The girl who saw the world less deeply
Sep. 7th, 2012 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistLast year, I saw a documentary called (I've just looked it up) The Man Who Forgot How to Read. I watched it mostly because I like Oliver Sacks, and only about halfway through it did I realize it might be of personal relevance to me. (Sometimes I forget that my eyes and my vision are not normal.) But now I can hardly tell you anything about the program besides the bit that made me realize that.
I can tell you about a woman, standing outside, looking at a tree, swaying gently back and forth, with a beatific smile on her face. Only saints and mystics and the people who get the really good drugs smile like that. But she was none of those, and her life-altering experience was just something that ninety or ninety-five percent of people have and think nothing of.
She was seeing in stereo.
I didn't remember many details of her story, just that she'd never had stereoscopic vision but hadn't thought much of that until, in her forties perhaps, she started having other problems with her vision. She went to a specialist and got treatment that, suddenly, left her able to see in "3D," rather than as if everything were on the same flat plane. She'd be literally stopped in her tracks by something like the tree (moving back and forth made it clear and appreciable that the leaves and branches were taking up three-dimensional space) or the steering wheel of her car "popping out" from the background. She could see the "space" between different layers or levels of things, when they'd previously looked as flat as a painting or photograph.
And what really broke my heart, what made me remember this and the book Sacks had written on similar subjects, was how goddam happy she was about all this. How blissful the experience of stereoscopic vision had made her.
And then, conversely, how badly its loss had affected Oliver Sacks himself. Treatment for a tumor near his retina has left him with little sight in one eye, and thus left him in a monocular, flat world. While the disturbance of visual effects that first alerted him that something was wrong, the surgeries, the fear of cancer and so on would be awful for anyone, the loss of his stereo vision seemed to hit him particularly hard. He'd always loved this ability, was obsessed with stereo photography since he was a kid, was even part of a stereoscopic society that believed they literally saw the world more deeply.
The other thing that I remember well from the documentary was him speaking movingly of looking through a ViewMaster as a kid, of the Grand Canyon and other picturesque places, feeling as though he'd been there, though he'd never visited except with stereo photography, and how much he missed that. Looking at a supposedly-3D picture of a lake surrounded by cat-tails or something, with a mountain in the distance, he said he knew the plants and the lake were meant to look close while the mountain was very far away, but he couldn't see that any more. He just knew it from past experiences of pictures like that. I remember him getting a little teary-eyed, but even if that's just my memory playing tricks on me (for one thing, my own vision is rarely good enough to pick up on invisible tears showing up on a person's face, if there are no other clues (i.e. the person is trying to hold themselves together)), it was clear he cherished the vision now lost to him.
And it was something I'd never had, so never even thought to miss (except in a few instances; more on this later). Watching these people, though, I really wondered what I was missing, and was a little sad I'd never know. Oh I could have it explained to me, like you can explain color to a colorblind person, but it's clear the explanations are not much like the experience in either case.
The story of the woman gaining stereo vision made me crazily hopeful for a second, but I pretty quickly knew that what happened for her wasn't going to happen to me. I didn't have the access to the advanced visual therapy she had, and even if I did, it hadn't been expected to give her this ability; it's not supposed to e something you can acquire like that.
Plus my problems are otherwise very different to hers. Since the hellish visits to eye specialists stopped long before I was old enough to be treated like a person (I was a teenager) I don't know much about my own eye conditions...and since I ended up with something like PTSD about eye doctors, however strong my curiosity is, I'm not going to do anything about it! So I don't know but have always assumed my monocular vision was due to the huge disparity in acuity between my two eyes. People have a dominant eye like they have a dominant hand, but in my case one eye's twice as bad as the other. (There's another incredibly obvious reason I won't have stereo vision that I've just learned, but I'll get to that.)
