What Do Blind People Actually See? | Stickman Themed | Whiteboard Style

Blindness gets imagined as permanent darkness. Someone sitting alone in an unlit room, waiting for light that never arrives. That picture is wrong, and the truth is stranger than the myth. Someone born blind does not experience black. They have no visual field at all, in the same way no image ever reaches you from your elbow. Tommy Edison was born blind and dreams in sound, smell, taste and touch, because his brain never built the equipment to dream in pictures. Christine Ha, who won MasterChef in 2012 and lost her sight in her 20s to neuromyelitis optica, still dreams in full colour, and still sees herself at the age she stopped seeing. Then it stops being a story about eyes. A 1996 Nature study by Norihiro Sadato found the primary visual cortex firing in blind Braille readers, and shutting down in sighted people given the same task. Daniel Kish, blinded by cancer as an infant, rides a bicycle using tongue clicks, and in 2011 Lore Thaler, Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale showed those echoes are handled by the visual system, not the auditory one. Marina Bedny's team at MIT found the visual cortex taking on grammar. The territory reserved for sight does not sit empty. It gets rented out. On 7 July 1688 the philosopher William Molyneux asked John Locke whether a blind man suddenly given sight could tell a cube from a sphere just by looking. It took 323 years, and Pawan Sinha's Project Prakash in India, to find out. What this covers: Why darkness is the wrong word for what the born blind experience What blind people dream about, and why it splits by when sight was lost The 2014 Danish study on blind dreaming and nightmare frequency How the visual cortex gets repurposed for touch, echolocation and language Aphantasia, and the 3 to 5% who cannot picture an apple Molyneux's 1688 question, and the experiment that answered it Sidney Bradford, who got his sight back in 1959 and wished he had not Mike May, who sees people shrink as they walk away from him Two people can share a language, a room and a lifetime, and still have no way to compare the one thing each assumes is universal. That gap is the subject here. It does not close by the end.