HOWSKI OF SUTKOWSKI
  • Home
  • Blog du moment
  • Music
    • My Bands
    • My Album, "Natural Impressions," Lives Here!
  • Books
  • Whoski?
  • Writerly Deets

The blind leading the sighted

2/12/2015

0 Comments

 
Pictureillustration by Nico Ecenarro
“Invisibilia,” the new podcast from creators of “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” recently explored a story about blindness, called “Batman,” in which a blind man inadvertently becomes a champion of the blind. Daniel Kish learned to get around by making clicking sounds with his mouth to create a mind picture of his environment. He can even ride a bicycle. Most blind people, however, are not encouraged to click to explore their surroundings and are instead helped too much, Kish would argue, in part because we live in a litigious society that wants to prevent injury.

Blind people are often discouraged from clicking because it makes the sighted uncomfortable. But a study of Kish’s brain shows the parts that register vision light up when things are waved in front of him. Please forgive my layperson’s description. The point is Kish, through training, has a certain type of vision that any blind person’s brain could develop, according to experts on the show. It “looks” similar to our peripheral vision. The brain responds to learning where things are through sound and the more a person learns this the more he or she can “see,” if you will, in what sounds very much like the mind’s eye. This is why Kish can ride a bike. It’s no party trick.

The show goes on to discuss how hard it is to give blind people this training because it requires allowing children to run into poles and the like. Our first instinct is always going to be to pull a blind loved one back from a busy street, even if he or she can hear it. Love makes us reach out to help and, as such, love is the very thing that can also shackle a person to a life of needing assistance. If we don’t give people a chance to fail, and all that, they might not succeed to the furthest degree of their potential.

I’m the first person to admit a desire to control in order to protect. This story makes me want to be better about that. Let my loved ones develop their own senses instead of pulling them back from the brink. Let them run into poles. It’s hard, though. But the other piece of the big picture to which this story points is that we are so very adaptable. It’s a total cliche at this point to say we only use a fraction of our brains. But when you hear a story like this, about a blind man riding a bicycle, it makes you wonder just how much of our brains we could use if we, ahem, put our minds to it. In what ways might we be able to expand by learning more? Maybe this is why the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Our brains would love something new.

So one of our challenges is how can we expand? And how can we let go to let others expand as well? I’m pretty sure we can surprise the hell out of ourselves. Let’s take it past the end of our noses, the end of our streets, the end of our belief systems.

Jenn Sutkowski is going off-road to explore this more. OK, maybe not literally off-road. Baby steps to big thinking.


This Full Frontal column appeared originally in the Newport Mercury.


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Picture
    I insisted on having this kind of school photo taken in first grade and believed the serious face was a capture of my very soul. #soulphotobomb

    It's me, Jennifer Bernice (rhymes with "Furnace": it was my Granny's name) Sutkowski

    • More details about my writing here.

    Archives

    November 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    January 2022
    March 2021
    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    June 2019
    May 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014

      Sign up and get my free 10K Hours of Getting Funnier in 10 Min ebook!

    Gimme My Funny!
Like a tarot card wrapped in a pierogi swathed in a dream.
©2005-present Jenn Sutkowski unless otherwise noted and linked. No steal-y, no squeal-y. Privacy policy here.
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Blog du moment
  • Music
    • My Bands
    • My Album, "Natural Impressions," Lives Here!
  • Books
  • Whoski?
  • Writerly Deets