Interesting ideas interspersed with nonsense - by nikhil bhatla

The end of visual deprivation

nikhil — 2011-08-02T07:34:06-08:00

It's the first day, morning, after opening my eyes after 7 days of visual deprivation. I opened my eyes last night, first in a dark room right after midnight, and then we lit a candle.

The first thing that's very striking, even in the morning now, is that everything that's blue looks extremely BLUE. Either I forgot what blue looked like or... That color definitely seems brighter than it's ever seemed. I'm looking across outside my window to some flowers, some blue large flowers, I'm not sure what they're called. They look extremely bright. It's about 5 in the morning. And then my neighbor's lawn chair has these blue pads with a blue pattern on it and they're much brighter than anything else in the morning. And I'm looking at my blue Nalgene bottle, even that seems... I don't know. That color, that color just seems brighter than the rest.

To look out the window, it seems that it's the natural world that seems to stand out the most. Everything else is very geometric. All of the houses, all of the cars, our constructions are very geometric but it's the natural world that has, I guess so much visual complexity that it's hard to remember it.

Even purple seems to be standing out a bit. There's a bush with a bunch of small purple flowers. In a way this is like being drunk.

Woah.

And we have a yellow wall. Wow.

In a way this is a bit like being drunk. I'm having some difficulty focusing my eyes. And the world seems to move very...

Woah. So the clock light looks extremely green. Not really green, but some sort of low-chroma green-turquoise, almost a slight green silvery color. I mean, reds. The funny thing is when I look at these red LEDs or red clock lights, it doesn't seem much different than it was before. But it's these blues and greens which I'm finding really striking. I look out onto the world and everything is so green. And there's a big red house back there but the house, even though they just repainted, it doesn't look as striking.

So as I was saying, this is a little bit like being drunk. The world seems to move more slowly around me. As I move my eyes, I feel like perception is delayed. I also felt that it was really hard to keep my eyes still. So if I focus my eyes on a little corner or something the world seems to blend out a little bit, sort of disappear and I feel I have to keep moving my eyes in order for it all to persist, and to be maintained. Otherwise it becomes hazier.

The red of this dog [on a painted tile] is pretty...

I couldn't sleep last night. I mean I slept a bit, I had a few dreams I remembered so I must have slept some. I haven't had any trouble sleeping during the whole experiment. I mean it's been the opposite, I've been sleeping all the time. But turning on the lights seems to have just stimulated my brain, and then my brain just would not succumb to sleep.

I feel like I'm having a bit of an issue with depth perception. My eyes are getting better now, but last night... One thing interesting was that when we turned on the candle last night, and even the candle which is just a bright orange... The orange seemed fine as I expected but when I moved my eyes away and looked from the periphery it actually seemed to glow green. Not the candle flame itself but just the light emitted from the candle flame. And even the light coming from the street light leaking in through our windows in the darkness, they all just seemed much more blue.

I'm looking at this violet cup. And this really stands out. I'm looking at a bunch of pots, some red pots, some dark dark green pots, but it's just the violet pot that looks like it's popping, it almost looks fluorescent, in a sort of dark, blacklight-like violet. But it's just a plastic cup.

Things seems to have this blue tone, even lights that I have never seen as blue, like the streetlight creeping through the window. It seems to illuminate in this bluish tone. Same with the candle, the candle seemed to have this greenish tone which I had never seen before.

It's amazing how quickly you can forget what you see everyday. How it does not have anywhere near the same sense of realism in your mind and your imagination as it has in reality. I'm just standing outside now and it's just amazing. I mean, I dunno, it's just amazing. I'd forgotten.

My memory is such a poor copy of the real world, especially my perceptual memory.

Some reds do seems to stand out. The red on the slide of my neighbor's little toddler play pen is pretty bright.

My eyes seems to be moving slowly. When I move them I seem to see more of the blur. I feel like I'm just more aware of my saccades in general. I was looking at a photo on my phone and I could just see every little saccade. Maybe blur suppression during saccades might be suppressed after these 7 days.

It's taking me longer to focus. My eyes are just not as good with the focusing. As I move my eyes around, things just seem much slower, and it takes me longer to get something into focus.

I don't think it's because my eyes themselves are having trouble synchronizing. When I just cover one I eye and look at something it still seems blurred.

(Our lawn really needs to be mowed.)

It's sort of like being drunk. I can't really see everything that's coming into my eyes. Maybe I really just have to focus on the smallest part and then the other stuff just blurs away.

Here's the pyramid I made. It's still drying. But it's not bad actually, for a blind man's pyramid. It actually has a bit of an interesting angle to it.

Wow, there's so much here.

Your eyes are basically your brain exposed. Especially the retina. So I do feel like I couldn't sleep last night because my brain got the stimulation that it's been missing for a week. And it got it now, and even though I only opened my eyes for maybe 15 minutes, it just persisted. It was just enough to sustain my mind for many many hours. I was just tossing and turning all night last night.

This is... something else.

--

Another interesting thing is that I don't think my eyes are very dilated, as I might have expected. Becca looked at my eyes by candle light last night and she said that they looked much smaller. And this morning I looked at one eye, my left eye, with the bathroom light on, and it was actually a normal dilation, even though I was extremely sensitive to light at night. I could see things Becca couldn't see, like the top of the curtains in our dark room. So it definitely seems like my sensitivity is enhanced.

I tried to read a magazine last night but I think because my eyes had trouble focusing I couldn't read very fast. Still now, when I look at my whiteboard, reading itself seems like much more of an effort. It still comes fairly automatically but it's much more... I bet if I measured my reading speed it would be much slower now than it was before I started.

The visual world is amazing.

After survival school I said that, I made the radical claim which I knew was radical when I was making it, that the last sense I would want someone to take away from me would be my sense of taste because it brought me such great pleasure after survival school. When I got to eat all the great foods that we have and not the same monotonous gruel.

