The Difference between Looking and Seeing

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The Difference between Looking and Seeing

According to the article Cathedral by Raymond Carver, the author relates the act of looking to physical vision. However, as the storyline illustrates, the act of seeing requires a deeper engagement level. The narrator assumes he is superior to Robert because he is not blind and can look at his wife, his house, his TV set and Robert. His assumption is that Robert’s blindness makes him unable to make a woman happy, let alone having a normal life. The reasoning of the narrator is that seeing is everything and this makes him not to put effects to look beyond the surface which is the reason he does not know his wife well. However, Robert is udoubtly able to “see” better than the narrator because even though he cannot physically see the narrator’s wife, he understands her better than her husband because he truly listens (Carver, 1981). 

Blind people may not have perceptually driven visual imagery, but they tend to use other senses in encoding spatial relationship. They acquire this by encoding the spatial information by use of sense of touch or by use of haptic system. The visually disadvantaged persons use their other senses like touch, and hearing to form a representation of the world (Davies, 2014).  As Wolchover (2012) explains, sighted people visualize their surroundings through detecting borders of areas rich in diverse wavelengths of light that are seen as different colors. This is unlike blind people who build picture by their sense of touch and listening to the echoes of listening to the echoes of clicks of their tongue as the sounds bounces off objects in their surrounding echolocation.

According to Wolchover (2012), in sighted people, the visual cortex receives the visual information first that is located at the occipital lobe at the back of the brain where it then goes to the parietal lobe, which generates awareness of a sensed object’s location. Sighted people use their eyes to see but it is their brain that translate the information to create an image. The World Health Organization suggests that in the world, approximately 40 million people are blind while others 250 million have some impaired visions. Age-related disorders like diabetes and glaucoma are accelerating the figures (Taylor, 2013). 

Therefore, according to Taylor (2013) more studies are required to develop new solutions that will allow these individuals to relate and interact with the sighted world and sighted people. This will be achieved by researching visually disadvantaged people to gain insight in to how being blind affects the way they think and perceive the world. Another insight that the research will include is how an individual’s senses are able to gather the world’s information. These insights will assist in shaping the new technology that will help visually impaired people in overcoming some of their surroundings limitations.

According to Sacks (2003), majority of people have a strong belief in the completeness and accuracy of their visual experience. Indeed, there is a saying that “seeing is believing”, which indicates that visual perception is one of the trusted means of obtaining information of the world missing less and distorting little. Studies reveal that visual perception does not capture as people think (Sacks, 2003). The study will answer several questions about visual perception aspect. Does the brain run the mind or does the mind run the brain- or to which extent does each run the other? To what extent do a person’s reaction, experience predetermined or shaped by their brains, and to which extent do they shape their brains? To what extent is an individual a creator or author of their own experiences?

The effect of blindness which is the profound perceptual deprivation casts unexpected light to the above questions. People who become blind later in life presents an individual with a potentially overwhelming challenge of ordering a new world, to find a new way of living, after the destruction of the world way. The sense of attention or auditory experience, along with sharpening of other senses like touch makes an individual to experience an intensity of being in the world and a sense of intimacy with nature (Sacks, 2003). Majority of blind individuals passively use the echoes of their natural environment in sensing details of their environment, others use mouth clicks to gauge information of their environment using echoes from those clicks. Both active and passive echolocation help visually disadvantaged individuals to learn about their environment. 

Davies, (2014) explains that hearing and vision are closely related as they process energy reflected waves. Light waves are processed by vision as they are travelling from the source, bounces off from surfaces throughout the environment entering the eyes. Correspondingly, in the process of auditory system, as sound waves travel from their source bounce from surface and enter the ears. Some visually disadvantaged individuals are highly skilled at echolocating silent objects by listening to the returning echoes and mouth clicks. The imagery sense is very rich for experienced users.

Sighted individuals rely on vision in finding their way on the environment while blind persons seams as disadvantaged as they are unable to perceive the layout of their environment with vision. They rely on proprioception that provides them with a sense of posture, movement and location of their body through space and on vestibular information that regards to their rotational movements. The blind individuals negotiate with unfamiliar environments by interpreting not only the level of the sound but also to its reverberation.

 References

Carver, R. (1981). Cathedral. Retrieved from http://www.giuliotortello.it/ebook/cathedral.pdf

Davies, J. (2014). What Do Blind People Actually See?. Naitulus. Retrieved from http://nautil.us/blog/what-do-blind-people-actually-see

Sacks, O. (2003). A NEUROLOGIST’S NOTEBOOK: THE MIND’S EYE (1st ed., pp. 48-59). Newyork: The Newyorker. Retrieved from http://powers.media.mit.edu/wiki/upload/MindsEye.pdf

Taylor, M. (2013). How blind people see the world. University Of BATH. Retrieved from http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/case-studies/how-blind-people-see-the-world

Wolchover, N. (2012). How Do Blind People Picture Reality?. Live Science. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/23709-blind-people-picture-reality.html