+Timour Iskarous As a stutterer who would spend my only wish on removing my stutter, I'd say people also take having a nice conversation for granted as well. Maybe I'm unlucky, still. Sighted, non-deaf, non-stuttering and without any other diagnose people should be much more happy.
+Mike Wright I feel you on the stuttering. I don't get how people can talk so fast and clearly without any problem. And fast rapping blows my mind lol.
+Mike Wright Hey I have a stutter too and I don't know where you live but you should check in your country if there is a course called McGuire Program. It's helped me a lot to learn to control it. And yes I agree, many people take "having a conversation" for granted. I'm glad I can now comfortably participate in any conversation I want and know I have control over my speech. It used to be a lot different.
G Skub being blind must be hell. At least he has been blind since birth and has learned this lifestyle and doesn't understand what he is missing. I cant imagine what i'd do if i were to lose my sight. He is a great man.
u would still live and havea happy life.. u just cant see.. some people cant hear.. some cant talk .. some even cant feel.. and they are still happy people :D not different from u and me..
Kieran, he seems happier and more successful than most (sighted) people I know. He seems to enjoy listening to movies, and he has intelligent conversation with his intelligent friends. He gets paid to listen to movies, then talk about his opinion of them. He's hilarious. He has a fantastic sense-of-humor that invites everyone to the party. I wish I was as happy and successful in life as this man. I wish I had awesome friends like his.
You know, human sight is actually kind of superpower. It's so much better than sight of most living beings out there. Yeah, some birds have zoom, snakes see infrared, butterflies see ultraviolet, chicken see many more colours etc, but human sight is much more powerful in terms of versatility and vast usefulness (including social interaction).
Cats can hear in 3D, for example, and have much more sensivity to silent sounds, and also have better night vision, but at daytime they have much more impaired vision than humans' (they see just some basic blurry forms and motion during high light conditions, unfocused and mostly uncolored, and they never can focus at objects right in front of them).
@@coderdude9417 It's about position of the eye, type, number and sensitivity of receptors in retina and also the characteristics of lens, m. ciliaris and vitreous body. Also, one of the main factors is how developed is the occipital lobe of the brain that given species has.
I'm going to answer all the questions as best I can. I feel like you've answered so many of my curiosities that I want to do the same. 1. How do you remember all those colours? I guess in the same way you remember a sound, for example, in a song. You can think of a sound in a song after having heard it only once. You can even try to replicate it in your own mind - it may not be exactly the same when you come to actually listen to the song again, but it'll be close. I suppose in the same way that, unless you have a great memory or talent for pitch, when you sing a song to yourself and then play the song, although you may have been singing the correct melody, you can often be a note or two too high / low. 2. What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in the room? Knowing where most things are is useful. I've never really thought about it before, but I get stressed enough when I have to run from room to room, late for work, looking for my keys. However, not being able to see that whole room in a snapshot would be even more frustrating. That being said, if an object is behind something else, it's totally hidden to sighted people too. Using your sight (touch) as comparison, if you imagine having a completely straight, unlimited extendable finger which cannot bend. In front of you is a brick and behind that brick is a pea. You can extend your finger to touch that brick and know it's there, however until you re-position either yourself or move the brick, you are not able to touch (/see) the pea that is behind it. 3. How can you stop and look at a hot chick? It's fairly difficult not to. Not really sure why, just something that takes the attention! Imagine you're walking down a very narrow street, people are behind you and cannot get past, but then someone tells you the thing you like to touch most is on your right hand side for a short period of time only. You slow down a little to appreciate it, but you know you cant stop completely, you're in a rush and there's loads of people behind yo that you're holding up. That's it I suppose. 4. How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things. It's less that I remember things detail in detail, but I can remember a general concept. Even if I were the world's best painter, I couldn't paint people I know as a perfect replication without having them there in the flesh. I think this is the same for most people. Until you remind yourself of the actual image, it's just a vague representation in your memory. It's the same sort of thing as the singing example in answer 1. 5. What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself? So until I was 16, I lived most of my life in the countryside, no buses, no way of getting anywhere unless my parents drove me. I remember on my 16th Birthday getting a motorbike and that first journey. I take it for granted now, but that freedom is incredible. It's hard to describe. I felt proud of myself. I can't think of something to liken it to for you. 6. What's it like to be able to get around in the snow? Wet and cold! It's fun for a few minutes, especially if you have a little snow fight, but really it's just inconvenient! You never know if you're stepping on hard or soft snow, if your foot is going to sink or be fine, if it's going to be icy and slippery or not. It's not that fun if you're actually trying to get somewhere. Too many unknowns. 7. How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face? Concentration. When you're not concentrating on vision, you can be seeing things but not really processing them. Like in a busy bar where the're lots of conversations going on, and if you listen hard you can pick out each conversation, but if you don't try to listen to them, they sink in to the background and you have no idea what anyone is saying around you, it's just a blur of sound. 8. How do you lose things when you can see? I would reference my answer to question 2 with the example of the brick, the pea and the extendable non-bendable finger. That's one way. Another way is camouflage. If something is a close enough colour to that upon which it lays, then it can be difficult to differentiate the two. For example, if you were played a continual pitch noise, and then that noise was very slightly pitched up for a fraction of a second, you may notice the change, but the likelihood is you wouldn't first time round. So you play that sound again (i.e. look around again) and try and hear the difference. Eventually you'll get it - or give up!