But now I take it all back. I had taste during that whole time. I think taste perhaps is the sense that has the greatest capacity for pleasure. But it is vision that tells you almost everything about the world. Vision is by far the most useful sense, at least for us and our environment. But I suspect perhaps for everything. It just gives you the most efficient way to measure space.

I do think part of me may have just... I look around and even this orange Sham-Wow... I guess I just forgot what color looked like. At least some colors. Reds and browns don't seem to be, but some of these yellows and especially the blues, they just really pop. And I think I had forgotten it.

I don't think I can actually imagine color or even dream color. I had one dream where the green was more green than any green I'd ever seen before. The green in the blades of grass. But other than that I think color plays a pretty weak role in my dreams. I was dreaming visually almost every night and I think I could remember my dreams a bit better because they were my only pseudo-visual experience while I was depriving myself.

It's quite cool to look around now and just see all the stuff I had been imaging in my head and to see how it's so much more than what I had imagined.

Especially things that are complicated. Like the stack of dishes or the trees and the leaves.

I wonder if this is why blue had always been my favorite color while I was little. Maybe it had this pop unlike all the other colors and maybe that's why, that's really what caused my attention to it, and why I made it my favorite color.

I also definitely feel like I have trouble shifting my focus. So as I'm focusing on something close to my face and then I go to look far out it takes a second to focus, instead of a few hundred milliseconds. And vice versa: if I'm looking far and I focus close it takes me much longer. So I think my whole focusing muscle system has been relaxed and has lost some of its performance, its efficiency.

I also think my ability to attend to my peripheral vision might be affected. I've been watching this cat as it's been watching this bluebird, ready to pounce. They're probably 10 feet apart. When I look at the bluebird I can't see the cat. I'm probably 30 feet from them. When I look at the cat I can't see the bluebird. So that's what leads me to believe that my ability to attend to things in my periphery is also affected.

--

Of course all of this heightened blue and violet and greens could be the result of the morning light. But I have a feeling that since I also saw it last night that it isn't.

--

Feeling dizzy again. I think I'm going to go for a walk around the block but I'm feeling a bit nauseous and a bit dizzy. Maybe my balance system is getting tuned back in.

--

Just went around a couple blocks. I'm feeling pretty nauseous and dizzy. The blues and purples are still standing out much more, in terms of the flowers and the cars. Not even the purples, the violets.

--

Even cars that are silver look sort of violet to me. It's really quite odd.

--

People's faces don't actually look weird, unlike my survival experiment when people's faces did look really weird. So I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe they looked weird because I was comparing them to my face, which I did see, cause I was taking photos of myself. Or maybe it was something to do with the natural environment. [I suspect that there's a difference between no visual input and lots of visual input that lack faces - the latter may make faces look weird while in the former things remain stable]. That's all.

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Visual deprivation: Days 6 and 7

nikhil — 2011-08-01T12:51:06-08:00

[For background, see my first post on the experiment. This is a rough transcript of a dictation made on day 7.]

It's T minus 11 hours. After talking to Sachin yesterday [day 6], he had a good idea to slowly introduce light back to me eyes, like starting with a candle or another single light source and then maybe add another. So I'm going to open my eyes at midnight tonight [of day 7 when this was written], which will be exactly 7 days. I'll put my contacts in and go into a dark room in our house and then ask Becca to turn on a candle or flashlight and see what happens. And then expand from there. And then go to sleep and see what happens in the morning.

We ran some errands in the evening. I got some clay and I played with it, and made a pyramid today [day 7]. I also tried to make a hollow ball, but that didn't work so well. We went to Target.

In terms of my perception I've been having more flickering with my eyes closed, and it seems to be getting more frequent. I also talked to a bunch of friends for 4 or 5 hours. Maybe when my mind is working, like when I'm talking to someone or trying to understand what someone is saying, when I'm engaged maybe that increases my chances of seeing the flickering. The flickering hallucination seems to be happening once an hour now. Much more than when it started. So the rate seems to be increasing. Maybe my brain is rewiring or reactivating or reperceiving or something.

I've been dizzy. Yesterday I ran into my door frame and it left a nice sized bump on my forehead. I have been feeling like my balance is less good than it was earlier on in the experiment, so I feel like my balance is getting worse. I've been talking about how I usually walked much farther than I actually had in familiar neighborhoods. We went for a walk and I was better able to estimate and calibrate. I think that's what was screwed up, I just wasn't well-calibrated to estimate distance based on number of steps or passage of time or something like that. So I've been getting better at that and it's been improving.

I think my sense of hearing is getting worse, not better. Either people are mumbling more, which I find hard to believe, or because I don't have the visual cues on where to attend it's hurting my audible perceptions. So I actually think my hearing is getting worse because I haven't been able to focus my attention with my vision. Since my attention is much more widely distributed I think it's harder for me to pick up on specific point sources of sound, like when someone's speaking. It's just a theory, but it does seem like my hearing has gotten worse. It definitely has not gotten better, at least for trying to understand what people say.

What else... I was telling Dave today that I've been feeling very impotent. This whole experiment has made me feel like a child. There are all these things I want to do that I can't do. I can't make dinner very well. I guess with time you get better with all of these things but at least at the moment I can't go for a run. I've been wanting to work on this new program I'm working on, I can't do that really. I can imagine that the longer this goes on the more frustrated I get, and even if my skills improve I still feel like I'd be more and more frustrated. Because I know that all I have to do is open my eyes and I'll be back to normal. And have all the capacities that I actually have. So, I feel very impotent. I feel like a child. I hated feeling like a child when I was young. I hated not being able to do. And I was so happy when I left my parents' home and went to college and now actually could do basically anything I wanted. And right now I feel like I've regressed back to a state where I can't do anything I want. I'm just dependent on Becca or other people to do simple things for me. And the more advanced things I want to do I just can't, I just can't do.

