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Barrett -> Re: Blindness and Manual Assessment (June 12, 2005 12:50:00 AM)
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Great stuff here, but I’d like to take the blindness motif a step further by suggesting that we needn’t create a darkened environment in order to appreciate what a lack of visual stimulus might produce, we are already blind to the processes within the patient and will always be so. It is this sort of blindness that we can use to alter our sensibilities if we choose to do so. Consider this passage from “A Sense of Things” on my site:
“We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brains.” The speaker is Paul Bach-y-Rita, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin . I first read of his work in the June 2003 issue of Discover magazine in an article entitled “Can you see with your tongue?” After watching his profoundly impaired father recover from a stroke that was known to have severely injured his brain tissue, Bach-y-Rita turned his attention to research designed to reveal and enhance the brain’s apparent plasticity. He developed electronic devices capable of stimulating tactile sense when a camera “saw” an object move. When the stimulation was applied to the tongue of a blindfolded subject they quickly learned to “see” with their tongue. This sounded a great deal like the production of synesthesia to me and I asked him about that in a personal communication. He replied: “I consider that what we are doing is completely different. The tongue becomes merely a relay, and no sensations are experienced on the tongue; this is much like a blind person with a long cane, who perceives the door, chair, foot, etc as being at the cane tip but feels nothing at the hand which has become the relay.” Fair enough, but in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering, he also says: “Synesthesia is the experiencing of one sense as if it were another; for example, the experience of tasting shapes, has been known for at least 300 years. When it arises unbidden and operates uncontrolled, it can be a serious and disabling pathology. Nevertheless, it leads to remarkable insights in the understanding and control of cognitive function. A controlled form of synesthesia may have parallels to the sense display unit (invented and developed in his laboratory)”
It appears that while naturally occurring synesthesia and the neurologic adaptation induced by means of Bach-y-Rita’s training and instrumentation are not precisely the same, the difference is primarily that of control and the end result, the translation of one sense to another, is much the same. The lack of simultaneous experience, i.e. the blind person has no sense of their hand, may be at the root of its distinction from the naturally occurring condition.”
When our palpatory method becomes almost completely non-coercive and our attitude non-judgmental (read Simple Contact) we work with our hands as the blind do with their canes. According to Bach-y-Rita, what is this likely to produce?
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