Each color has a unique appearance. We can distinguish between colors just as easily as you can distinguish between sounds. Imagine the difference between the sound of a dog barking and a phone ringing. That's how different the colors red and blue look to sighted people. We don't always know exactly where everything is in a room just by looking. If the room is too dark, we have just as much trouble finding things as you might. Also, if the room is really cluttered, a small object might be difficult to find if it's mixed in with a lot of other objects of similar size, shape, and color. Imagine playing a bunch of songs on different radios at the same time, then trying to tell which song is coming from which radio. The same sort of blending of sensations can happen with our sight. Sighted people can see shapes from a distance. Different objects feature a particular combination of shapes which can be used to identify them just by looking. Although objects such as cars often vary widely in appearance, they can still be identified as cars because of common features such as wheels and windows. You can know the model of a particular car because different manufacturers like to include distinguishing features in their designs. It's similar with faces. You can identify a person by looking at their face because even though we all have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, the size, spacing, and color of these features are unique enough that we can associate them with a particular individual. Just like you might be able to identify a person by their voice, we can identify a person by their facial appearance, and remembering and keeping track of them isn't difficult. Just like how you can keep track of different words and their meaning, we can keep track of different faces. We can know what somebody looks like without ever actually meeting them by looking at at picture of them. A printed picture consists of ink on paper. Ink comes in different colors, and those colored inks can be printed on paper in such a way as to correspond to the appearance of a person or object. Things can happen right in front of us without us realizing it because of limitations in the way the human brain processes information. It's kind of like how you could be having a conversation with somebody in a crowded shopping mall, and you tune out the other people to listen to the person you're talking to because the conversations of other people aren't a concern to you. There can be so much visual information to absorb that the brain can't handle it all, so it chooses to ignore certain things, and it often ignores things that it shouldn't have. So it's not that we didn't see it; it's that we simply didn't take notice of it. We can lose things when we drop them because if we drop something, it can fall out of our field of view and bounce away somewhere where we couldn't see it. It can end up underneath something, or it could blend in with its surroundings and become difficult to see. When there are a hundred other cars in a parking lot, they can obstruct your view of your own car. They can also look really similar to your own car, so you might struggle to tell which one is yours from a distance. The amount of detail we can resolve decreases with distance, so it can become difficult to identify something when it's too far away.
the only thing I found a bit off balance is your explanation of colours. a dog's bark and a phone's ring are very specific sounds. they are more equivalent to visuals of real objects (like a dog or a telephone). but colors are more like if there were a bunch of flat surfaces lined up in a row like square sheets, and each of them had a different coarseness/smoothness and temperature to the touch. and some of them were softer and some firmer. that's how distinguished colours are and how different they get. but they still vary on a spectre and each color can be darkened with black and lightened with white.
an even better analogy to colours would be just a scale of sound frequencies. even though they're just various frequencies of a similar monotonous sound pattern, each one can sound pretty distinct and have certain character to it. the same thing are colours to the eye. because colour after all is a wavelength characteristic of light.
I hear you man, definitely the same for me. I know I'm a bit late, but I love your videos. It's nice to see that know about him. I normally watch rocket league videos like yours, but after discovering this guy, this this is all I can watch.