So I'm really excited for this thing to be over. I'm not sure what's going to happen to my visual perception but I'll try to record those thoughts after the experiment is over.
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Visual deprivation: Day 5

nikhil — 2011-07-30T23:31:59-08:00

[For background, see my first post on the experiment. This is a rough transcript of a dictation made on day 6.]

Today was an interesting day. Very nice weather. I'm still pretty lethargic, I took a 2 and a half hour nap, but so did Becca so I'm not sure if it's due to my experiment.

It was Jude's birthday so we went to dinner at a place in the Navy Shipyard called the Navy Shipyard Bistro or something like that. There were three other people: Jude, her friend Kristen and A
Amanda, and Becca and me. I had never met Kristen and Amanda before so it was sort of interesting. When I start seeing again it will be interesting to compare my mental images of their faces based on their voices with their actual faces (we took pictures). The food was good. Because there were so many people I was pretty quiet, as it's hard to know when to speak especially if people are having relatively fast conversation without being able to see.

It's also hard to know when questions are being directed at me, unless they're very specific to me.

After that we went sailing. Becca and I had never been sailing before, and Jude arranged a sailboat cruise at night (9 to 11pm) with this couple who ran the business and owned the boat. I did that with my blindfold. I did not get sea-sick which was a bit of a concern because I'd been getting more car-sick while blind. I think the car accelerates and decelerates and changes directions much more than the boat. We didn't go much faster than 4 knots. It was fun, and it would probably be more fun if I was able to see. It was very relaxing. You could hear lots of party boats in the Boston harbor, and I could hear all sorts of people in the harbor and wharf.

Overall I don't think my hearing or any of my senses have been enhanced so far after 5 days.

It was very calm.

At this point I'm just wanting time to go really fast so this experiment will be over.

On the boat it did seem to go by really fast. It was 2 hours but it felt like an hour or less. Overall the strange thing that's happened is that I feel like time is passing more slowly than it actually is. Conversely I feel like space is passing more quickly than it actually is. So when we go walking I think we've gone probably twice the distance unless I carefully pay attention to the intersections. Even then I screw up and I think we've gone farther than we have. I've been to calibrate and improve in that but it's more of a conscious calibration or a sort of "I thought we went this far, but historically I knew that that far was twice as far as we'd actually gone, so divide by 2 and that's where we are." That kind of thing. And it is a little bit strange. Either our vision helps us with the passage of time significantly (which I'm beginning to believe), so that we're calibrated appropriately. I've also been getting better at estimating the passage of time but my instincts are way off.

What's funny is that the space expansion is the opposite of what you'd expect based on the temporal result. So if I feel like time is moving more slowly than it is, then when I'm moving through space, since this movement is a function of speed which is a function of time, if I think time is moving more slowly then I should also have this instinct that I'm moving through space more slowly when I'm walking. But it's the opposite. I feel like I'm moving much further in space. So the perception of time passing and the perception of space passing must be independent and unlinked, because if they were linked they'd go in the opposite direction than they are actually going.

So I think what's happening with space is this. With walking there is a certain number of landmarks, like in a familiar neighborhood. I feel like I've walked farther than I actually have because there are only a certain set of landmarks. I don't remember every single house on the street. I remember maybe the big ones at the ends and maybe one or two in the middle. So I guess what I am expecting is that, OK I've passed one, OK I've passed the next, OK I've passed this one and OK I should be at the end. In actuality I've only passed three houses and maybe just one of them was the one that I remembered. So I think that seems to be what might be happening with the spatial expansion. My memory of the space is not accurate, and because of that I feel like I'm walking farther than I actually am.

Another interesting thing happened. As we were preparing to go to Jude's party I started seeing more flashes. This was the most prolonged period of flashes so far. I was seeing some sort of flashing in my vision. I've experienced this before when I'm drunk. Often when I'm going to the bathroom when I'm drunk I notice this. If I close my eyes then I see all this "activity", all of this "noise" or something or light-darkness flickering. It's really fast flickering in my vision when I'm drunk when I close my eyes (often or sometimes). So today I wonder if it was because I was moving around fast. I was cleaning the cooler, putting beer in the cooler, and when I stopped I would get this flickering. And it wasn't uniform through my field of view it was mostly concentrated in the upper right corner and then decreased over distance. When it was happening it was very strong but if I attended to it I think it would stop and go away. I don't know if my eyes or my brain is starting to perceive spontaneous activity which is normally drowned out by environmental stimuli. Since I've cut off the visual environment, maybe my brain is now trying to interpret the spontaneous activity that's happening in my visual cortex. So that started happening.

Other than that there isn't much else to report. I think that's about it.

The name of the ship we went on was Tupelo Honey, which is a reference to a Van Morrison song. The captain and the other woman working on the boat were very nice. They never had anyone go on their ship who couldn't see before, but they didn't even ask what I was doing, even when we were discussing it amongst ourselves. I thought that was a little bit too polite especially when we started talking about it.

I guess that's it.

I'm really happy I have 2 days left. I just want the time to fly. I just want to be able to open my eyes again. There's all this stuff I want to do which I can't really while I'm blind. I just want to start doing those things again. So maybe this will really help me get back into my science [research], though I suspect it will really motivate me around the software I'm trying to build to make science more understandable.

Alright.

