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Barrett -> Re: Blindness and Manual Assessment (June 11, 2005 6:23:00 AM)
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In Geerat Vermeij’s memoir “Privileged Hands” he describes his tactile sense of things, shells specifically, and how he may come to know even their “regular intervals of asymmetry” with this sense, knowing that sighted experts have missed this mainly because they can see. In other words, vision smoothes things out in a way that our hands cannot. He also decries the emphasis on visual acuity in education and how this leads to a prejudice in testing and achievement scores that simply do not take into account how we might learn about things otherwise. He speaks of how he can manually assess things that he can move in his hands (like shells) but cannot similarly appreciate statues because they are typically fixed and stable. He wants to move something across the stillness of his other hand in order to learn about it. When I heard him interviewed he spoke of how people imagine blindness as something dark or even black. He doesn‘t sense it in this way at all-especially when he touches something moving in his hand.
I understand that at the PT Convention in Boston ( I wasn’t able to attend) a session was devoted to more accurate and reliable methods of measuring the surface contours of our patients (read posture) in order to finally discover what’s wrong with them. Many still live in hope that the dysfunction we seek to ablate will one day reveal itself in this way-in a way our eyes can see it. And what would Dr. Phil say about this decades old effort?
Every reply to this thread has yielded more insight (pause a moment and think about that word) from people who are blind to the patient’s internal activity and seek to sense it with their hands-mainly because they have no choice. They have done this not by using their hands as agents of their will, but as organs of perception. The following is from “The Use of Simple Contact” on my site:
Charles Brooks’ "Sensory Awareness: The Rediscovery of Experiencing" (The Viking Press Inc. 1974) contained a chapter titled “Simple Contact” that described touching people (and objects) in a fashion that, to me, was remarkably reminiscent of my own thoughts on the subject: “We are actually working when we touch another-working to try out our hands not as agents of our will but as organs of perception. Indeed, however we may touch him, we may somewhat disturb our partner’s freedom. Our hands may feel hard to him, or heavy, or light and fluttery. He may feel “handled,” restrained, pressed, or-sometimes a very disappointing experience-not really touched at all. Accordingly, one might expect such contacts to be downright unsatisfying, if not downright inhibitive. But in a great majority of cases it is exactly the opposite. The mere fact that one comes to the other quietly and without overt manipulation is normally very moving to the person touched. He feels cared for and respected. And the one who touches, if he is really present in what he does, is apt to feel something of the wonder of conscious contact with the involuntary, subtle movement of living tissue.”
I came across a line from John Griffin’s new book “Scattered Shadows,” the story of this man’s ten year ordeal with blindness. Early on, he has a conversation with another blind man, a monk in fact. The monk says, “You are too nervous my son. You must develop heroic patience.” Sound familiar?
Is there any science behind manageing to see things though we are blind to these things in the usual sense? Yes, there is.
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