I noticed others answering your questions, so I wanted to take a stab at it too, I hope you like! 1. How do you remember all those colors? Same way you remember smells, building layouts, or people's voices. It's repetition and association with other known things. 2. What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in the room? You say "know" and it's really just the same as how you "know" where everything is in your house, except our sight gives us one extra element to remember with. Memory plays a big role in how we know where everything is. 3. How can you stop and look at a hot chick? Imagine a beautiful song being played on the street, would you stop or slow down to listen? Beauty is like a song, so it's going to be different for everyone, but that's why some people stop when they see something beautiful. 4. How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things. Repetition and association with other known things. We learn a lot of these things when we're still developing language skills, so there's lots of stuff that people just know because they learned it while they were learning how to talk and walk. But things like the Make and Model of Cars kind of falls under a specific interest. I know the difference between cars and trucks and minivans, but I can't tell a subaru from a honda. 5. What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself? I don't understand this question, because from past videos it sounds like you go places on your own as well. But if you mean driving, Phones, radio, and conversation are all distractions that need to be managed. Some people can drive with lots of distractions, some can't. Our brains can focus on things that matter, like stop lights and how fast we're moving, and ignore things like billboards and music. It's like a priority thing. 6. What's it like to be able to get around in the snow? I find getting around in the snow to be incredibly difficult. unfortunately, sight doesn't replace coordination and quality footwear, and even then the snow is concealing our view of the ground, which can cause our eyes to be misled. I personally stay inside. 7. How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face? Our brain does a lot of "filling in" of what we see, and we can't always put 100% focus into everything, much like you probably can't listen to every conversation in a busy room, so sometimes things are glossed over and we don't see them. Seeing isn't like hearing. You can hear all around you, but you can't see all around you. Imagine if your ears only picked up sounds that were on your right or left side of your head, but not things that were directly above, below, in front of, or behind you. This is what seeing is like, so you can only see what's in your range. Sure we can see all around us, but only if we're also moving our necks, and heads, and turning around constantly... we can't possibly do that all the time though, it'd be exhausting and overstimulating lol. 8. How do you lose things when you can see? It's more a matter of forgetting. The lost thing might be obscured by another object that was carelessly placed, maybe a blanket was draped over the book you're looking for. Just as you wouldn't be able to find a button or sign if it were covered by a piece of glass, a sighted person can't always see an object that's covered by another object. This is where taking action and moving things can help reveal the lost item, but not all sighted people do that, myself included. :P
I am hoping that within the next twenty years science makes a major breakthrough for blind people and helping them see. I would love to see Tommy's reaction to the world, it would be amazing.
sight is way more than eyes, your brain needs many years as a baby to learn how to interpret the signals from your eyes. Like a deaf person, who doesn't speak any languages would not be able to understand anyone speaking just because they got their hearing. It's not a perfect analogy but I think it's as close as I can come up with.
the problem is no the eyes, we can make "artificial eyes" - cameras. The real problem is our limited perception of our brains. I really hope we'll fully understand them soon.
There already is technology that allows some blind people to see... As it turns out, Most blind people who have their sight fixed will actually keep their eyes closed anyways- since the information is unfamiliar, overwhelming, and even scary. Most blind people who get the change don't use it like they think they will. There must be exceptions- but you can't miss what you don't have. He's happy.