--

One last comment on generating faces from voices. I think this could be a testable theory, though it would be difficult but perhaps possible. I think the faces I generated for the people I met who I had never seen before are likely a function of a couple things. One is I think just the voice quality. The face generation from the voice quality is likely dependent on faces I've seen before that have a similar voice quality. So like similar pitch or frequencies, is it a high voice or a low voice, a raspy voice (like the captain's voice), stuff like this. I have somewhat clear pictures for each of these 4 people that I met. I think what it's based on is either an average of all the people I've seen before with similar voice quality, a sort of weighted average where the weight is dependent on how similar the voice is and that's how much that voice owner's face contributes to this unseen person's face. Or memorability. For whatever reason some people's faces you remember more than others (likely observer-dependent). So I think this is sort of what's happening: Given this voice, what are faces I've seen that match that voice that I remember (either consciously or unconsciously), and what sort of face emerges from examining all of those old faces that I remember. So that's one thing.

There's a second thing though, asides from voice quality, which also has to do more with personality: What kinds of questions did the person ask? What was their tone? Did it seem like they were listening well? Did it seem like they weren't listening well? Were they agitated, or bored? Some of these personality qualities that are beyond just the sound of the voice. So with that I start to think about how they might be dressed. So if they're a little more uptight-sounding, maybe they're wearing more formal clothes. Maybe they're moving in a less smooth way, in a more fast and sharp way.

So I have mental pictures of the faces based on voice quality (based on people I know before who have had faces associated with those voices) and then also something to do with personality (how they behave, the questions they ask, the tone of their speech, not the sound of their speech). I think those 2 factors might contribute to the mental faces I've generated for these people that I've never seen, only heard.

Now that I think about it, it's sort of like the faces we generate for radio DJs. Rarely have mine matched the real thing.

If people had more drawing talent on average, it would be fun to make this into a sort of game. Play a voice, then each team draws the face that they think match. Then the true voice-generating face is revealed, and the closest team wins.
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Visual deprivation: Day 4

nikhil — 2011-07-29T23:32:09-08:00

[For background, see my first post on the experiment. This is a rough transcript of a dictation made on day 5.]

It's a beautiful day (referring to day 5). Right now I'm sitting in the sun, without a shirt on. It's quite nice. Boris (my tortoise) has emerged from his little borough. He didn't come out yesterday but he came out today to eat his lettuce (or so Becca tells me).

So far the experiment is going pretty good I think. I called the sailing place and they said it was fine to come on to the boat not being able to see, and I think I'm going to do that. So I have no excuse to end this experiment early.

I had more energy today than any of the previous 3 days. I took maybe 2 naps, 1 in the afternoon around 5pm and another at night.

I've been listening to this book called "Area 51" on audiotape, which is interesting. It's supposed to be about Area 51, which is famous for UFOs and flying suacers, but the book has been mostly a history of the military development that happened there. This includes the development of the U2 bomber and the Blackbird SR-71, though apparently it's supposed to be called the RS-71. The Blackbird was a derivative of a plane called A-12 made by Lockheed. The book is more of a technological military history of what spy planes were developed at Area 51. It does say that the incident at Roswell where people reported seeing a flying saucer crash as well as one or more alien-like bodies (big heads, big eyes, small bodies) was just Russian technology that was taken from the Germans after the end of World War II. And they claim that there was Russian writing (Cyrillic) inside the dash of the flying saucer. But they haven't yet explained anything about the bodies (kids?) or anything about the craft's ability to hover, to go really fast and stop and hover, which I guess is technology that's available today but not in the shape of a flying saucer and was technology that was definitely not available in 1947, at least according to what people think they know. So I'm not fully sold on the idea, but I've been listening to that audiobook. It's pretty interesting but really, really long especially compared to the Helen Keller autobiography which was really short.

I got halfway through that today, and listened to it for maybe 6-8 hours. It put me to sleep twice.

Otherwise I had a lot more energy. I did a lot of household chores. I didn't leave the house but I mopped and I did the dishes, put away the dishes. I also did some exercises because I was getting to feel just like a bag of sand. So I did some push-ups and sit-ups so that was good. Overall, more energy.

I think I might be getting used to this. I think the eyemask isn't bothering me as much although it's always a relief to take it off and get some fresh air on my eyelids. I also took a shower today.

Becca did look up some other visual deprivation experiments. I hadn't looked up anything because I wanted to go in blind (whatever, stupid pun). It was hard to find things. First we searched for visual deprivation experiments and apparently my blog post is the second result, which is ludicrous because it doesn't say anything and has no data on the topic because I haven't posted my experience yet.

We found a few things. People have done experiments with people where they visually deprive them for anywhere from an hour to a few hours and they find that they're visual sensitivity is heightened at the neurological level, not just the retinal level. So TMS stimulation of the visual cortex leads more easily to seeing phosphenes (bright dots in your vision) and you have better acuity in terms of measuring angle differences in visual gratings. So that's pretty interesting, and what I would have expected. My mom was hoping that this experiment would just heal my vision (since I'm near-sighted). So I think my visual acuity will go up.

We found another study from the 50s. I guess they did a lot of interesting stuff in the 50s and 60s, maybe because they weren't as paranoid as people are today about human treatment. They did an experiment where they basically put people in solitary confinement where they were stuck on a cot in a small room, with no stimulation. They had sound muffling and they wore goggles to blur their vision so they couldn't see any patterns. Apparently people only lasted 2 or 3 days. My experiment is not as serious as that - I can move around, I can talk to people, I can go out, but it didn't sound like they measured any visual response after the experiment was over.

So far there hasn't been anything in humans that is quite like what I'm doing, at least reported in the scientific literature (that Becca and I were able to find).