So my brain defaults to seeing out of my right eye. Only if I cover it up or close it do I see much out of my left, and it's no fun -- I can't read the words I'm typing at the size or distance from the screen that I'm otherwise using now, and I get spiky pains around that part of my head if I do it for more than a second or two. Whereas if I close my left eye, there's very little change in my visual field or acuity. Because that's what my brain is doing anyway.
I had a ViewMaster as a kid, too. How singularly pointless! I can only assume my parents didn't realize the fatal flaw there -- though that'd be unusual for them, overprotective and misinformed as they were.* And of course I wasn't going to tell them the ViewMaster didn't work for me: as is so often the case, I thought my experience was just normal. This was a machine for looking at pictures of Mount Rushmore, kinda boring but then a lot of toys were. I knew, of course, that it had holes for two eyes to look in, but I was young enough not to really understand that I was only seeing through one eye, or this would interfere with enjoyment of the toy.
With all the other problems my eyes have -- acuity (I am, roughly, very shortsighted), field (I have very little peripheral vision), poorly formed eye muscles (which mean my eyes tire easily and causes what Plok calls my "strange saccadic eye-movements", the jumping back and forth) -- that do have obvious, constant and annoying impacts on my life, it had never really occurred to me to think too much about stereoscopic vision. But the documentary made me have to curl up on the sofa under a blanket for a while, wanting cuddles. And it also really made me want the book that Oliver Sacks had written on vision, which was mentioned in the program.
I've finally got my hands on it, and it's given me a lot more to think about on these subjects. But since I've written a lot already, I'll stop here for now.
* I remember my mom telling someone there was no point taking me to the movies, "because she can only see a little bit of the screen," my mom said, making a circle of her thumbs and forefingers to demonstrate. I don't remember arguing or challenging her on this -- I was very young (and it probably wouldn't have done any good if I had; I was ignored or treated as if it was just wishful thinking or lies when I tried to correct my parents or caseworkers or offer an opinion on what adaptations I needed or whatever). I do remember being surprised though; I am more than capable of seeing a whole cinema screen thankyouverymuch, and if I'd taken my mom at face value I'd have believed everyone else saw movies the size of skyscrapers, if what I was seeing was only "a teeny little bit"!
I can tell you about a woman, standing outside, looking at a tree, swaying gently back and forth, with a beatific smile on her face. Only saints and mystics and the people who get the really good drugs smile like that. But she was none of those, and her life-altering experience was just something that ninety or ninety-five percent of people have and think nothing of.
She was seeing in stereo.
I didn't remember many details of her story, just that she'd never had stereoscopic vision but hadn't thought much of that until, in her forties perhaps, she started having other problems with her vision. She went to a specialist and got treatment that, suddenly, left her able to see in "3D," rather than as if everything were on the same flat plane. She'd be literally stopped in her tracks by something like the tree (moving back and forth made it clear and appreciable that the leaves and branches were taking up three-dimensional space) or the steering wheel of her car "popping out" from the background. She could see the "space" between different layers or levels of things, when they'd previously looked as flat as a painting or photograph.
And what really broke my heart, what made me remember this and the book Sacks had written on similar subjects, was how goddam happy she was about all this. How blissful the experience of stereoscopic vision had made her.
And then, conversely, how badly its loss had affected Oliver Sacks himself. Treatment for a tumor near his retina has left him with little sight in one eye, and thus left him in a monocular, flat world. While the disturbance of visual effects that first alerted him that something was wrong, the surgeries, the fear of cancer and so on would be awful for anyone, the loss of his stereo vision seemed to hit him particularly hard. He'd always loved this ability, was obsessed with stereo photography since he was a kid, was even part of a stereoscopic society that believed they literally saw the world more deeply.