Seeing is a lot like having a dozen conversations at once. You can really only pay attention to the conversations that you're most interested, the rest turns into background noise. If you're at a crowded restaurant and you hear everyone talking while you're having an actual conversation with the people you came with, you may be able to pick up on words or snippets from what others in the restaurant are talking about, but if someone quizzed you later on all the words and conversations you heard, you wouldn't remember. It's like that with sight. You can see everything around you, but you an hour later you can't remember most of it. Or back to the restaurant analogy, say you're at the table and are supposed to be deciding what to order, but you get side tracked talking to your friends and the waitress comes back and asks what you want but you haven't even looked yet. Missing your exit is the same way. You're supposed to be looking for your exit but you get side tracked with talking or listening to music or looking at something else on the road and next thing you know you've driven past it. For the hot girl question, back to the restaurant analogy, you're talking to your friends and trying to concentrate over all the other loud noise and chatter when suddenly you hear your favorite song. Or suddenly you smell something amazing. You're likely to stop paying full attention to the conversation you were having and focus on the song or try to figure out what it is that you're smelling. With an attractive girl you're walking along constantly surrounded by sights and sounds but for some reason she appeals to your senses and it's hard not to stop and look because what you're seeing gives you a good feeling. Last one I'll try to explain is picking out clothes. Imagine if instead of things having a visual quality, they had smell in place of it. A shirt may feel really comfortable, but if it smells like straight up dog poop, you're not going to want to wear it. Or say you have a pair of shoes that aren't the most comfortable, but they smell like your favorite scent in the world and wearing them means you get to smell that scent all day long. For people with sight, sure, a shirt may feel good, but if looking at it gives you a feeling of disgust the way smelling poop or mold would, you don't want to wear it. If we see shoes that are beautiful to look at and make you want to keep staring the same way you want to keep smelling vanilla or pumpkin pie or cinnamon,
Then you're going to want those shoes. And seeing an attractive man or woman whose well dressed is like walking down a crowded, noisy city street, filled with cars honking and people shouting, that smells like garbage and gasoline when you suddenly walk past a bake shop filled with your favorite smells and playing your favorite music. Not only does it catch your attention but it makes you feel good and it's something you WANT to be around. And I lied, I have one more attempt at an answer for losing your keys or money. Back to the crowded restaurant. You're in there talking to your friend but if your friend suddenly runs across the room and you have no idea where they went, trying to hear them and continue the conversation is damn near impossible. You'd have to wonder around the entire place listening to each person and sound trying to pin point your friends voice. Finding keys is the same way. You don't always see exactly where they fell and sometimes things bounce or roll further away than you'd think. You have to look and distinguish your keys from all the other things around you. And if you drop your keys in a messy room where they could have fallen under something, it's like trying to pin point your friends voice if they're hiding underneath someone else's table. And that table is filled with a drunk fighting couple, a bunch of screaming kids playing with iPads and a crying baby lol
another example for fashion could be eating something that tastes delicious but is terrible for you (maybe you know you will have discomfort later from it). The food that is really healthy for you doesn't always taste very good like the clothes that are the most comfortable, like sweatpants, don't always look very good (or professional). Try going to a job interview wearing sweatpants.
I was trying to think of an answer to your question about 'how do we know where stuff is in your room?' and i ended up with more of an odd situation than a real 'answer' Well, imagine if everything you owned made a little different sound... your chair makes a low hum, while your keys chirp... nothing particularly loud or anything, just everything making its own noise... eventually you'd start to register what made what sound, and you'd be able to tune things out so you could listen and find that one specific item. sure everything is still MAKING its own sound, and your ears are receiving all the information, but you can focus in on certain frequencies and examine those objects like that. Maybe you walk into your room and you notice something doesnt sound the same.... You hear the chair's hum, you hear the key chirping... but something is off... did someone move something? is something gone? you can't place your finger on it, but what sound is missing? you've been in this room a million times and the sound is ALWAYS the same... but today some sound is just not there but you can't tell what... What about when you're looking for your keys? You try to tune out the humming and the spring noises and focus on chirping... you hear something chirping and you think its your keys, but nope, it was your mini tool set that is a very similar sound to your keys Maybe you listen and notice your cup sounds a bit weird... like... something just doesnt sound right... then you realize "Oh! It's the can of soda sending sound waves THROUGH my cup's sound waves, that's why it sounded weird... So yeah... not really an answer i guess, but maybe its a way of thinking that gives you an idea how sight and sound can be similar...
+Niklas Forsman This interprets as an object being behind another object. The object does not register in your eyes. You can't see it because another object covers the view of it
The part about looking in a room and knowing exactly where everything is? I would almost bet money that you have a better idea of where shit is then I do Tommy :P I can never find anything! EVER! Even when it's sitting on my desk in front of me. Sight is over rated man! :D
or smell like or taste like. how we missplace a car in a big parking lot is similar to too many sounds going on drowning out the uniqueness of what we are concentrating on (looking for/listening for). these are some very interesting questions getting answered!