The last interesting experiment we found was done in mice. There are lots of childhood deprivation, critical period kinds of experiments in mice, but we found one in adults. They deprived mice of vision for 7, 30 or 120 days. What they found after 7 days (which is how long I'm doing it for) is that the mice's visual sensitivity had gone up. They didn't measure behavior, so it's not as convincing as the human experiments, but they did measure electrical activity in the visual cortex, which is a good correlate I suppose. So after 7 days the sensitivity goes up (the same stimulus gives a greater response in visual cortex), but after 30 or 120 days it goes down. So they interpret that as an initial period where sensitivity increases and then decreases. That's the closest study to what I'm doing, though 7 days in the mouse is probably longer than 7 days in the human, so for now I'm expecting my sensitivity and acuity to go up.

There are also lots of results if you search for blindness simulation. These are people who are trying to show people what it's like to be blind. These I find less interesting because they aren't really about what effect deprivation has on your visual experience of the world or your qualia, your consciousness.

Even for me right now I don't feel like my hearing is enhanced, I don't feel like my sense of smell is enhanced, I don't feel like my sense of touch is enhanced, I don't feel like my sense of taste is enhanced. I don't feel like anything is enhanced though I'm not measuring this in a more consistent, experimental manner.

I keep going. Only 3 full days left. I think I'm going to end the experiment Tuesday morning when I wake up. If I end it Monday night that technically would be the full 7 days but it will be dark, and it may not be a good time to get the full effect of deprivation if it's so dark. So I think I'll end Tuesday morning.
]]>Comments:
]]>Liz Dzeng: Hey Nik! Wow, I'm so impressed that your doing this. It sounds incredibly hard with a huge amount of self discipline required. I could not even last an hour I bet if I tried. I've really enjoyed reading your posts which are so descriptive and introspective. You really should publish these findings in a scientific journal, so few experiments have been done on this. I'm really interested to read about your "unmasking"!

Niniane: Are there any more entries??
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Visual deprivation: Day 3

nikhil — 2011-07-28T22:09:29-08:00

[For background see my first post on this experiment. This is a rough transcript of a dictation made on day 4.]

I sort of just feel like I'm a puddle of mud. I sort of just feel like I would behave if I'm sick, cause I don't really do much and I just lie around all day. So it just sort of feels like I'm giving myself some sort of sleeping sickness, or self-inducing some sort of sickness, which is not a good feeling.

Yesterday we did a few things. We went to the Arlington Library to look for a book on Braille. We weren't able to find the one we were looking for though we did find a bunch of Braille children books. I started to feel them and it's just impossible to make anything out. And I just don't even have the energy or the attention span to try very hard.

I got really dizzy while I was there. I guess it's a beautiful library (Becca kept saying) and I'd never been there before, and I got really dizzy going up the stairs and even up and down in the elevator. And on the car ride back I was feeling really car sick and really uncomfortable and unhappy.

I was thinking a lot about how I think that vision is the sense that gives us the most truth about the world. It's the most efficient at providing the truth. So even if you're blind your whole life, if vision was restored, that method would seem the most true. When we were in the library I kept trying to visualize or reinterpret the world in terms of vision and visual space, and that makes me feel very much like I'm in my head, that I'm not really in the world. I tried to imagine if I was blind my whole life, presumably I wouldn't be able to do that. I wouldn't be reinterpreting the world into imagined visual space, this would just be my direct, non-visual sensory experience of the world and that would mean whatever it meant. But I can't help but wonder, say if you're deaf-blind and you're just feeling by touch or you're just blind and you're hearing and touching, what are you doing with that information, what sort of space are you creating? It must be so qualitatively different than the space I'm trying to create which is largely dependent on what I imagine things I touch would look like, rather than them having some existence as a touched object in their own right. So that's a little interesting.

Another thing we did yesterday is we went out to dinner to Taipei Tokyo (our favorite restaurant in Davis Square) and that was sort of fun. It really lifted my spirits. And the food was really good. I just had some sushi, and that was really easy to eat with my hands though apparently I made a big mess of the soy sauce bowl, spilling it everywhere. And they didn't really say anything, even thought the waitress recognized us she didn't really ask what I was doing or what happened to me, which is fine. And the food was really good.

I've been talking a bit with Becca about how I think it's very liberating to be blind. I might title this post "The Freedom of Blindness". It's liberating but almost too liberating. When you're speaking you have no sense of whether anyone cares, all of the body language and facial expressions are lost, so whatever your natural proceedng uninterrupted would be of your speech, that's just the way it is. Because I can't tell how anyone else is responding to what I'm saying. Whether they're bored or really interested or think I said something crazy. So you're just free from all of the non-verbal social cues, which is extremely liberating. But then on the other hand I have no connection, I can't connect with anyone with what I'm speaking, cause I can't tell what their response is. So if you don't really mind what other people think I think it's great. If you just want to talk and feel unencumbered by social response this is actually quite fun. But if you sort of care about what other people are thinking and how they're responding then that's a whole other type of distance. In addition to the visual distance that's there, the visual simulation that seems to keep me in my mind a lot, there's also this social distance because there's no way of telling how I'm speaking. There's no eye contact, which is so important. There's no non-verbal cues.

In a couple of days we're going to Jude's party, where we're going to dinner and going sailing, so I guess I'm going to call the sailing place today and see if they'll let me on the boat without being able to see. Even if they do I'm not sure I'll do it. But I'm sort of sick of this. I just feel like I'm almost literally sick. And I don't think anything's going to happen when I open my eyes. Maybe every hour I open my eyes a little bit or something happens and a little shard of light comes in, or I wake up from a nap, even though I'm wearing this night mask, there's still a little bit of a light that can creep in from the bottom. So I get these shards of light and then, taking that miniscule amount of information I recreate, I can't tell whether I'm hallucinating something is happening in front of me or I'm building on these shards of light and recreating what I think is happening. I can't quite tell. So I may end the experiment in 2 days, which is a bit unfortunate. This is much worse, or much more difficult to do, than the semi-starvation experiment I've done. And maybe even more difficult than survival school, though maybe I can't really remember well enough to compare (since that was 4 years ago). I mean I can do things, but it's just that I can't really do things.
]]>Comments:
]]>Yu-li: I like your introspective description. You really did something hard. I don't want to try that even though I wonder how it feels like. About construction of space, I think measure theory can be helpful. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_theory) Even without visual information, it must be possible to construct mental space of things as we have information on spatial order of things. I think what matters is (mental) metric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_%28mathematics%29).
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Visual deprivation: Day 2

nikhil — 2011-07-27T23:13:08-08:00

[For background see my first post about my blindness experiment. This post is a rough transcript of a dictation on day 3.]

