by Dr Trish Riddell
Imagine this scene – you see your friend Nick looking under piles of magazines, behind cushions, in drawers. He sometimes even looks in the same place twice.
Suddenly, he grabs something from the back of a drawer. You guess from his actions that he had lost something, but has now found it again. Moreover, you know – without ever seeing Nick’s face – that he is relieved and happy.
But how would you be able to interpret this if you had been blind from birth? I was astounded to read a recent research report that shows that blind people are able to imagine exactly what Nick is feeling, and, even more surprisingly, what he is seeing!
Intuitively, I had thought that someone who had been blind from birth would find visualising both the scene and Nick’s facial expression at least difficult and maybe even impossible. In order to determine how other people feel, I had assumed that blind people would have to use a verbal description of the scene and would rely on information other than sight – for instance comparing a person’s voice tone with voice tones they know to represent happy or sad emotions.
So – I thought that it would be more difficult for blind people to learn how to interpret other people’s emotional states than it is for sighted people. And, in fact, I was partly right – it is true that children who are blind take longer to develop the ability to imagine other people’s emotional states than sighted children. However, both sighted and blind children eventually reach the same level of ability.
Another possibility I considered is that people who are blind use different brain areas to think about other’s emotional states than sighted people. Again, I was wrong. Recent research by Rebecca Saxe and her colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that blind people do use visual information. Thus, Saxe’s most surprising finding was that blind people interpret emotion from examples that involve seeing as easily as when the example involves hearing. To show this, blind and sighted people were given a selection of scenarios like the following:
Visual:
‘‘While cleaning out her dorm room, Abigail sees an old love-letter lying under the bed. The handwriting looks like her beloved boyfriend’s’’
Auditory:
‘‘While cleaning out her dorm room, Abigail hears footsteps approaching the door. The footsteps sound like her beloved boyfriend’s’’
In both cases, sighted and blind adults were able to correctly say that Abigail would be happy. Saxe and colleagues used brain imaging to show that in sighted adults, and adults who were blind from birth, the same parts of the brain were active for both the visual and the auditory descriptions. Thus, it appears that blind people are able to imagine what it is like to see, and therefore know what Abigail, a sighted person, would feel when she sees the love letter.
This is incredible! Without ever experiencing sight, the brain of a blind person is able to imagine what it would be like to see and to use this information to predict an emotional response!
Further evidence that adults who are blind from birth can imagine what it is like to see comes from the explanations that blind people give for terms related to seeing. For instance, Landau and Gleitman asked a blind person to define “to examine” and got this response:
“To look at, scrutinize, look at in very fine detail.”
Experimenter then asks: How do people do that? Would you hold it close to you?
“It depends on the size of the object you’re looking at. What kind of perspective you want to get on it. If you wanted to get the full detail you would close [sic]. If you wanted to see a lot of detail you would look at it from far away. If you wanted to see just part of it you would look at it up close.”
This blew me away - it seems that the brain of a blind person can imagine the process that a sighted person would go through when closely examining an object that the blind person will never see!
And with this new knowledge, I asked myself what I could imagine doing that I never thought I would be able to experience. Since the brain can use imagined descriptions to begin the formation of networks for a new activity even though it has never been experienced, think of all the new abilities you could develop.
And then, your blind brain will see too!
Call to Action
Pick a skill you believe that you will never have either because you don’t think you have the ability or because you will never have the necessary experience?
- Find descriptions of what it would be like to have this skill, and then imagine it often and vividly in whatever way you do this best.
- Watch for opportunities to test whether the skill is developing
