Do people who are blind who all of a sudden gain eyesight feel overwhelmed with colors, seeing how people really look like, etc.?people really look like, etc.?

07 Dec Do people who are blind who all of a sudden gain eyesight feel overwhelmed with colors, seeing how people really look like, etc.?people really look like, etc.?

There are actually extremely few recorded cases of a “blind” person getting back their sight. The most common situation (depending what one means by “blind”)is when a person with advanced cataracts has them fixed with successful IOL (Intraocular Lens Implant) surgery. But for these people, the cataracts typically did not develop until late in life so vision restoration is mostly getting back what they were already used to. They rarely have any difficulties re-adapting to sight.

In the case (which I suspect is what you mean) where a person has been severely visually handicapped from childhood, gaining sight is usually not experienced as such a wonderful thing. It is difficult to imagine, but what we see “out there” is not a passive input of data, but rather a “projection” onto the world out there of how we have learned to interpret that visual data. Yes, visual performance is more like learning a language! If you have not learned how to “see” (because of some reversible impediment to images entering the eye) by the time you are physically mature (about age 13), you will probably never be able to make much sense of all those shapes and colors! This is much the same in learning a language to a degree of fluency one could possibly be mistaken for a native speaker -it is just highly unlikely if you don’t start until you are grown.

There is a film with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino called At First Sight. It deals with precisely this: a grown man who gained useful vision unexpectedly from surgery after a lifetime of blindness. He tried to deal with all the demands and expectations from the people around him who could not understand how somebody who could read an eye chart for the first time could not drive or look you in the eye when conversing. He found this very stressful. His case was written up as “To See and Not See” by the well-known neurologist and medical writer Oliver Sacks in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars . This and the movie made from it were inspired by the true life story of Shirl Jennings. He was a patient of mine and I was the ocular surgeon involved.

_Written by J. Trevor Woodhams, M.D. – Chief of Surgery, Woodhams Eye Clinic