Yesterday I had a little bit of an adventure. I went around the block by myself. It's amazing how much I do not walk in a straight line. With cars going by on the street, it's amazing how close they seem though I guess they're at least 6-8 feet away. So I had a tough time, I just went around the block. It's easy when there's a fence or something that you can follow just with your hands but for lots of the yards that don't have a fence and maybe just have grass it becomes more difficult to go straight. To know when to turn I was just watching out for when the sidewalk dropped but of course there are driveways, so if I accidentally veered down a driveway there's not going to be a steep drop. And then I'm relying on my ability to detect the textural difference of the cement on the sidewalk from the asphalt on the street, which is possible but still a bit frightening. Overall it was pretty frightening.

I made it and didn't get lost. I was scared. Funny thing is that it ended up taking a lot longer than it felt. It felt like 10 to 15 minutes but when I came back home Becca said that it had taken 30 minutes. In general it seems that, although I've been sleeping a lot, time is passing a lot faster than it feels like it's passing, which is unusual. So that was pretty frightening but I made it home. I didn't fall, I ran into a few trees and a stop sign pole (which I later learned was a parking restriction sign) on one street, but overall it was alright.

So I may go again later, maybe at night when there's less traffic. Though the cars really helped me determine the ends of the blocks because my sense of distance is extremely poor. I tend to think that I've gone a lot farther in space than I actually have, so I think I should be someplace but I'm only halfway there. This is opposite to the effect I experience for the passing of time. So the cars really help because at least around our block there's a stop sign at each intersection. So I can hear for when the car stops and then I sort of know that I haven't passed the edge of the block. That's the other thing. I think those wheelchair-accessible sidewalk ramps on corners might be not so great for blind people because you lose the steep drop that delineates where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

So that was exciting and scary. A lot of sleeping still, just reclining. I worked on my software in my mind and solved a few more technical problems. We've been watching the new MTV show Teen Wolf at night, which is not great to watch when you're blind because a lot of stuff happens on the screen that no one on screen talks about. Which I guess is probably true for most movies.

I helped Becca make dinner. I chopped up some broccoli, threw them in the frying pan. Tomorrow we're going to go to the library to get a book on Braille. I've also been listening to Helen Keller's autobiography, which she wrote when she was about 20 years old. It's pretty short. But it's pretty interesting how she learns to read. She goes blind and loses her hearing when she's about 1 and a half years old, so she has to do all this basic learning about the world missing 2 key senses. First, she has an amazing teacher, who I think is perhaps more impressive than she is. Second, she learns to read by her teacher writing letters on her hand, and eventually she learns to listen to people speaking by touching their lips. This all happens around the age of 6 or 8 I think. This is the most amazing part of the book because she talks about learning concepts, such as doll and water, which she can be aware of doing because she's so old. I doubt most of us remember learning our first concept of an object, let alone an abstract concept like love, but she remembers learning all of this. If you're curious about cognitive processes that happen in children, I highly recommend reading her account of learning her first words.

She can also tell what people are writing by putting her hand on their hand when they write, which is called the "mechanical alphabet". So people can communicate with her in that way as well.

It's interesting to read her book when I myself can't see and listen to all the stuff she does, like going on a rowboat on a river. After my little experience going around the block that seems even more frightening, cause God knows where you'd end up with the current especially if you don't have any sense for what the terrain should be like, which I do with my own neighborhood. So she does a lot of things which I guess if this is your lifelong condition you learn to do.

This does sort of suck.

So I've switched to using a black eyemask. The eyemask started irritating my eyebrow, so I've spent some time with the eyemask off, which is nice. I also took a shower yesterday, which was nice. I just did that by keeping my eyes closed. Sometime I don't do that well, so shards of light do enter when my eyes inadvertantly open a little bit, but then I just close them pretty quickly. I also normally wear contacts and can't see very well without them anyhow. So I don't think these shards of light will affect the experiment, and if they do, I guess it's now part of this experiment.

So that's it. Depending on whether Jude chooses to go on a sailboat adventure for her birthday and whether they let me go on blind, this experiment may last 5 days. If they do let me go on blind, or if she doesn't go there, I'm still shooting for my 7 days ending Monday night.

So one interesting thing about this blindness experiment so far is that I really feel very distant from the world, and that I'm trying to map what I perceive through my other senses (hearing, touch), trying to map those 2 senses back onto what I know to be the visual world of this environment. So it's almost like I'm really living in my mind more deeply than I had before when I could see, because when I could see there was a sort of veridical truth and I didn't have to constantly imagine what the truth was like. But without sight I'm constantly trying to imagine what is the shape of this object, what does it look like. I don't think this is what people who are congenitally blind would do but since I know that there are visual objects out there, the visual world seems like the veridical world and everything else seems like it's trying to approximate it, to get me to that visual world. So I feel like I'm deeper in my mind, much more distant from reality now than I was when I could see, because I'm constantly trying to do this recreation, this simulation in my head as I get all these non-visual inputs. So it's interesting. There's this great distance, greater distance between me and the world than there's been before.
]]>Comments:
]]>Kanika: I don't know if you did this already - bit about three years ago a movie came out- beautiful movie about the blind- called BLACK by Sanjay leela bansali staring amitabh.... I must watch it!!!

