What Do Blind People See?

Tommy, who's been blind since birth, talks about what he sees.

#vision #sight #eyes

[ocsjc]

We can only ask blind ppl who became blind after already having sight for a while

[ErikAnkan]

I met a blind girl at a festival. She could see up until the age of 6. After that, she became blind. She told me that it's like "looking from your elbow". Or "close one eye and try tell me what your closed eye is experiencing".

[RobKaiser_SQuest]

I have an ex whose parents were both fully deaf, though she was hearing. She told me she learned both English and ASL as her first languages but obviously mostly used ASL at home, and rather than hearing a voice her internal monologue was imagining watching herself sign. That spoke to me about how much a person's brain learns to function from a young age based on what they've got to work with, that a hearing person still regularly exposed to English thinks in sign. It shouldn't be surprising that someone blind from birth has no mental imagery they can identify at all, they have no reference for what imagery is.

[anna]

It does make my curious what blind ppl perceive in their minds. Like I can vividly see a movie in my head. If someone has been blind all of their lives do they still have the capacity to at least imagine certain images? Like if someone taught a blind person what a tree actually looked like. Can they see that tree in their heads?

[sluminous]

Black can occur naturally but the color also refers to what a sighted person in the absence of any light would be seeing

[Deathblade]

If you got sight, even having your eyes shut would amaze you. Vague immages and colors kinda float around. Kinda like what murky water feels like, those individual grains rubbing across your hands? Well, those are the colors and the clumps are the shapes. And its defined by black darkness, or the smooth water you know is there.

[MrPretzel]

the best way to explain it is our minds can’t comprehend not being able to see yet we do. Meaning you can’t see behind your eyes but there’s no darkness… take your finger and move it around the side of your head with your eyes facing forward and try to look at it in your peripheral view and go till it is gone. It doesn’t go into darkness. It just is gone. You can’t see it.

[renegadetla]

I think it’s hard for people to comprehend what they have never experienced, whether that’s being sighted and trying to understand seeing *nothing at all* or being blind and trying to understand the concept of seeing.
If you’re blind since birth, your brain has never had that input. There is nothing for your brain to experience there! And vice versa, if your brain cells have experienced sight, what is the absence of it? Totally bizarre and fun to think about.
For someone sighted since birth, and having temporarily been partially blind for a few days once, it weirdly wasn’t even darkness for me. It was just…. Nothing. There was some light that I could detect but it was totally separate from actually seeing, I just knew there was some light somehow. The concept of the nothingness was so new to me. The parts where I had no vision were just completely gone and what I could see just connected to each other. So the centre of my vision was gone, and if I looked at my hand, it was blurry and barely there and my fingers visually looked like the connected to my wrist because there was NOTHING to see in the centre. Not darkness, not blackness, just an absence of information

[JonBrase]

If you can perceive the difference between presence and absence of light, then absence of light is your reference point for "black". In principle, at least, the most presence of light you've ever experienced is your reference point for "white", but from the look of your cataracts, that might not be very bright at this point in your life, so maybe "dark gray". Assuming a retina that has normal numbers of different types of cells, you may also have some color perception, but without the ability to form an image it would take special lighting conditions for the difference to be noticeable to you: you'd have to have light that was dominated by a single color suddenly change to be dominated by a different color.

[ReaIHuman]

The best explanation I've heard is, it's like asking someone what do you see with your elbow.

[Essh]

Ive heard of people who became blind after they were born dreaming with sight but since you were born blind your brains never had any input

[kzcreationzmore]

Okay follow up question: When you say you can see the absence or presence of light, what does that mean exactly? Like can you see the absence of light or can you only see the presence of light and therefore know when there is absence of light? Because generally speaking, the absence of light tends to be black, or close to black. But if the only way you know that there is an absence of light is because you can only see light, than you likely can’t see black

[WallahNein]

There obviously are differences, like Tommy said, even though he's been blind since birth, he can still perceive light in some way.
So he would actually see darkness when there's no light in his room.
If your receptors for different colors work you could probably also see the red of your eyelids when there's a lot of light (but probably you can't identify it as red)
And if you're nerve doesn't send any signal to your brain, you wouldn't even see nothing, because your brain probably wouldn't process anything sight related in the areas it would normally do that.

[Puppies-zh]

I've heard closing one eye gives you a better sense of it than closing both eyes.

[daablurg]

Man I love how he refers to us as sighted people it cracks me up every time

[brandonthomas]

I imagine it's like a bird coming up to me and asking, "where do you migrate? If you can't sense the magnetism of the Earth, where do you go?"

I don't...

So interesting.

[CharliRay]

I’m legally blind and over the moon with gratefulness to have that and before cell phones I couldn’t see tv so never watched it growing up went to the Maryland school for the blind and never have driven a car but I can see everything close by to a degree

[wadewhat]

I have a good analogy for this. What does your hand see? Nothing. Maybe he can’t see out of his eyes like we can’t out of our hands

[Anti.brinrott]

If you can see light and dark then can’t you use that to determine what shape something is due to the reflection of light? It may take a lot of time and training to do so but I think it would be possible

[SAMURAINUTS]

Best way i think we can get close is to close 1 eye. If you close 2 eyes your brain will pick out signals from both and you'll see that ambient blackness, but if you leave 1 open your brain will focus on those signals and ignore your closed eye to a large degree (because it would impose that dark image on what you see and mess up how stuff looks).

You get to see what "nothingness" lokks like. No black image with your brain trying to make something out of it, but a literal disconnect from that eye (as far as you are cinsciously aware of)