Recorded at | July 28, 2023 |
---|---|
Event | TED Studio |
Duration (min:sec) | 05:46 |
Video Type | Original Content |
Words per minute | 236.91 very fast |
Readability (FK) | 66.84 very easy |
Speaker | Andrew Leland |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us see the world.
1 | 00:03 | (Audio description) A white man with glasses sits at a marble table | ||
2 | 00:07 | next to a plate of sliced pears. | ||
3 | 00:08 | Hi, I'm Andrew Leland. | ||
4 | 00:10 | I'm blind. | ||
5 | 00:11 | And this is a TED Talk about blindness, | ||
6 | 00:13 | which is confusing for me and for you | ||
7 | 00:15 | because just by watching me right now, you can probably tell I'm not blind. | ||
8 | 00:19 | For example, I can tell that on this plate right here, | ||
9 | 00:22 | there are five slices of pear arranged in a smiley face. | ||
10 | 00:25 | Or that that -- | ||
11 | 00:26 | (AD) A framed photo hangs on the wall behind him. | ||
12 | 00:29 | AL: Is a photograph of a very sad hippo. | ||
13 | 00:31 | So you might be wondering, if I can see all that, | ||
14 | 00:34 | why am I talking about blindness? | ||
15 | 00:35 | OK, so I'm going blind. | ||
16 | 00:38 | I don't know exactly when. | ||
17 | 00:39 | As a teenager, I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, | ||
18 | 00:43 | which is a degenerative retinal condition. | ||
19 | 00:45 | In my teens and early 20s, | ||
20 | 00:47 | I only noticed it at night. | ||
21 | 00:49 | Then in my early 30s, my peripheral vision started to deteriorate. | ||
22 | 00:52 | Right now I have central vision, | ||
23 | 00:54 | but I'm seeing the world through a pretty narrow porthole. | ||
24 | 00:57 | So even though I can see these pears and that hippo, I'm legally blind. | ||
25 | 01:02 | I have severe tunnel vision, | ||
26 | 01:03 | but it doesn't look like a tunnel | ||
27 | 01:05 | because your brain adapts really quickly to whatever you see. | ||
28 | 01:08 | Like if the frame of the movie you're watching | ||
29 | 01:10 | starts to shrink to a much smaller size, at first you'll be annoyed. | ||
30 | 01:13 | "This sucks," you might say to yourself, | ||
31 | 01:15 | "I don't like watching this movie on this tiny screen." | ||
32 | 01:18 | Then your complaints will soften and disappear, | ||
33 | 01:20 | and your brain will adapt to the new normal. | ||
34 | 01:22 | Like the first time you watch a movie on your cell phone, | ||
35 | 01:25 | it will be annoyingly small at first, and then you just get used to it. | ||
36 | 01:29 | So every time I lose another chunk of vision, | ||
37 | 01:31 | at first I feel super extra blind, | ||
38 | 01:34 | sometimes scared or claustrophobic. | ||
39 | 01:36 | My world is shrinking. | ||
40 | 01:37 | But then a week will go by, I get used to it, | ||
41 | 01:41 | I don't feel so blind anymore. | ||
42 | 01:42 | This experience of super gradual vision loss has given me time | ||
43 | 01:46 | to think about what blindness is, | ||
44 | 01:48 | which might seem like an obvious question. | ||
45 | 01:50 | Blindness is the absence of sight, | ||
46 | 01:53 | but it's actually more complicated than that. | ||
47 | 01:55 | Trying to define blindness can start to feel paradoxical. | ||
48 | 01:58 | There's a paradox that's useful in thinking about blindness. | ||
49 | 02:01 | It's called the paradox of the heap. | ||
50 | 02:03 | Let's say you have a heap of something, like sand or marbles or goji berries. | ||
51 | 02:08 | Now imagine I take a single little goji berry off of the heap. | ||
52 | 02:12 | Is it still a heap? | ||
53 | 02:13 | OK, what if I remove a second tiny little goji berry from the heap? | ||
54 | 02:18 | Obviously that is still a heap also. | ||
55 | 02:20 | But, the ancient Greek philosopher wondered, | ||
56 | 02:23 | at what point is it no longer a heap? | ||
57 | 02:25 | How many goji berries do I have to remove? | ||
58 | 02:27 | Is it still a heap when there's only ten left? | ||
59 | 02:30 | Five? | ||
60 | 02:31 | Vision works this way too. | ||
61 | 02:32 | How much vision do I need to lose | ||
62 | 02:34 | before I can legitimately call myself blind? | ||
63 | 02:36 | I saw this photo online the other day. | ||
64 | 02:39 | (AD) In the photo, a Black woman holds a white cane | ||
65 | 02:42 | and looks at a cell phone. | ||
66 | 02:43 | AL: The image circulated with a caption, | ||
67 | 02:45 | "If you can see what's wrong, say 'I see it.'" | ||
68 | 02:47 | Can you see what's wrong with this photo? | ||
69 | 02:50 | The answer that the people sharing the photo had | ||
