About a month ago, two young Swiss men visited the Holy Land Institute for several weeks. On one of their first days here, they had an idea: “Why don’t we make some blindfolds, find cotton balls to stuff in our ears, and then walk around the school for an hour or two? That way, we can actually experience what it’s like to be deafblind!”
But no matter how dark the blindfolds, no matter how thick the cotton, their proposed experiment was doomed to fail. This post explains why.
Most of us who can see and hear are initially bewildered by the concept of deafblindness: we understand that the condition is profoundly life-altering, of course, but we struggle to imagine (even more so to articulate) how exactly the condition alters one’s life -- what it means to not be able to see and hear.
Essentially, the alteration regards the ability to make observations of the world around us and the phenomenon of mental development that results from those observations.
Just about all of our knowledge is based on sensory observations, and particularly on sight and sound (called “the distance senses”). Everything that you and I know, we know because we saw or heard things first. We compile and classify these things over time, and with the help of the rest of the brain, we eventually create ideas, syllogisms, etc. But sensory observations are always at the root.
Deafblindness, the absence of the distance senses, constitutes a radical reduction in the spectrum of possible observations, in the number of observations actually made, and (if the remaining senses do not compensate for the absence) in the mental development that results from observations.
Thus, deafblindness should not be associated with mental deficiency. The mind works just fine: it’s just that far less “stuff” goes into it, far less than what’s going into the mind of a person who sees and hears. But again, without sensory compensation, the deafblind person’s mental development will suffer.
...Okay, let’s bring this back down to earth. To put it in terms of the proposed experiment, truly understanding how deafblindness affects a person doesn’t merely require the obstruction of one’s own faculties of sight and sound; it would require somehow removing from one’s mind every single observation ever made by sight and sound -- and, along with those observations, the infinitely many mental acquisitions to which they led.
Let’s say that the two Swiss men went ahead with their experiment, that they blindfolded their eyes and plugged their ears. Let’s say that we could pluck them up from wherever they are and place them anywhere we want...your neighbor’s kitchen, for example. Let’s say that they begin to stumble around, and soon they run into your neighbor’s oven.
Like a deafblind person, of course, they use their hands to feel around the oven, making observations through touch. But what’s happening in their minds when they do this differs dramatically from what would happen in the mind of a typical deafblind child...
The two Swiss men instantaneously know that this object is designed to heat food, and they begin to search for the features that they know exist: burners on the surface, knobs on the side near the top, a handle that they can pull open; they know that each of the knobs corresponds to just one feature of the object they’re touching, and given a few minutes, they could probably figure out exactly which knob corresponds to which feature (as they would know to slowly run their hands over the stovetop, at a safe distance, and feel for heat); they know that, if they turn a knob, they must return it to its original position, because otherwise they or someone else might burn themselves later on; they know that they are standing in a room where food is cooked (which they have learned to call a “kitchen”), and they know that in such rooms there are sources of food nearby; they could search confidently for what they have learned to call a “refrigerator.”
These are just some of the conclusions that the Swiss men can reach instantaneously and subconsciously, due to their past observations of sight and sound. But not one of these conclusions is self-evident to the deafblind child. Even if her or his hand movements are identical to those of the Swiss men, this child’s observations won’t lead them to the same conclusions. Furthermore, the child is quite likely to draw conclusions that seem self-evident to her or him, but that are actually wrong (for instance, the child may assume that the oven is something to be played with, because the knobs on the side are just like the knobs on a toy in her or his bedroom).
That’s why the proposed experiment was doomed to fail. Given our history of observations via our distance senses, we just can’t imagine what it’s really like to be deafblind. Indeed, insofar as we imagine through the creation of mental images, deafblindness is, quite literally, beyond our imagination.
Hopefully, these words have illuminated and not confused. But if they have confused... Well, be grateful that your confusion is nothing compared to the confusion of the deafblind child who can’t understand why the oven isn’t a toy.
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