Previous research has found that memories based mainly on sensory information decay if they are not maintained. For example, people who have become blind are likely over time to lose their visual memories and, thus, the ability to visually imagine objects, shapes, and faces. However, people who have lost hearing seem to have memories of both sounds and voices.
This time I present some lived experiences shared by people who have become blind.
Often people who have just started learning braille by touch try to imagine the characters visually. For example, seeing “black spots on a white background” and then associating:
– the braille o (⠕) with the print close parenthesis
– the braille v (⠧) with the print capital letter L
– the braille s (⠎) with a snake
– the braille t (⠞) with a chair or set of stairs in profile1-2
They associate braille characters either with print characters; through focusing on angles, curves, and straight lines, or with object shapes. But this all stops when they become tactually more experienced: “I associated braille characters with regular print characters in the beginning (…). Not now”2.
(…), he could perfectly well, visually, imagine a painting hanging over his living-room sofa, but could no longer, visually, imagine his wife’s, his daughter’s, or even his own face: these had now become tactually familiar3.
So intense was my desire to know the face of a stranger, as someone I was meeting for the first time, that vivid pictures of the person’s possible face would flash through my memory so rapidly that I could hardly concentrate on what they were saying. Slowly, slowly, that also began to fade. (…) I began to lose the memory that things looked like anything. I found myself caught with a slightly abrupt sense of surprise when people would say to me, “John, would you like to know what I look like?”4
And then, when the other senses had taken over, John Hull described it as “being reborn”.
I discovered so many beautiful things. For example, trees came back. I used to love trees – the forest, the greenery. Now stars had gone. Clouds had gone. The horizon was no more. But now I gradually discovered trees came back. They came back acoustically. (…) I discovered that in the winter, the trees whistled, and cracked, and hissed. In the spring, they became all fluffy. In the summer, they were like the rolling ocean waves as the wind swept across them. In the autumn, they became all tinkly. (…) And I felt, how incredibly beautiful that is. Why did I never notice it before?4
It seems people who lose vision use information that transfers between the senses to retrieve visual memories and, thus, visually imagine the world around them; that is, until reaching a certain level of experience in the other senses. And; at that point, their visual memories are gone. (See our blog for the scientific approach and the crossmodal correspondences between the senses.) In contrast, it seems people who lose hearing remember both sounds and voices. Could this be because they previously perceived multisensory information, for example, lip-reading by vision and voice by hearing (sound on), and that visual information maintains their auditory memories and, thus, their ability to imagine the auditory world around them?
See our blog for Activities; especially 31-33.
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1Graven, T. (2018). How individuals who are blind locate targets. British Journal of Visual Impairment, 36(1), 57-74.
2Graven, T. (2015). How blind individuals discriminate braille characters: An identification and comparison of three discrimination strategies. British Journal of Visual Impairment, 33(2), 80-95.
3Graven, T. (2009). Seeing Through Touch: When Touch Replaces Vision as the Dominant Sense Modality. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller AG & Co.
4John Hull Blindness and memory being reborn into a different world