The other thing that I remember well from the documentary was him speaking movingly of looking through a ViewMaster as a kid, of the Grand Canyon and other picturesque places, feeling as though he'd been there, though he'd never visited except with stereo photography, and how much he missed that. Looking at a supposedly-3D picture of a lake surrounded by cat-tails or something, with a mountain in the distance, he said he knew the plants and the lake were meant to look close while the mountain was very far away, but he couldn't see that any more. He just knew it from past experiences of pictures like that. I remember him getting a little teary-eyed, but even if that's just my memory playing tricks on me (for one thing, my own vision is rarely good enough to pick up on invisible tears showing up on a person's face, if there are no other clues (i.e. the person is trying to hold themselves together)), it was clear he cherished the vision now lost to him.
And it was something I'd never had, so never even thought to miss (except in a few instances; more on this later). Watching these people, though, I really wondered what I was missing, and was a little sad I'd never know. Oh I could have it explained to me, like you can explain color to a colorblind person, but it's clear the explanations are not much like the experience in either case.
The story of the woman gaining stereo vision made me crazily hopeful for a second, but I pretty quickly knew that what happened for her wasn't going to happen to me. I didn't have the access to the advanced visual therapy she had, and even if I did, it hadn't been expected to give her this ability; it's not supposed to e something you can acquire like that.
Plus my problems are otherwise very different to hers. Since the hellish visits to eye specialists stopped long before I was old enough to be treated like a person (I was a teenager) I don't know much about my own eye conditions...and since I ended up with something like PTSD about eye doctors, however strong my curiosity is, I'm not going to do anything about it! So I don't know but have always assumed my monocular vision was due to the huge disparity in acuity between my two eyes. People have a dominant eye like they have a dominant hand, but in my case one eye's twice as bad as the other. (There's another incredibly obvious reason I won't have stereo vision that I've just learned, but I'll get to that.)
So my brain defaults to seeing out of my right eye. Only if I cover it up or close it do I see much out of my left, and it's no fun -- I can't read the words I'm typing at the size or distance from the screen that I'm otherwise using now, and I get spiky pains around that part of my head if I do it for more than a second or two. Whereas if I close my left eye, there's very little change in my visual field or acuity. Because that's what my brain is doing anyway.
I had a ViewMaster as a kid, too. How singularly pointless! I can only assume my parents didn't realize the fatal flaw there -- though that'd be unusual for them, overprotective and misinformed as they were.* And of course I wasn't going to tell them the ViewMaster didn't work for me: as is so often the case, I thought my experience was just normal. This was a machine for looking at pictures of Mount Rushmore, kinda boring but then a lot of toys were. I knew, of course, that it had holes for two eyes to look in, but I was young enough not to really understand that I was only seeing through one eye, or this would interfere with enjoyment of the toy.
With all the other problems my eyes have -- acuity (I am, roughly, very shortsighted), field (I have very little peripheral vision), poorly formed eye muscles (which mean my eyes tire easily and causes what Plok calls my "strange saccadic eye-movements", the jumping back and forth) -- that do have obvious, constant and annoying impacts on my life, it had never really occurred to me to think too much about stereoscopic vision. But the documentary made me have to curl up on the sofa under a blanket for a while, wanting cuddles. And it also really made me want the book that Oliver Sacks had written on vision, which was mentioned in the program.
I've finally got my hands on it, and it's given me a lot more to think about on these subjects. But since I've written a lot already, I'll stop here for now.
* I remember my mom telling someone there was no point taking me to the movies, "because she can only see a little bit of the screen," my mom said, making a circle of her thumbs and forefingers to demonstrate. I don't remember arguing or challenging her on this -- I was very young (and it probably wouldn't have done any good if I had; I was ignored or treated as if it was just wishful thinking or lies when I tried to correct my parents or caseworkers or offer an opinion on what adaptations I needed or whatever). I do remember being surprised though; I am more than capable of seeing a whole cinema screen thankyouverymuch, and if I'd taken my mom at face value I'd have believed everyone else saw movies the size of skyscrapers, if what I was seeing was only "a teeny little bit"!