70 | 02:52 | is that the woman can't be blind. | ||
71 | 02:54 | If she is, why is she looking at her phone? | ||
72 | 02:56 | Blind people don't look at things. | ||
73 | 02:58 | The caption wants you to remember: blind people don’t see. | ||
74 | 03:02 | And if she can see, | ||
75 | 03:03 | what's she doing with that long white cane | ||
76 | 03:05 | that signals to the world that she's blind? | ||
77 | 03:07 | Maybe she's trying to get sympathy that she doesn't deserve | ||
78 | 03:10 | or trying to trick us somehow. | ||
79 | 03:12 | So how blind you have to be to be blind? | ||
80 | 03:16 | How much vision do you have to remove from the heap of sight | ||
81 | 03:19 | before it becomes blindness? | ||
82 | 03:20 | People love binaries, especially people on the internet, | ||
83 | 03:23 | which is a place that's not always very friendly to ambiguity. | ||
84 | 03:27 | This photo was shared more than 33,000 times, | ||
85 | 03:30 | and I think it went viral exactly because of its ambiguity. | ||
86 | 03:33 | It illuminates a weird, paradoxical truth about blindness. | ||
87 | 03:37 | Blind people can see. | ||
88 | 03:38 | I don't mean this in the way that people mean it | ||
89 | 03:41 | when they talk about Daniel Kish. | ||
90 | 03:42 | Kish makes clicking sounds with his mouth | ||
91 | 03:44 | that he uses to navigate his environment the way a bat uses sonar. | ||
92 | 03:48 | Brain scans show that when Kish navigates his environment this way, | ||
93 | 03:52 | using his DIY sonar, his visual cortex lights up. | ||
94 | 03:55 | That's amazing. | ||
95 | 03:56 | But the point I'm making is much simpler. | ||
96 | 03:58 | On the one hand, blindness is a binary. | ||
97 | 04:01 | You're either blind or you're not. | ||
98 | 04:03 | But on the other hand, blindness is a spectrum. | ||
99 | 04:05 | There are different degrees of blindness and different styles. | ||
100 | 04:08 | Some people have the inverse of what I've got. | ||
101 | 04:10 | They only see through their peripheral vision with nothing in the center. | ||
102 | 04:14 | Other blind people see the world | ||
103 | 04:16 | as though their glasses have been smeared with Vaseline | ||
104 | 04:18 | or their head's been wrapped several times in saran wrap | ||
105 | 04:21 | or like they're looking through a thick, broken fishbowl. | ||
106 | 04:24 | Only very few blind people see nothing at all, total darkness. | ||
107 | 04:27 | As I lose my sight, | ||
108 | 04:29 | I experienced this degeneration the way you might expect: | ||
109 | 04:32 | as a loss. | ||
110 | 04:33 | In the meantime, | ||
111 | 04:34 | I feel privileged to still be able to see things like sunsets or tree frogs | ||
112 | 04:39 | or celebrity breakfasts on Instagram. | ||
113 | 04:41 | There's another paradox lurking around here. | ||
114 | 04:44 | If blindness is a spectrum, | ||
115 | 04:45 | could it also include somebody who's not actually blind? | ||
116 | 04:48 | The paradox works the other way. | ||
117 | 04:50 | How much sight do you have to add before someone's no longer blind? | ||
118 | 04:54 | At a certain point, we do have to agree that someone's not blind, | ||
119 | 04:57 | even if they don't see very well. | ||
120 | 04:59 | I do think it's important to reserve blindness for people | ||
121 | 05:02 | who don't have the luxury of correcting their vision, | ||
122 | 05:04 | who need assistive technology to do things like read print or walk around. | ||
123 | 05:08 | On the other hand, separating out blindness like this | ||
124 | 05:10 | can lead people to view the blind as strange or mysterious or off-putting. | ||
125 | 05:15 | And that can lead to fear and sometimes damaging misconceptions and stereotypes, | ||
126 | 05:19 | like the idea that blind people are psychic, | ||
127 | 05:22 | which some people actually believe, | ||
128 | 05:23 | or that they have super hearing. | ||
129 | 05:25 | (AD) Words appear: Superpowers for the blind. | ||
130 | 05:27 | The brain rewires itself to boost the remaining senses. | ||
131 | 05:31 | AL: Or more destructively, | ||
132 | 05:32 | that they can't go to a normal school | ||
133 | 05:34 | or hold a normal job or travel on their own. | ||
134 | 05:37 | So the next time you see a blind person do something | ||
135 | 05:39 | that you think only a sighted person should do, | ||
136 | 05:41 | like making eye contact with you or watching a movie, | ||
137 | 05:44 | or standing at a bus stop checking their phone, | ||
138 | 05:47 | remember, it might be possible to see even if you're blind. |