My favorite books on blindness and the brain

For me, thinking about blindness and the brain all started with an essay by Oliver Sacks called “To See and Not See” (An Anthropologist on Mars). In The Mind’s Eye Sacks picks up some of the threads of that earlier essay and goes deep into how seeing is not just a matter of having functioning eyes. From the pianist who could  suddenly no longer read music to blind people (like myself) who still consider themselves very visual, these neurological tales are intellectually intriguing and emotionally compelling. Sacks even includes his own journal of vision loss as one of the case studies. But whether he is the patient or the doctor, his distinct voice and personal connection to his subject matter has had a huge influence on my own writing.

This seventeenth-century offering is where the famous Molyneux Man first appears in the form of a question: If a man born blind and capable of distinguishing a cube from a sphere by touch, was suddenly made to see, would he be able to distinguish the two objects by sight alone? The answer was a resounding “no!” Just as we must learn to read, we must learn to see, gradually building up connections between our sense of touch and our sense of sight. This was a revelation to me when I encountered it as a person going blind and learning to not-see. If humans are not exactly born blank slates, we are certainly unfinished ones, whose environments and education supply us with knowledge and brain power to perceive the world.

Perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum’s book changed the way I thought about my brain on blindness and gave me hope about its ability to adapt. I was astonished by blind painters and mountain bikers, but more importantly, I learned that what often strike us as superpowers, are actually the result of practice and the cross-modal plasticity of the brain. The sighted brains that change after only five days of blindfold and intensive braille training, the experiments that demonstrate how humans can follow a scent trail, and the ways blind people (and sighted people) use echolocation to learn about their micro and macro environments (even if they are not always conscious of it), are just some of Rosenblum’s many examples that are as fun as they are fascinating.

If the word “echolocation” pricked up your ears in my previous recommendation, I think you’ll love this book which is both a biography and a deep dive into how one blind person used the senses he had to become the first person to go around the world. James Holman (1786-1857) lost his sight at the age of 25 while he was an officer in the British Royal Navy. His career was cut short and he refashioned himself as an author and adventurer known as the “blind traveler.” Roberts explains how Holman used his gentleman’s walking stick not only to detect obstacles and level changes in his immediate environment, but also used the sound of the metal tip bouncing off objects to guide him through far-flung regions of the world.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman uses a delightful array of examples—from historical to contemporary, geological to quotidian—to explain the marvels and complexities of the human brain. Although, as someone who lost all her sight later in life, I sometimes find myself wishing for the brain plasticity of a two-year-old, I am grateful for the amount of change that can occur in even the older brain. Most excitingly to a blind person living in an ocular centric world, Livewired reveals how “Sensory organs feed many different information sources to the brain,” and the consequence of this diversity is that: “your brain doesn’t know, and it doesn’t care, where the data come from.” I can only hope reading this book helps non-blind humans learn to be as impartial as their brains.