The Hobbit Actually

I remember reading a well known 70's book (no I don't remember, although I only read it a few years ago) about the brain where it alleged that restored sight was cruel in older persons as the brain could only recognise new images in terms of old stored images and this created cognitive dissonance which led to insanity.

Yeah it was probably shyte.

What does it say about about blind women, or are the results limited only to blind men?

I met a woman a few years back who'd been born blind and gained sight for the first time in her early 40s. She told me that some things were perfectly and immediately recognizable to her, like human faces, and that other things - mostly colors and random objects - were more confusing. She said it took her a couple of years to get "vase" into her head when she looked at one.

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!

I read a book about Mike May, who was blinded during an accident as a toddler and who regained sight as an adult. It's a pretty great read: http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Through-Story-Adventure-Dared/dp/1400063353

Reminds me of an Iranian film I'm still trying to see. It is called "The Willow Tree" and it's about a man born congenitally blind. He learns his world through touch and becomes extremely fond of the willow tree. An operation restores his sight and he begins to evaluate the world according to how he sees. People he knows now have appearances, but with great costs, the man begins evaluating them on their beauty and his attitudes toward them change accordingly. What's worse, is he now finds the willow tree to be an ugly tree. The short-story is that everything this man valued becomes devalued or cast into the world of vision for re-evaluation.

Molyneaux's question dealt with something slightly (but significantly) different. Unlike the children in this experiment, Molyneaux's hypothetical person has been acquainted with these objects since birth (but, of course, by touch alone.) The question was whether or not this person, on receiving their sight, would be able to "..know which is the Globe and which the Cube" by sight alone - without any touch-acquaintance at the time of the test. Of the three tests given the children, only the third test approaches Molyneaux's sense modality question and that's where the childrens' performance plummeted. The article didn't say whether or not, during the third test, the children were able to touch-and-see the shape or just touch the shape before it was removed from them and they were required to use sight alone. ("After feeling a shape [feeling only?], the children did only slightly better than chance at identifying it by sight alone.") Does anyone know?