In 1688, Irish scientist William Molyneux asked philosopher John Locke "if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given the ability to see?"
That philosophical thought experiment, called Molyneux's Problem, stood for centuries until MIT researchers Richard Held and Pawan Sinha collaborated with Indian surgeons to operate to restore sight in children who'd been blind from curable causes:
Held, Sinha, and colleagues recruited five children, ages 8 to 17, from Project Prakash to tackle Molyneux's question. The researchers built 20 pairs of simple shapes from toy blocks and tested the children within 48 hours of the surgery to restore their sight. The children had not encountered these unusual shapes before. [...] After feeling a shape, the children did only slightly better than chance at identifying it by sight alone, the team reports online today in Nature Neuroscience.
That result suggests a negative answer to Molyneux's question. Because many children travel long distances for the operations, most go home with their families before the researchers can do follow-up experiments, Sinha says. However, when the researchers retested two of the boys with a new set of shapes a few days later, their accuracy on the touch-to-vision experiment jumped to above 80%. That suggests a more nuanced answer of "initially no but subsequently yes," Sinha says.
"It's a great story," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The change in the children's ability to integrate touch and vision happens too fast to be explained by major rewiring in the brain, Pascual-Leone says. Even though they grew up recognizing objects by touch, they needed only a little bit of visual experience to learn to translate between the two senses. "They're not starting from zero," he says.
Link (Photo: Pawan Sinha)
Comments (6)
She was most confused by colors because to her they seemed so arbitrary. I wish I'd had a week to talk to her. I never found out what her dreams were like before she could see!
This is the discrepancy caused by speciesism and my hope is that in 250 years we'll look back in the same way that we not look back at slavery, nazism, sexism etc - we'll be horrified how we could pay money to have someone killed to be put in a glass jar, at a time when the world could use that money for doing lots and lots more good.
As for humans, look up Gunther von Hagens and plastination. While no humans are killed specifically to be put on display, he uses real dead people in his art. Most cultures in the world are fascinated with life, and are often just as fascinated with death. It's why art like this exists.
Fish are caught and killed in their millions, and the people who do it make money, and their profits and taxes do 'lots and lots of good'. My point? A shark is a fish. It's a big one, yes, but still a species of fish. Why should we give a big fish any more (or less) respect than a small one? Why do we eat cows but not dogs or dolphins? There simply is no good reason. Presumably dogs are tasty (I wouldn't know), but we all choose to be 'speciesist' to some degree, and rather than scorn it the majority (every non-veggie in the world) accepts that certain animals are treated differently.
Next time you use an insect spray, be sure to think about your speciesism against insects. Don't they have a right to life too? Or if you think it's okay to kill them, do you also eat insects as part of your daily diet?
I think my rant is over, but the words 'double standards' spring to mind, or even 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'.