How to Be Blind

Andrew Leland is losing his vision. He writes in The New Yorker about learning to navigate the world sightless at Colorado Center for the Blind. 

This can be rather nerve-wracking to read if you worry about being blind. I don't worry about it exactly but, unsurprisingly, it does make me anxious. If the possibility comes to mind then I quickly move my mind off of it.

In this case, I got rather anxious reading about Andrew Leland's initial trials in becoming independent. As it went, however, I grew very interested in all the things he was able to do. By the end, I felt actually hopeful. If I lost my vision, I'd want to be pushed into being just that independent.

Here's a bit of the piece, which you can read free at The New Yorker. 

I began to appreciate the novel experiences that blindness gave me. The notion that blind people have better hearing than the sighted is a myth, but relying on my ears did change my relationship with sound. Neuroscientists have found that the visual cortices of blind people are activated by such activities as reading Braille, listening to speech, and hearing auditory cues, such as the echo of a cane’s taps. At lunch, one day, Cragar’s wife, Meredith, who was visiting from Houston, came into the room carrying their fifteen-month-old daughter, Poppy. The sounds that she made—cooing, laughing—cut through the room like washes of color. I didn’t quite hallucinate these colors, but I came close. In the coming weeks, I had several mildly psychedelic experiences like this, a kind of blind synesthesia. The same thing happened with touch. I played blackjack with a Braille deck, and, after a few days, began to intuitively read the cards as if I were seeing them. In the art room, a teacher taught me to pull a wire through a mound of wet clay. Later, as I described the experience to Lily and our son, Oscar, on a video call, I had to remind myself that I’d never actually seen this tool or the clay. It was so clear in my mind’s eye.

My sense of space gradually transformed. Walking the carpeted halls of the center’s lower level, I could see a faint black-and-blue virtual-reality environment lit by some unseen light source. Sometimes my cane penetrated one of the velvety walls, and I had to redraw my mental map. When I was out in the city, Charles sometimes informed me that what I thought was Alamo Avenue was actually Prince Street, or that east was actually north, and I had to lift the landscape in my mind, rotate it ninety degrees, and set it back down. I could almost feel my brain trembling under the strain. But it was also kind of fun.

Andrew Leland, How to Be Blind, The New Yorker

Via The Dispatch's Morning Newsletter