Alright, I'm gonna try to answer all the questions *cracks knuckles* 1.) How do you remember all those colors? Well, we just sort of learn them over time. It's no different from how you can recognize a smell or a sound or a taste, we just learn each color over time. 2.) What's it like to look at a room, and you know exactly where everything is in a room? We probably kind of take it for granted all the time. The best thing I can compare it to is when you're walking in a place that's really familiar. If you know where everything is, you can walk confidently, and you just sort of know where to go. 3.) So how come you stop and look at a hot chick? There are certain features in a person that make them attractive. Symmetry, hair, clothing, and obviously your chest. When guys see an attractive girl or vice versa, there's got to be some sort of chemical reaction in the brain that makes you want to meet that person. If they look good, it means they're healthy physically, and from a biological standpoint that makes them viable mating material, or atleast friend material. It's sort of like when you hear a sound you really like, or feel something really soft, or taste something really good. You want to stop and just savor the feeling for a little longer. 4.) How do you remember what things look like? Just like colors, we learn over time. How do you know how to read Braille, or type on a keyboard without being able to see the keys? How do you know what everything tastes like or feels like? It's like that. You just learn over time. 5.) You would choose to wear something that looks good, rather than something that's real comfortable? As I said before, there's just certain color combinations and shapes that look pleasing to the eye. If you look good, people will want to be around you. 6.) What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself? I don't know, you just sort of... you just do? 7.) What about driving? Well, obviously not everyone can focus very well when driving, and there's lots of terrible drivers. You just have to tune everything else out and focus on the driving. 8.) What's it like to be able to get around in the snow? Terrible. Cold. Wet. You try to step so that you won't fall in the snow, but you do anyway. 9.) How do you miss something? Well, sight's a funny thing. In the center of our vision, everything's really clear and focused, sort of like when someone's talking right by you and you can hear them perfectly. But towards the edge of our vision, it gets fuzzy, less accurate. We can only really see basic shapes and colors. Peripheral vision is mostly just to detect movement, you can't really do anything else with it. Sight is a lot more overwhelming than the other senses. There's absolutely no way that you can focus on every single thing you see all at once. I think it's most comparable to touch. You usually feel really well on your hands, since there's the most nerve endings there. But are you really paying attention to what your feet are feeling right now? To how it feels under your armpit? No, you're really not focusing on it. That's why pickpockets can get away with it, because when you're not focusing on a specific area of your body, you really don't seem to feel anything there. Ditto sight. If you space out, you stop paying attention to what you're seeing as much, and just get lost in your thoughts. 10.) How do you lose things when you can see? We don't always see that we lost it. Obviously, as in the previous question, we may not notice. Or it may fall out of our back pocket, and since we can't see behind us, we won't realize it's gone. Also, we sometimes put something in a cupboard or drawer and forget which cupboard or drawer it was we put it in. We can't see through objects, it's only a surface thing. Like touch. If you feel a desk, you can't feel under the desk, you can only feel the desk. We have to remember which drawer we put it in first, so we can open it and subsequently find whatever we lost. 11.) How do you not find your car in a parking lot? Parking lots are big. Cars are tall, and people are relatively short. We can't see over the cars to where our cars are. Also, as things get farther away, they get tinier and blurrier, harder to see. 12.) When you're driving, how do you miss the exit? Well, you're focusing on driving, and it's easy to miss a sign. HA, done. That's a half hour of my life I'll never get back.
