Maybe, that's why we have 'different points of view', 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', and different 'eye estimate' though we see with the same physical eye. And i could agree with Troy

You can't see nothing, you always see something (even if it's nothingness).

because even if your eyes is totally incapable of seeing, the function of the brain to see is still there but no data coming from the eye is received, and data could get to the brain through the other senses or by way of emotions. (So it's more like the story of the 7 blind men and an elephant, just google it pls if you are interested with the story).
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#23
Strike Martel

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If I was blind, I would see some kind of enlightenment: that my life is not over and I can still make the best of a pretty bad scenario. That's how I would see.
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#24
FNP

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Hi there pips,

my opinion on the matter?

I think 'black' is more of a description, 'nothingness' or emptiness is a state of being.
if you apply that to a blind person, he would 'see' black because no light is coming in, but it certainly not 'nothingness' though because he can still perceive or feel in a different way.

but as for me it's not a question of seeing black or seeing nothingness, but what makes 'seeing' happen. We see with our brain, not with our eyes. So, if your visually impaired, no 'data' gets through the brain. If your eyes is normal, 'data' gets through the brain and it is in our brain (somewhere in the back of our brain) that images are formed.

Maybe, that's why we have 'different points of view', 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', and different 'eye estimate' though we see with the same physical eye. And i could agree with Troy

You can't see nothing, you always see something (even if it's nothingness).

because even if your eyes is totally incapable of seeing, the function of the brain to see is still there but no data coming from the eye is received, and data could get to the brain through the other senses or by way of emotions. (So it's more like the story of the 7 blind men and an elephant, just google it pls if you are interested with the story).


Then what happens when the part of the brain that is responsible for sight is damaged?
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#25
BradMcKinley

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What's the difference between seeing black and seeing nothing?


I remember reading in a Alan Watts book where he said he knew a man (in real life) that was blind from birth. This blind man told Alan that he did not know what 'black' was.



Just to expand on this as another Alan Watts fan I must say this is the most interesting part of the discussion. Imagine your most vivid dream where you have before you a incredibly fantastic colorful and unique cartoon experience.

Your brain gives you this without requiring your EYES.

Thus it follows that a blind person may experience the world that is simply shaped by the things they bump into, hear and smell. I daresay if you closed your eyes for a while daily you too would experience the waking dream. Some like to call it meditating.


Ref: "Humans don't always dream during REM (and what's more, some dreams happen outside of REM)." - University of California
http://psych.ucsc.ed.../FAQ/index.html
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#26
BradMcKinley

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If I was blind, I would see some kind of enlightenment: that my life is not over and I can still make the best of a pretty bad scenario. That's how I would see.



Don't despair for this world, make it your own. You can simply close your eyes and visualize what you want in life. Be thankful for the sight you do have as most assuredly your life is not over.
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#27
Alzeimer

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Our brain tells us what our eyes catch, not the other way around, the information passes through our optical nerves but our brain uses that information to create an image, so to me the eyes is just a bridge between the world and our brain.

As long as our brain sees something it does not matter if our eyes work we will see something, if your born blind it is harder to create an image of something it never had any information about so I am guessing it creates its own image base on what its been told by others and information from the other senses.

Just giving my personal opinion.
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#28
Ikillmalware

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I've heard if you press down on your eye if your blind you can make out faint images sometimes. One of my greatest fears is being blind, I respect anyone who is due to the fact we take things like crosssing a road for granted when for them it can be pretty dangerous not seeing/or barely seeing anything.
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#29
Tigereye

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I am legally blind. My vision, I think is 20/250. Last time I got checked (which was about...7 months ago) I was 20/200. I inherieted it from my dad, who has 20/320 vision. Also, because we both read 24/7. We also both have astigmatism, and for that we both use...what's the word for hard lenses? Toren? Anyway, when you're blind, I really think it's like closing your eyes. Try closing your eyes. It's semi-darkness, not completely black. I know the feeling of being blind. You look around, and if you don't know the place, everything is unidentifiable. The colors of the wall dominate your vision. It's a complete blur. When I was 10, I thought that being blind was a complete gray field. I read that it was "no light perception". Some people argue that bling people only see black. But, it order to see black, wouldn't you have to have light? Just my thoughts.
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#30
dsenette

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Some people argue that bling people only see black. But, it order to see black, wouldn't you have to have light? Just my thoughts.

this is a misconception based on how people are taught about light and the visible spectrum. we're taught that blue things are blue because they absorb all light except blue, and red things are red because they absorb all light except red, and that black things are black because they absorb all light. which makes some people assume that if there's no light to be absorbed, then there's no black. but that's not the case. the reason that black things are black because they absorb all light is because at that point no light is making it to your eye from that object. so if there's no light (or at least if your eyes can't receive/interpret light because you're blind) then all you "see" is black (of course you wouldn't know that because you've never seen anything other than black)...of course that applies to people who are completely blind (i.e. the eyes do not work at all). it would be the same case for someone who's physically lost their eyes.
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