GETTING rid of blindness, I’m told, is not such a bargain after all. Human eyes, you see-even when healed physically-still need training and rigorous practice before they can transmit what is “real” and “not real” back to the brain. It doesn’t much matter how long you’ve been sightless, either: a decade or so of blindness and your cerebral cortex has to be completely reprogrammed, as if from infanthood. On opening his eyes, the healed seer confronts a nonsensical, frightful, and, well, Cubist landscape. Over that shattered universe he must stubbornly impose the familiar 3D grid we live in.
Oliver Sacks has written about the new seer in An Anthropologist on Mars. Virgil, age fifty and blind since childhood, has had “successful” eye surgery. Five weeks later “he often felt more disabled than he had felt when he was blind. . . . Steps . . . posed a special hazard, because all he could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and crisscrossing lines; he could not see them (although he knew them) as solid objects going up or coming down in three-dimensional space.”
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