What is it like to go somewhere by yourself? Being single, just about everywhere I go, I go by myself. It is a mixed bag of emotions. On the positive side, I don't have to wait on anyone. I can't thing of anything worse than when you are on vacation with friends or family, and you finished your shower first and are ready to go, but you have to wait another 30 minutes or hour for everyone else to get ready. I can just go. This gets even better when I want to do something that costs money. I don't have to worry about if the other person can afford it, or if I will have to cover them, I don't have to worry if I have enough money if they suggest something. So that is really nice. However, it can be lonely as well. That 10 minute drive to work doesn't really bother me, but what if I am driving across the state? I got relatives who live 3 hours away. I've gotten used to making the trips alone, but I have gotten to where I usually call someone on the phone to talk to just to keep me sane. Worst trip I ever made on my own was to go see my parents in Arizona. That is 15 hours if you drive straight through. I start going crazy after about 2 hours in the car by myself. It is HORRIBLE, and the thoughts start going through your mind of if you are ever going to make it alive, if you will ever see people you care about again, am I going to be able to point this car straight for the next 10 hours, because the land is flat and featureless and nothing to look at, so your brain starts cutting in and out. I will explain that later. In any case, that gets dangerous. Your brain starts to try to entertain yourself, taking you away from reality, which makes you suddenly less concentrated. As strange as this may sound, it is actually good to have SOME distraction, like a radio, or a person talking to you, as it keeps the brain alert. That is, however, my experience. I have a friend who is a cross country trucker, and he is usually driving while his co-driver is sleeping in the back, so you can say he is really driving alone as well. Yet he loves it. How do you miss something? Great comment by Somehow Still Sane. I want to comment on this as well. Let's start out with sound. Let's say you are at a park. In this park, you hear the wind. The groundskeeper is cutting the grass. Kids are playing on the playground. Parents are around, talking, some to each other, others on their cell phones. There is the sound of the fountain in the middle of the pond. Off in the distance, you hear the sound of traffic on a highway, and closer, you hear the sound of cars going by on the side street. Got the picture in your mind? Good. Now, I want you to tell me every word of the conversation the one mom is having on her cell phone, as well as a summery of the conversation the two other parents are having with each other. Oh, and what are the kids talking about? Can't tell me? Okay, how about this. You listened to the conversation of the kids. Let's say you can tell me every word. Got the scene in your mind? Okay, now tell me how many cars passed by on the side street while that conversation was going on? Can't do it? Why not? You were there weren't you? You heard all this stuff, didn't you? So why can't you give me an accurate description of everything that you heard? The answer is that your brain throws out excess information. There is too much to process. Now let's try reconstructing this scene again, the day after it happened. So, you say you heard the wind blowing and the birds singing. But what if I was to say there was no wind, and no birds anywhere around. Wait, we can't both be right. You swear that you heard birds. So I play back a recording and.... There are no birds. So why do you remember birds? Because your mind fills in the blanks. It cannot process all the information going to it, so a lot of it gets tuned out, but your mind, based on past experiences, has incorrectly filled in missing information. Okay, so let's take site here for a minute. With our eyes, we take in significantly more information than we here. How do we process all that information? Well, we can't. Just like in the example of the above park, you cannot recall how many cars went by on the side road or how many motorcycles are going by on the freeway, even though they make a distinctly different sound than a car. Your mind is processing too much information, so it throws out the junk information. In fact, your eyes can take in so much information, that it can overwhelm the senses. Or, if you are taking in much of the same information for long periods of time (ie driving a straight road at night in the desert), the brain starts shutting down parts of your senses, and starts feeling in the missing information. Both of these are known as "your eyes playing tricks on you". In fact, a person could doze off at the wheel, but the brain still sends images of the straight road to the processing centers. Wait, aren't their eyes closed? Yes, they are. So, in the case of the desert, the mind has both filtered out a lot of what you do see, and even produces images of things that you do not see. Let's do an experiment. You are a movie critic. So, let's take a movie such as The Hobbit. Find someone who has never seen it. Let's take a scene, say when Bilbo first meets Gandalf at Bag End. Got the scene in your mind? Good. Okay, play this scene for them, but only once. Then wait about 10 minutes. Now, go back and ask the person to describe the clothes Bilbo was wearing - the color, the pattern, etc. They can''t do it? Did they not just see it? Okay, what shape were the windows, and how many panes of glass were there? Okay, fine. How was the yard decorated? Were there flowers? If so, where, and what colors? Hmmm, interesting. Well, let's turn the tables and ask you about what you heard. Did Gandalf arrive on foot or on a cart or on a horse? Based on ambiet sound, describe the weather. What instrument was most dominate in the score?Does Bilbo live in the village or in the country? Were any animals present in the scene? If so, name them. Actually, have you ever watched this movie? If so, and if it has been a while, just by me asking those questions, your mind is reconstructing the scene, and you may be remembering sounds even though they were not in the movie. Strange, huh? How do you remember all those colors? How