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 12:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 10:56 am (UTC)And I am all but bouncing in my chair to think that I've got someone to think about what we take for granted :) Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 11:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 12:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 12:06 pm (UTC)As for official discrimination, yes I was once given a really hard time when I got a new job (the NHS nursing-assistant one) when during a routine occupational health assessment before it started, the two nurses or whatever who were assessing me came out with all kinds of weird ideas about how I wouldn't be able to work on a ward where "I wouldn't see if people threw things at me" or "I might trip on things." I was worried (and, when I told him about it, Andrew was even more worried) that I wouldn't be able to start my job, because we were in really dire financial straits at the time and it just exacerbated the stress of all of it.
One of the nurses, as I was standing up to leave, pointed out that my shoelace was untied and before I could do or say anything TIED IT FOR ME.
I ended up making a formal complaint about how I was treated and was able to start the job.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-10 07:12 pm (UTC)I've had an employer delay my employment with occy health bollocks then take EVEN more weeks to decide to give me a start date claiming they hadn't processed the result (which was yes do employ barakta she's great) cos the occy health nurse was partially deaf herself, and talked SENSE!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 10:43 am (UTC)I'm really glad you got an occy health person who was helpful and knew what she was on about :) Reminds me of conversations on Twitter the other day about how Atos people should be familiar with the conditions they're assessing for...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 12:19 pm (UTC)I wasn't allowed to write with pencils in lower elementary school because my parents and vision caseworker had decided that I could see pens better so I was given shitty pens with gooey, supposedly erasable ink, when my classmates were forbidden from using pens for schoolwork and just thought I was weird. In middle school my caseworker went to immense effort to get some of my books on tape, and I had a special tape player to play them on. I never touched them; I loved reading and it never hurt my eyes, but no one believed me when I said this, just like no one believed me when I said I could see pencil marks just fine and didn't want to write with pens (though both of these eventually ended, despite being in the meantime told off for "tiring my eyes out" unnecessarily and not making use of the adaptations).
I had field trips with the other "blind kids," we went to a Twins game, go-karting (that was fucking hilarious), ice skating, all kinds of things. I went to summer camp for blind kids a couple of summers, too: canoing when one person's paddling the wrong way and no one can tell is fun :) There was a totally-blind girl who could do the rock-climbing better than anyone else, and barefoot too (which I now realize probably helped her get tactile feedback about how she was doing, but when I was twelve it just seemed badass).
My mom resisted me getting glasses (because the problems are mostly with my optic nerves, lenses can only correct so much so even with them I can't see very well, but a hell of a lot better than I can see without them!) because she thought it'd make my eyes weaker; this on the basis that she'd been wearing glasses since she was young and her eyes have since gotten worse.
I will forever be sad that I well remember my dad showing me stars and constellations when I was young, but I couldn't see any of them.
When I was seven, something happened (they never bothered explaining these things to me so I don't know what) so I couldn't open my eyes without pain for a while and everything looked blotchy and red like it was on fire; I missed a whole family vacation this way. I had to be led around by the hand, and I remember this being kind of cool because it was the only time my undemonstrative dad would hold my hand.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 11:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-08 12:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-08 08:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-10 07:18 pm (UTC)I get asked fairly often what it's like to be deaf which is impossible for me to answer as a question in that form as I know no different. I didn't realise a lot of my differences till I lived with a hearing person and talked to hearies about losing their hearing temporarily or otherwise. I know for example I crash into people in crowds/shops because I can't hear them moving/walking around me. I can't hear between rooms (usually) so have no idea how loud I am and what sounds do or don't travel. People who spend a lot of time with me usually get used to me not responding to some things which I assume hearies would respond to so they will repeat themselves or get my attention first. I realised (clueless) colleagues were speaking slightly slower/louder to me on average when one introduced me to her child and switched to speaking to me in the same way and I couldn't understand any of it until she switched back into the speaking to Barakta voice.
I've read Sachs's book on deafness (Seeing Voices) which is mostly a rehash of what I've read from people like Harlan Lane and Paddy Ladd who are much more technical (Sachs is good at non technical mainstream audiences). I shall look for the one you've read as that does sound interesting.