Yu-li: Interesting. Your experiment tells that normal sense of distance greatly depends on visual information.It must be specific to visual sense. Physically, other types of information are not very sensitive to distance I think (They are not linear. I mean, the strength of scent depends on both distance and quantity for example). I am sorry that my description is not very accurate. Good luck!

Niniane: This is an awesome story. I like all the details of how you're watching Teen Wolf, etc. It sounds domestic and pleasant.

mom: good reading your descriptions and findings son. Yes, the Indian movie 'Black' suggested by Kanika is wonderful and maybe you would be able to appriciate it. Netflix should have it.

sakshi : hmmm.. ive been out of the loop !!! just got back in.. another thumbs up for black !!!
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Visual deprivation: Day 1

nikhil — 2011-07-26T23:07:07-08:00

[All posts in this series have been backdated to the date they occurred. For background info on my visual deprivation experiment, see my first post on the topic. This post is a rough transcript of a dictation I made on day 2.]

I started Monday night (last night) at midnight. Becca taped stretched-out cotton balls over my eyes, couple pieces of tape, and I slept that way for the night. I slept fine. When I woke up in the morning, I woke up but felt sleepy most of the day, all day, and I was just napping. I'm not sure if my circadian rhythm is screwed up because I'm not getting much sunlight. With the cotton, if I stare into a light or the sun, I see a uniformly diffuse orange. So it's not completely dark, but there are certainly no visual patterns.

So I spent most of the day just lounging around, I'm really tired, I napped, I went outside in the backyard I napped, came back in I napped.

We went for a walk with Erika to the Indian grocery store where the man there was very worried about me but then when I told him it was an experiment he was very angry at me, though I couldn't tell [Becca told me]. The best thing about being blind is that you don't have to respond. You can't see and therefore don't have to respond to any of the non-verbal cues people give you, the facial expressions and body gestures and languages, all of that is just gone. And it's actually quite liberating, because you're not responding so much as you're just acting, which is nice and I find liberating.

I've just been having trouble staying awake. And it's mostly just darkness. In the night we also walked to the grocery store which is farther. And I guess a lot of people were giving me looks, which of course I can't see [Becca told me]. In the night time we decided to switch the cotton balls as they got pretty itchy and annoying. My eyes were a little sealed shut from not being able to wash them in the morning. So I took off the cotton balls and replaced it with a dark, black-colored eye mask and this actually works really well. I can rub my eyes. I can wash my face. And it's actually much darker than the cotton balls. There's more of a risk of actually opening my eyes, though. I've gotten minor cracks of light come into my eyes once in awhile, but no major mistakes so far. And I keep my eyes closed under the mask.

I've been spending my time thinking a lot about my new software, solving some design and implementation questions.

I feel very lethargic, and since it's harder to do normal exercises I feel like a bag of body parts, not really very active. I'm going to go try and walk around the block by myself. I'm using a bright yellow broomstick as my blind man's stick.

It's also worth noting that I don't feel any strong emotions. I mostly just feel tired. I don't feel sad, I don't feel happy, I just don't really feel much, pretty neutral. So my emotional response is fairly indifferent.

One thing I was telling Becca is that visual deprivation, at least so far, doesn't seem to elicit the strong visceral response that other forms of deprivation, like starvation, do. With starvation, you get this hunger, this really innate, intrinsic feeling to end it. Same thing if you hold your breath for a while. Also for me I feel something similar in social isolation, where I get a really strong desire to talk, to myself or other people. But with visual deprivation I don't have a very strong desire to rip my eyemask off and to see again. So visual deprivation seems to be in a different class, it doesn't seem to have the strong desire to end that other deprivation conditions have.
]]>Comments:
]]>Nicky: Did a desire to rip off the eye mask emerge after a few days? Did it just take longer than food deprivation or isolation? I am on the edge of my seat waiting for the next post!

nikhil: Nope, a desire to rip off the eyemask and open my eyes never emerged, certainly nothing like the desire to eat after food deprivation or the desire to breathe after air deprivation.

Howard: well, those are interesting comparisons because one could argue that the other two forms of deprivation you use for example are tied to very real needs of survival on a biological level. While food is a little different because given your survival school mean experiment you weren't lacking nutrition just variety and craving. With air deprivation, that's entirely different, no air = no life and your body starts to react involuntarily. so the one easy conclusion is that vision is not tied to survival instincts

nikhil: Howard, I completely agree. I also think it's interesting to think about the brain basis for each of these deprivations. Vision is believed to rely mostly on the outer parts of the brain (the cortex), whereas more basic body functions like breathing and perhaps even hunger lie deeper in the brain. Maybe it's these different brain locations that contribute to the different class of feelings that each type of deprivation generates. So maybe inner brain deprivations generate the intrinsic or visceral feeling to stop, while outer brain deprivations don't.

Yu-li: Hi, I've waited for your post! Your experiment is so interesting. Some ideas come to my mind. 1) You could feel sleepy because of conditioning. The sense of darkness might be associated with sleepiness. 2) You also could feel tired because of mental resource reallocation. (It's a hypothesis). I mean, in some sense, you had depended on visual feedback in order to control your movement. Now you have to decide your movement without some information, so you need to compensate the loss with other types of information. Your body and brain could have been working very hard subconsciously. 3) I think some portion of emotional stability(?) can be explained by decreased quantity of information. I mean, it might not be specific to visual sense. For example, if you cannot smell, you would feel quite indifferent to food. That's what I think. Good luck!
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False start (a paint & hardwood interlude)

nikhil — 2011-07-25T15:50:41-08:00

My visual deprivation got off to a false start. Instead of starting last weekend as planned, Becca and I decided to redo our dining room. We pulled up the carpet, painted over the wood paneling, repainted the trim, installed new pre-finished Maple hardwood floors, and installed new baseboards. We got the wood and paint and everything else from Home Depot. All told it was 9 continuous days of labor, ending just a couple hours ago.

