Blind in My Mind's Eye

8/9/2019 Blind in My Mind's Eye

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Blind In My Mind's Eye

"All the exams the scientists gave [study subject] MX confirmed his claimthat he was missing his mind's eye.""Perhaps the most remarkable thing about MX is that he did not need years

to develop this new skill [of routing visual information through other brainparts than the mind's eye in order to develop an intellectual concept toreplace the mind's eye images he lacked]...Perhaps his blind imaginationwas always available to him, ready to be used."- Carl Zimmer, Discover , March 2010

"In your mind's eye..." has been spoken to me only a few times in my life,but I have read it on several occasions.

Unlike MX, who lost his familiar and much appreciated mind's eye suddenly

at the age of 65, I never had one. Rather, it might be more accurate to saythat my mind's eye is nearly blind.

Do a little experiment with me. Picture in your mind, one at a time, each of the following:(1) the face of your mother;(2) the face of your spouse (if this is not appropriate, the face of your fatheror one particular friend);(3) your favourite pet in your life (if this is not appropriate, the face of yourdoctor).

Were you able to bring those faces up as you read them? I can't. When I tryit's as if I have a blind spot where the face should be, yet I can get a generalidea (not clear) of what I would see with my periphery vision if I werelooking at these people with my real eyes.

As I write this my wife is on a different floor of the same house as I amsitting in, yet I cannot picture her face in my head, in my mind's eye. I couldpick her out of a crowd of thousands of real people, yet I have no image of her face in my head.

Though my dreams have people in them, I can't recognize any of them.They have no faces to me. I dream in thoughts, not in images. I may havethe odd image flash through my dream, but it's nothing like a movie.

Moreover, when I have wakened I can't remember my dreams. Even when Iwake up knowing that I have just been dreaming, I have only experiencedremembering what I dreamed about a dozen times in my life.



If you can do these things as part of our experiment, you have an activemind's eye.

Who cares? Science now knows that when you sleep you consolidate and fixin your brain your experiences of the previous day. Which experiences you

choose to review while asleep determine which you can draw upon easily thefollowing day or days.

When you studied, as a student, during the days before an exam, youcreated an easily accessible place you could get to if that information wererequested on the exam. You created those quick-access locations in yoursleep on the days following when you studied.

But...study? What's that? What does it mean? I honestly don't know. It didme no good to study before exams because by the time I had the exambooklet in front of me I had forgotten what I studied. Even when I sat withmy notes in front of me, studying meant little because I couldn't rememberwhat I had read a few minutes after reading it.

That bit of consolidating and fixating of recently read material for laterretrieval may well be one of the functions of the mind's eye. It's not used

just when you are asleep, as our little experiment showed.

The great sculptor Michelangelo, when asked why he pounded so hard on alarge rock, allegedly responded "Young boy, there is an angel inside of thisrock and I am setting him free." Michelangelo could see David inside therock. I would only ever see rock.

As a child I dreaded those rare occasions when we had art class. Art classalways meant painting, where a large blank piece of paper was placed infront of me. While my classmates happily created their masterpieces, Icontinued to see only blank paper. No image ever came to mind that I couldtransfer onto the paper.

An image would have had to be in my mind's eye. It wasn't there. Ever.

Study subject MX lost his mind's eye at age 65. Before that he used to liedown in bed before going to sleep and review the events of his day, likewatching a filmstrip or movie clips. When he lost that ability, he quicklyadapted by using other parts of his brain to accomplish formerly mind's eyetasks.

I never had a mind's eye. Yet I always felt the need to create in my mind,something, so I could make sense of my world. MX had a mind's eye, lost it,



then used other means to compensate.

People who have all the physical connections for sight, yet are blind, oftenhave what is called blindsight or blindimagination. Though blind, many cannavigate their way through a room crowded with furniture, for example. Do

we all have blindsight or blindimagination ability but not use it? Or do weuse it in ways we have not yet discovered?

The researchers who studied MX, Adam Zeman, a neurologist at PeninsulaMedical School in Exeter, England, and cognitive scientist Sergio Della Sala,of the University of Edinburgh, continue to study how the brain managesvisual information. In this field of study, it's still early days.

My experiences, those of MX and the studies of Zeman and Della Sala clearlydemonstrate that children need to be offered a variety of learning stylesbecause of the differences in their ways of learning. In education, a one-size-fits-all style of teaching means some children will miss out. Innocentand unknowing children will be blamed for being at fault for not learning asthey should. Some schools address the need for different learning styles,most do not.

I couldn't even count on all my fingers the number of times "not working tohis potential" appeared on my report cards, nor the number of times mymother was told in parent-teacher interviews that I was lazy. The schools Iattended as a child had ways to assess my intellectual potential, but lackedthe means to put it to use.

To my teachers I was lazy. Except in physical education where I was alsoweak and uncoordinated, which somehow also got to be my fault. The roleme lack of a working mind's eye played in any of this will not be known forsome time.

Suffice to say, I managed to work around the detours to reaching myintellectual potential, though many years after completing my formaleducation. I still can't throw a baseball straight or walk a balance beamwithout falling, even when cold sober and in the best of health. Maybe the

brain can only adapt around one detour and has to choose which will taketop priority.

At age 67 I am no longer called lazy. However, some people still don'tappreciate why I sometimes can't follow simple spoken instructions orwritten directions. I have solved some of the most profound mysteries of life, yet I still can't find Waldo.



No one today wants to teach a man who is smart enough to have foundevidence of what God really is and what the afterlife means. He's scary. Yetno one wants to teach a man who is so dumb he can't put together a child'spuzzle. They are the same man, same brain, different abilities.

My education continues to be based on my own initiative. As a student, I amstill a dunce, an oaf who is "too lazy to learn." Other adults, many of them,may not have the motivation I had to learn. So they don't. You meet thesepeople in stores, or driving the streets with you, or at voting stations.

When people have trouble learning because what they need to know ispresented in ways they can't understand, many just give up. Teachers needto recognize learning differences before that happens to their students. Moreimportantly, teachers need to be trained on how to recognize the needs theirstudents have for different learning styles. They have to understand andhave the skills before they can put them to use on their students.

Before the kids drop out of school, and sometimes out of socially acceptedbehaviour.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems , a fancy sounding title for a book of ideas and solutions everyone can understand and teachers and parents canuse.Learn more about the book and the TIA project at http://billallin.com

http://billallin.com/

http://billallin.com/

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Blind in My Mind's Eye