PIT2
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Do blind people see blackness?
(and before u say, "no theyre blind", please think about it!)
(and before u say, "no theyre blind", please think about it!)
Yeah, same here. Its like asking "what do deaf people hear?" Completely blind people, can't see anything. Not even black.Hypnagogue said:My guess would be that blind people don't experience visual blackness, or anything in the visual modality for that matter. For instance, a better analogue for the visual experience of a blind person (at least one blind from birth, I'd imagine) might be not blackness, but rather, the same visual experience you have of the area in the back of your head. Blackness is a visual experience, even though it usually connotes absence of light. What you see at the back of your head is more like complete absence of any visual experience at all.
It's not necessarily that simple. The visual cortex requires proper visual inputs and motoric interactions in the world on the basis of that visual input in order to develop properly. In the absence of such input from birth, visual cortex proper would likely be subsumed for other perceptual/cognitive processes. I find it unlikely that such a radically different "visual" cortex would support anything like the subjective experience of vision (of which blackness is a type).PIT2 said:With 'the blind from birth' part, u mean that when one hasnt ever experienced light, then one still sees blackness but doesn't realize it because one can't compare it with light (since one can't imagine what light looks like).
For people who developed blindness well into life, it's likely that they at least have the capacity for visual experience. Whether or not they actually experience visual blackness or no visual phenomena at all, and how this unfolds as a function of time spent in blindness, is really an empirical question that would be best answered by asking for the introspective report of a suitable person. Whatever the answer turns out to be, though, a significant part of the story should be the physiological state of the brain regions that normally support visual experience. It's not just a matter of simple cognitive comparisons.And for people who have not been blind from birth, they can compare their no-light-blackness to their memories of once experienced light.
There are varying degrees of photosensitivity among animals. On different levels, you can actually trace the evolution of the mammalian eye. Some merely have mildly photosensitive patches of skin cells, more advanced types have crude retinae, others add a lens to the system, etc.. Insect compound eyes seem to be in a class by themselves, but I'm not sure.PIT2 said:And what about animals without any eyes, do they see blackness aswell?
Do plants?
hypnagogue said:For people who developed blindness well into life, it's likely that they at least have the capacity for visual experience. Whether or not they actually experience visual blackness or no visual phenomena at all, and how this unfolds as a function of time spent in blindness, is really an empirical question that would be best answered by asking for the introspective report of a suitable person. Whatever the answer turns out to be, though, a significant part of the story should be the physiological state of the brain regions that normally support visual experience. It's not just a matter of simple cognitive comparisons.
Well, there is no blackness behind our heads-- that was the point of my using that example. If you compare the visual experience of complete darkness to the visual experience of seeing out the back of your head, you should find that they are different, because the latter isn't a visual experience at all. You might think of it as analogous to the difference between the written numeral "0" as compared to the complete absence of any written number whatsoever. They may amount to roughly the same thing conceptually, but in one case there is a representational vehicle, a pointer which we interpret to mean "nothing," and in the other case there is literally nothing to begin with.PIT2 said:But is it (theoretically) possible for us, with our functioning visual cortex, to become visually aware of the blackness behind, below, above and besides our heads?
I've thought about it. Actually, I figured that one should come to the conclusion, "no, they're blind," after thinking about it, and not before.PIT2 said:Do blind people see blackness?
(and before u say, "no theyre blind", please think about it!)
i would rather consider it as not seeing at alldav2008 said:I imagine it would depend why they are blind. I don't know much about the reasons for blindness but I imagine it can either be caused by the eyes or by the brain.
If the eyes themselves are damaged then it would be the same as you being in a very dark room, that is no photons are hitting your eyes so the eyes don't send any signals to the brain and you "see" darkness.
If it's part of the brain that's damaged then I guess they wouldn't see anything. It would be as if they don't have the sense of sight at all.
PIT2 said:Do blind people see blackness?
(and before u say, "no theyre blind", please think about it!)
