Current Event 2-4-08
It is a terrible enough having to be blind, but to have it affect you and consume you in a long time must be agony. I read up on a man who has been gradually losing his sight over the last 50 years, but that’s not the highlight of my article. After he went completely blind he started seeing all these fanatical images in his head that he hadn’t seen before. For example a civil war soldier appeared in his head very vividly. This is called Charles Bonnet syndrome, where you lose your sight and you start seeing things in their mind. Basically, when you have normal vision or just you can see in genera, you are taking things in for your brain to analyze but, when you go blind your brain can’t take things in therefore it creates its own images based on previous memories. In other words a “memory mash-up.” A compilation of a bunch of your memories to make new ones. Many other blind patients have experienced this too, along with deaf patients just that with them they hear voices of people who have passed on or living.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18549104