There's a REALLY interesting Oliver Sacks article in this week's New Yorker about the brain adapting to sensory deprivation; it talks about one guy who was blinded at age 30 and within a few years had lost all visual memories, even having difficulty with visual concepts such as "facing". His brain adapted to other senses and he didn't have any mental "pictures" at all. He talks about how he loved the rain because he could step outside and immediately know where he was and where everything was around him by the sound the rain made as it struck different surfaces.
So a lot of people are like that, but then Sacks talks about a bunch of people who retain perfect visual memories and exist in states of constant hallucination, actually "seeing" as they move around (one girl says she can't move anywhere until she's created a visual map in her head). Like one guy who would scramble around and re-roof his house in the dead of night while his neighbours gasped and swooned, because he had created a perfect visual image in his head of what the roof looked like and just followed it.
I have another couple of pages to go--maybe I'll finish it at lunch.
So a lot of people are like that, but then Sacks talks about a bunch of people who retain perfect visual memories and exist in states of constant hallucination, actually "seeing" as they move around (one girl says she can't move anywhere until she's created a visual map in her head). Like one guy who would scramble around and re-roof his house in the dead of night while his neighbours gasped and swooned, because he had created a perfect visual image in his head of what the roof looked like and just followed it.
I have another couple of pages to go--maybe I'll finish it at lunch.
