What We See

A false-colour Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) of a mid-sagittal section through the head of a normal 42 year-old woman, showing structures of the brain, spine and facial tissues (Image: Mehau Kulyk / Science Photo Library)

The human mind is a little-understood, incredibly complex and always-surprising engine of thought and imagination and discrimination and intelligence and perceptions. And we have the human brain to thank for all of that, that ingenious pathway to perception and understanding and movement designed by nature for whom no task however complex appears to have been too daunting for a blueprint to appear and for nature to studiously furnish the living, breathing creature she had herself imagined, then brought into reality.

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It produces our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world. This jelly-like mass of tissue, weighing in at around 1.4 kilograms, contains a staggering one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons.

The complexity of the connectivity between these cells is mind-boggling. Each neuron can make contact with thousands or even tens of thousands of others, via tiny structures called synapses. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. The pattern and strength of the connections is constantly changing and no two brains are alike.

It is in these changing connections that memories are stored, habits learned and personalities shaped, by reinforcing certain patterns of brain activity, and losing others.

This cannot by any means be an absolutely rare occurrence. But it is in brief, a story of a man who lives yet in Ottawa. At 86 years of age now, he lives in a nursing home and is dependent on the use of an electrified wheelchair to get around. He is obviously a kind man, and a man of gentle good humour; not surprising that those characteristics group around someone who has known his share of pain in his lifetime.

He is the last of a family of six children. When he was born, his eyeballs were 'elongated', making him very short-sighted. He wore prescription eyeglasses whose lenses were so thick, to correct his vision, that his eyes almost seemed to disappear, from the perspective of someone looking at his small face. So, for a while he could see, but then the lenses of his eyes turned dark. And when that happened he was able to read or to count fingers by placing them just about at the tip of his nose.

He was able to see almost as far as his feet, looking down at them, but not seeing them, for his eyesight was incapable of meeting even that challenge. He adjusted to his blindness, and as blind people do, over-compensated through his other organs, his sense of touch and hearing and smell. He became observant in a way that people with eyesight have no need to be. Voices meant much more to him, and he could understand the shape of things under his exploring fingers.

Wherever he went, whomever he met, he imagined what a room, a building, a street, looked like. And he had an idea, invented in his head, what people looked like as he imagined them to, by their voice, by the interaction he had with them, by his experiences. And then when he was 66 years old, the science of medical optics produced a kind of plastic that the eyeball would accept, and he was fitted with a set of clear plastic lenses to take the place of his natural, blackened pair

 Donald “Red” Wellington went blind at the age of five and remained that way for 61 years until artificial lens implants regained his sight at the age of 66.    Photograph by: JULIE OLIVER , OTTAWA CITIZEN

 

Suddenly he could see. And not merely see as much as he was able to when he was a child before he'd gone completely blind. He suddenly and to him miraculously, had acute eyesight. Colour dazzled him; size, texture and the presentation of reality confused him. And the sight that was restored to him overwhelmed him. He was suffering from sight overload, his eyesight finally presenting him with the kind of vision that made everything clear, but which confused him because it conflicted with what he imagined.

As a regular volunteer at a soup kitchen, he was familiar with all the regulars. He 'knew' what they looked like, because he had imagined what all those voices' faces were like. And once he could see after 61 years of sightlessness, he was unable to connect those familiar voices to the unfamiliar faces and it caused him great distress. His reliable old functional world had turned itself inside out. When vision is impaired or missing, the brain makes neural pathways in compensation.

Evidently there is research that demonstrates when people depend on their sense of touch to 'see', the brain forms images and memories. These new routes are disrupted when sightlessness returns to sighted. Once sight returns, habit born of actual need, dependent on those neural pathways, require that objects still be handled and touched as they were when sightless, to obtain the real picture in the mind's eye...until new neural pathways adjusting to the new reality form over time.

He was able to cope with his visual disability because he had become accustomed to understanding and 'seeing' in his own very unique way. It took him quite awhile before his brain re-adjusted to the reality that the head in which it was ensconced was now sighted once again. It took him 18 years to adjust, but adjust he did. And he is so transfixed with wonder at the things he sees; things that might seem simple and fundamental to the always-sighted, but amazing no end, to this man.

He has no need to travel too far from his roots to marvel at everything that surrounds him. Colour is particularly fascinating, and colourful lights at night mesmerize him with the wonder of it all. Seeing things in motion, from vehicles to animals to people, grabs his undivided attention.

"It's beautiful here. Have you ever seen the Parliament Building at night (referring to the summertime sound and light show)? Look at that. That's beautiful. I could look at that all day", he said, pointing to a Canadian flag in the breeze, seen from the sixth floor of his room in the nursing home.