Blindness cured...

[Notguest]

Also, she doesn't have the brain structures necessary for sight.

[Shades of Grey]

I'm not gonna lie, that tooth eye looks terrifying.

[neumanproductions]

If anyone hasn't already seen this then by all means follow the link to this thread.
This is a parody image set by kosherbacon on this page that explains why restoring eyesight might not be a good thing.

Lilly cured from blindness by kosherbacon

[Warwick]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05 ... t-To-Blind

Am reading the article "To See and Not See." Interesting so far.

[Bringerof_D]

problem with curing blindness is that it only works for people who have "recently" lost their sight. meaning in the last few years. For anyone who has been blind since birth or was blinded at a young age, the solution isn't quite as simple as fixing the physical problem which caused it. The neural connections and developments for sight would not exist in such a person, or be fairly basic. As someone else mentioned a movie about a guy who got his sight back, i remember seeing a documentary of some sort about the subject and those people tend to have their lives ruined by the supposed "gift" that science has given them.

Their life is thrown off by a large margin one would easily imagine. They've been blind since birth they've developed their other senses to compensate for their lack of sight and thats all they are used to now. all of a sudden they get sight and now their brain has to process all this extra information. Imagine yourself all of a sudden having a sixth sense, just like in the movies with the main character, you will go insane. everything becomes foreign because where there was once a voice, there is now also a face which you've never seen.

[Bara]

problem with curing blindness is that it only works for people who have "recently" lost their sight. meaning in the last few years. For anyone who has been blind since birth or was blinded at a young age, the solution isn't quite as simple as fixing the physical problem which caused it. The neural connections and developments for sight would not exist in such a person, or be fairly basic. As someone else mentioned a movie about a guy who got his sight back, i remember seeing a documentary of some sort about the subject and those people tend to have their lives ruined by the supposed "gift" that science has given them.

Their life is thrown off by a large margin one would easily imagine. They've been blind since birth they've developed their other senses to compensate for their lack of sight and thats all they are used to now. all of a sudden they get sight and now their brain has to process all this extra information. Imagine yourself all of a sudden having a sixth sense, just like in the movies with the main character, you will go insane. everything becomes foreign because where there was once a voice, there is now also a face which you've never seen.

Of course the easy answer is to... close or cover their newly functional eyes. Just as a newly blind person can learn to adapt to not seeing, with a blind from early age the reverse is theoretically true; possessing the advantage that they can shut out the new stimuli when it gets too difficult or overwhelming. Not that I mean to make light of something that would be harder than hell to learn to do. It'd most probably take years and years of therapy to learn to work with a new sense of sight and there are no guarantees that it would ever be more than a pain in the butt to the person involved.

[Warwick]

That's what the second article is about. In general, it's about the psychological and psyiological difficulties someone who has been without sight for long periods of time goes through after it's been restored. Some of the information about the discrepancies between a tactile and visual "world" are particularly insightful.

Honestly, it's a really good read. It's long, as New Yorker articles tend to be, but worth it.

[Wren]

If anyone hasn't already seen this then by all means follow the link to this thread.
This is a parody image set by kosherbacon on this page that explains why restoring eyesight might not be a good thing.

Lilly cured from blindness by kosherbacon

Oh man, choked on my soda looking at that.

I will read the article when I am not in zombie-like trance(aka lack of sleep), but from my initial skim over, it is very an interesting read that deserves my full attention when I am more awake.