Like, is it just total darkness or, the opposite? Is it easier for them to fall asleep given that there’s no light to distract them whilst trying to nod off?
I feel like an absolute ass for asking these questions, and I’m honestly not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings or anything.
There’s different levels. My wife knows someone who can see just from the extreme periphery of her eyes. My dad worked with a guy who could barely make out shadows in bright light.
I know a blind guy who used to see for half his life, like roughly 16 years and then became super blind. He told me it's nothing like closing your eyes. He sees as much out of his eyes as i see out of my elbow. This still kinda fucks with me
My mother worked for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind for 40 years, so I grew up around a lot of blind people.
One of the things that surprises most people is that most “legally blind” people can still see, they just have impaired vision. Anywhere from complete blindness (no sense of light) to cloudy or blurry patches obscuring parts of their vision. So asking what blind people can see is kind of a complicated question, as it depends on their specific condition.
One of my best friends in high school woke up with clouded-over corneas one day. It was a congenital condition, inherited from his biological parents, but a surprise because he was adopted as a baby, so he had no idea what his biological medical conditions were until they happened. (He also has Marfan’s Syndrome and a heart condition, and was basically told by doctors he’d be lucky to live past his teens, which thankfully wasn’t true. He’s almost 40 now and still going. But I digress…)
Fortunately, I had spent enough time around blind people that I was able to help him get from class to class. His biggest annoyance was people shoving their hands in his face and asking, “Can you see this?” And when he flinched at the blurry object flying at his face, they would accuse him of faking his blindness.
Eventually, he got a corneal transplant and was able to regain most of his vision. But his vision is still bad enough that he’s considered legally blind. He had started working as a chef right out of high school (he attended the Culinary Institute of America, so he had professional training), but further complications with his vision down the road meant that he had to quit his dream job. No business would hire him, as his disability made him a liability in the kitchen.
In the case of my friend, he said it was reasonable that no one wanted him in the kitchen. He kept burning himself because he had a hard time telling the difference between countertops and hot surfaces. Also, he had a bad habit of putting his face so close to cooking food so he could see what he was doing, that he was getting splattered in the face with hot grease and oils.
If he had spent his whole life blind, he probably would’ve learned how to get around better. But developing blindness at the tail end of high school left him struggling to figure out solutions to daily life, just as he was becoming a responsible adult who had to pay bills.
He went to Harvard to pursue a different degree path and is now working as a manager of a financial investment company.
This question would only be valid if there’s only one type of “blind” and this being the type of blind where you have no sight at all.
Much more common is the type of blind where you do see, but it’s unusable. Depending on the reason this will look different. For example just plain bad sight everything blurry as hell and not correctable.
Or it could be that you have a tiny tiny dot like vision. Or some type of defect causing your eyes to be not properly controlled, jumping around wildly causing effectively a lack of vision but for different reasons.
Yes, official it is called Blind defined as a vision that is less than 20/40. Technical it called visual impairment, and it is a spectrum. Some people vision are blurry or they can see very small parts or they have floaters. When these or absolute loss of vision become less than 20/40 then the person is considered legally blind.
So now what they can see, if they can see, depends on the type and how bad the condition is.
Here’s a neat trick to imagine what it could feel like. Close both of your eyes. You see darkness, right? Now close one eye and leave the other one open. You don’t really “see” anything out of that closed eye at all. There’s no darkness. There’s just nothing there.
I saw that some blind people actually have difficulties falling asleep. Because they cant see the sun, their circadian rhythm and they’re sleep/wake signals are all out of sync.
Huh?? Do I see differently than everyone else? I can definitely still see my one closed eye’s darkness. It’s like a 98% transparent overlay on my open eye’s vision that’s a slightly different colour.
Good analogy, but not for me, one eye is very dominant, so if I cloae that lid initially I see out of the other eye but slowly it all fades to black as my dominant eye tries to take over and feed the blackness to my brain. Then it sonetimes reverses to vision again.
Look to the right and hold your right hand at the very edge of your peripheral vision. Now turn your head to the left. Keep your right hand still, and then try to look at it by moving only your eyes, not your head. There isn’t blackness there, your vision just doesn’t go that far. You don’t see, period. Being fully blind is having that complete absence of sensation in every direction.
That’s how a blind person explained it to me. He also said to plug your nose and try to tell what you can smell, and that it’s like that: there’s nothing there and no sensation of smelling nothing, just like how a sighted person can’t see X-rays.
Let’s wait for an affected person chiming in, but the way it was explained to me is this (when you were born blind): You don’t see anything. There’s no part in your brain developed to “see”. It is as if you tried to “see” with your elbow. There is no perception of sight l.
I don’t know much about it, but there is an interesting thing called “Synesthesia”, basically some of your senses mix, most famously people can “see music as colours”.
And blind people do seem to have quite uncanny abilities to get around, just relying on touch and sound. Who knows how they precieve it in their head. But it’s an interesting question for sure.
Add comment