Saturday, January 06, 2007

synesthesia for namtip

there's an episode of the tv show called "the twilight zone" in which doctors have figured out how to give vision to people who have been blind from birth. a formerly blind man who just got the corrective surgery is in a building, several stories above street level, looking out a window, and he sees something on the street that intrigues him. not understanding visual perception of depth, he tries to grab it, from several stories up, and falls out the window to his death.

i've actually never seen it, but it sounds pretty synesthetic

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's also a movie with Val Kilmer, I don't remember the name, but I believe it's based on a true story. Its along the same lines, a guy who lost his vision when he was very young and later got it back when doctors had developed a way to give it back to him. He actually was very afraid because the world was so different to him with vision that he could not understand. He would do things like walk into traffic and try to walk off of very high edges because he couldn't understand what it was that he was seeing (shadows, perspective, etc). I also remember one scene in the movie where a woman comes to visit him at his house and she starts to totally throw him off because she does things like moving a chair without putting it back. Moving things around totally throws off his mental "map" of the space and he begins to bump into and trip over everything. Maybe worth taking a look at...

Jenn said...

I think that movie is called 'At First Sight'. :)