The difference is that they do not experience or process visual data consistently. A person with sight will assign a visual object with properties such as shape, color, and dimensions, and these properties are determined by a light source shining upon the object. With no light source, the brain will determine a color or pigment based on the information provided to it, which we as humans acknowledge as black or dark, as we were taught in school. For a person that was blind from birth, I can't promise you that what they "see" is black or dark, because they don't actually see or perceive anything. That sense does not exist to them so there is nothing to "compare" it to. As for a person that became blind after birth, then I'm quite sure that they may find that the sensation of blindness is much what we sighted people conceive as dark or black, however, I've read in this thread that a man that became blind explained that if he could compare what he currently experiences, as visual perceptions, to colors, then he would compare it to a yellowish haze (kind of like facing towards a bright light with your eyelids closed), quite the opposite of what we would expect. Ultimately, what a sighted person sees in the dark cannot be directly applied/compared to what a blind person does not see because they are not the same thing thus not perceived in the same fashion.Radrook said:What's the difference between not seeing anything because of blindness and not seeing anything because of being in a totally dark room?
andRussell Foster remembers his first human subject, an 87-year-old woman, as she sat in a dark room facing a backlit pane of frosted glass. A genetic disorder had destroyed the light-sensing rod and cone cells in her eyes, leaving her blind for the past 50 years. She was convinced that she would see nothing. But as the wavelength of light in the room shifted to blue, she reported — after some hesitation — a sort of brightness.
"That just blew us away," says Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the senior authors of a 2007 study reporting the finding1.
Foster and his collaborators had done nothing to treat the woman's blindness. Instead, her awareness of light owed itself to a class of light-sensitive cells discovered in 2002. Studies of these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) have since revealed many surprises. Scientists initially thought that, rather than contribute to vision, the cells simply synchronized the circadian clock, which sets the body's 24-hour patterns of metabolism and behaviour, with changing light levels. However, recent work suggests that ipRGCs have been underestimated. They may also have a role in vision — distinguishing patterns or tracking overall brightness levels — and they seem to enable ambient light to influence cognitive processes such as learning and memory.
and finally, which I was surprised, but not shocked to learn...It became clear that under low light conditions, rods can set the body's clock, but some groups have suggested that under different conditions cones can as well. Perhaps more surprisingly, researchers have found that ipRGCs may contribute to visual perception. Hattar and others fluorescently labelled ipRGCs in mice to trace the projections of these cells to the brain. They found that ipRGCs reach into more brain regions than expected, including centres involved in visual processing: the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and the superior colliculus. Mice without functioning rods and cones, but with intact ipRGCs, could even discriminate patterns in a visual test
Steven Lockley, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues tested the reaction times of 16 healthy volunteers while they were exposed to either blue or green light for 6.5 hours. Those exposed to blue light had faster reaction times and fewer attention lapses when they were asked to report when they heard a sound10.
Lockley says that these different strands of research might eventually help to engineer 'healthier' light — using specific wavelengths, intensities or even patterns to activate brain pathways and improve mood, sleep or mental performance. "This research opens up a whole new field in terms of light applications, both for use therapeutically and for the general population," says Lockley.
Patients with this disorder typically have damage to the retina, to the optic nerve, optic radiations, or sometimes even to area 17, producing blindness in either a large portion or in the entire visual field. But remarkably, instead of seeing nothing, they experience vivid visual hallucinations.
These patients had a sharply circumscribed region in the visual field where they were completely blind; i.e., they had a blind spot, or scotoma. The remarkable thing is that their hallucinations are confined entirely to the blind region.
One possibility is that the normal person, unlike the Charles Bonnet patient, has real visual input coming in from the retina and optic nerve. This is true, by the way, even when the eyes are closed, because there is always spontaneous activity in the retina, which may function to provide a null signal informing the higher centers that there is no rose here, and this prevents her from literally hallucinating the rose. (Indeed, this may be one reason why spontaneous activity in the peripheral receptors and nerves evolved in the first place.) Again, all this is very fortunate, otherwise your mind would be constantly flooded with internally generated hallucinations, and if you begin confusing internal images with reality, you will be quickly led astray.
PIT2 said:Do blind people see blackness?
(and before u say, "no theyre blind", please think about it!)