Before (kitchen in background)	After

Before (another angle)	After (whole room)

Anyhow, if all goes well, visual deprivation begins tonight. The more I think about it, the more I feel like it's going to drive me stir-crazy and I won't finish my 1 week's worth. But I guess I'll just have to find out.
]]>Comments:
]]>Omar : It looks great! Sucks That you won't be able to marvel at it This week

Sachin: Looks awesome! Good luck on the visual experiment. Call me if you need something to do. Are you allowed to use the phone, maybe dial by voice commands?

Liz D: wow, I love your remodeling job. it looks great!
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My visual deprivation experiment

nikhil — 2011-07-15T11:40:47-08:00

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to start a visual deprivation experiment on myself. For 1 week, I'm going to tape my eyes shut. I'm not going into the lab, and I'm certainly not going to be on the Interweb or reading email. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be doing - I'm guessing trying not to get hit by a car or otherwise stumble down the stairs. I guess I'll be listening a lot, and possibly becoming bored out of my mind. To be honest, I'm not sure I'll be able to last a day, let alone a week. But I always think, if I'm going to do something that's ostensibly crazy, do it further than I think I can because God-knows when I'll try to do it again.

"This experiment sounds stupid. Why the hell would you want to do this?"

When I came back from survival school (another thing that most people thought was stupid, yet it was the best thing I've done in my entire life), I was completely desensitized to life in society, so much so that I felt I could see powers at play I'd never noticed before. Not only did food hold a newfound perceptual power, the makeup of the constant social hum became strikingly apparent. It became clear how much each entity in the small town of Provo and beyond was yelling "hey, you look at me!" in its oh-so-subtle way. After 28 days of seeing no big signs or billboards, they practically popped out and pulled me to them. It's no wonder we can have so much trouble focusing - not only do we live in a society with a high baseline of subliminal distraction, we become addicted and compulsively seek it out.

So desensitization via deprivation is a powerful method for heightening awareness. A few months after survival school, I thought, "Hey, if desensitization works for food and love, what about more basic sensations, like vision and hearing?" So for the past 4 years I've been wanting to do this experiment, and since it's summer and I'm less motivated to do experiments, why not do it now?

The goal of this experiment is not to see what it's like to be a blind person (though that's obviously unavoidable). I don't have much interest in that. My goal is to see what effect a week of visual deprivation will have on my visual perception when I unblind myself. Will colors "pop" more? Will I notice differences in color more or less? Will vision give me a headache? How long will the effects last?

My second goal is more meditative, in that I'm curious what a week with less visual distraction will do to my thoughts. I found on survival school that my mind took me places I never reached in distraction-filled society, and I really liked those new places. Will something similar happen while I'm blinded?

Third, and least important, I'm curious about sensory enhancement while I'm blinded. People always say that non-visual senses, such as hearing and touch, are enhanced in blind people. Will a week of blindness lead to enhancement for me? I suspect I might make Becca take me to the library to get some Braille books - maybe the Braille alphabet will be easy to learn now?

I've got a pretty good mental map of familiar places like home and MIT, so it'll be interesting to go to new places (like the Cambridge library) and have to create it from scratch. It might be even more interesting to go back to those places when I'm sighted and see how my blinded map compares to my visual one. I'll probably also try to cook, relying on smell and touch to figure out if my food is ready.

Of course, I'm not going fully solo. Becca will be with me most of the time, and I'll have a long stick for when I walk around. I'm not yet sure how I'm blinding myself. I got a pirate eye-patch, but light can leak in around the edges, and a band around my head will probably start to hurt after a while. The current plan is to tape cotton over my eyes and not remove them until the week is up.

I'll write my experiences, of during and after, when the experiment is finished.
]]>Comments:
]]>neha: I was going to ask you if you and Becca wanted to hang out soon. Perhaps the week after.

Niniane: Ok this is awesome. I want to hear how it is!!!

Yu-li: Sounds interesting! I would like to do the same experiment by myself, but I am too lazy... I think it is better to measure the effect as objective as possible. How about preparing a color chart so that you can compare the visual perception? Good luck!

Dylan: Good for you. I'm very curious to hear your findings after this. My non-informed guess is you will indeed make it a week, but will spend much of your time just sitting and listening to the radio.

Retsina: Very cool, Nikhil :)

Mom: Nik - You awesome but crazy kid, you must have begun your experiment by now. I know you will not be reading this blog until you restore your vision. You may look like a raccoon with white circles around your eyes...ha ha.Maybe a visit to the Braille institute will help you read faster and not get bored. Becca can convey my words if she is reading your blog to you. I look forward to discussing your observation with you...Be careful son. xoxox
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A website for Becca's mom

nikhil — 2011-07-13T10:42:05-08:00

Becca's mom, Lindy Loya, has been running her own hand therapy center in Arcadia, California for the past 10 years.

What's hand therapy? When you injure your hand or arm and need to recover your ability to use it, your doctor might send you to an occupational hand therapist (that's what Lindy is). Lindy then develops a customized program of exercise and treatments to help you use your hand after the damage has healed or after surgery.

To promote her business and encourage more doctors to recommend patients to her, I recently made a simple website for her clinic:

Loya Hand Rehabilitation Center - www.LoyaHandCenter.com

I think the coolest work she does is designing custom splints. Some of those look really mechanically intricate, unlike any splints I'd ever seen before.

Also, she's worked with some really gross conditions and helped them heal up nicely.

If you're near Arcadia and need some help getting your hand to work again, be sure to check out Lindy!
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