many people do you know? How many men, women, and children? Let's take two little girls that you may know, and have them both say something? Can you distinguish between them? How, they are both little girls? Can you distinguish between them and the sound of their parents? By their voice alone, can you identify them? How, they are all people, how do you remember all those people? Because you have made associations in your mind for them. But, let's say that today I play you a sound of a little girl you do not know who is about five years old, and tomorrow I play you a sound of her sister who is about six years old. But I don't tell you who these people are. Based on sound alone, can you tell me if these two are the same voice, or different? If they are the same person, were the voices recorded at the same time, or a few months or years apart? If they are different people, are they the same age, and if not, which one is older? Do you think their mom can distinguish between the two girls? Than why can't you? Last question, what if you think they are the same girl, but someone else says they are two different girls? Which one is correct? In your mind, there is only one girl, even though the other person knows there are two Likewise, we associate colors in our mind. Some people have a harder time distinguishing between shades than other people - like a girl may say "this is red, this is maroon, this is blood red" whereas a guy may say "that is all red". Who is correct? My then can't the guy see that there are three different shades? I hope I was able to answer some questions. It took me an hour to write this
Also, with the parking lot thing, lots of cars look alike. There are a limited number of colors that cars are usually painted in -- so in a parking lot of hundreds of cars, there may be 50 or so that are the same color as yours. And cars can be shaped very similarly too. One trick some people use is attaching something bright to the top of their car antenna (which sticks up a couple of feet above the roof), so it can be seen above all of the other cars. Another problem I have is my mind blending together different incidents of parking. If I go outside to find my car in a place where I've done so many times, I can't remember if today I parked way over to the left like usual, or in the back like I've done a few times before, or right near the entrance like I did yesterday. Even if it's very close by, my car could be completely hidden behind a large van. If I could get a job explaining sight, I would take it in a second, this is really fun!
Not seeing things with sight is because just like you said there are so many things to see that essentially you cant see everything. A good way to explain it maybe is when you are hearing a crowd of people talking but are only trying to listen to one person talk. Its like that but with sight, you are trying to focus your sight and mind to a task so something right in your vision can go un-noticed.
1) We remember colours because to sighted people, it is like learning your ABC, once you learn it, you just remember it forever. 2) We remember what things look like by learning a certain aspect to remember, like a logo for a car or a shape of a vegetable. For people, we mostly remember their personality I guess, being able to see them is just a benefit that we can also remember. 3) To go somewhere by yourself is a different experience for all people. For some, being alone is a good time to relax and for others, being alone is the worst thing ever as there is no one to help you out. Driving, you just focus on the road and multitask I guess to listen to music and chat. 4) As someone who is constantly looking around, I normally miss things. For example, if my friend was to hand me something, I could be looking in the other direction, so my visual radius wouldn't catch what is in their hand (if that makes any sense whatsoever). 5) I lose things all the time, as again, I could be looking at my friend (not focusing on an item) and then it could fall out of my pocket or I could leave it on the table as I was busy looking at other things. Don't know if you will ever come across this, but I hope it is helpful!
OMG That was the best video of yours I've seen so far! A few answers... We miss things because our brains can only focus on one thing at a time. Think about when you are in a crowded coffee shop. You have loud espresso machines running, music playing, and lots of people talking, not to mention the smaller sounds like people walking and stirring their drinks. But in order to hear your companion, you have to tune all that out and focus on what that one voice is saying. So you might miss something being said at the table next to you. That's what it's like to miss things visually, because you're focused on what's important to you at the moment. As for remembering what things look like, that's because we've seen them since we were born. Normally we can't see something once and memorize it. A few special people can, because they have "photographic memory," but most people have to see something a lot in order to remember it clearly. And again, our focus plays a role. You ask how people know what brand a car is. I've wondered that myself! But then, I don't give a hoot about such things. I'm sure if I cared, I would pay attention to details of a car's appearance, and thus be able to identify them. However, I'm an artist, and I can identify subtle color variations more easily than the average person. As for remembering faces, some people are really good at that and can remember a person after just one brief encounter, while others, like me, usually need to meet someone several times before readily remembering them (let alone matching their name to their face). These things all very from person to person.
How do you remember all the colours? - How do you remember sounds? You hear them, and you know. What's it like to look at a room? - It's kind of like one piece of information, you get all at once. Like when you mix different flavours together. Why do you stop to look at pretty girls? - You've had sex right? It's like that but to the eyes. And not quite as great, but like hearing sex compared to feeling it. How do you remember the look of things? - Same with how do you remember sounds and the feel of different fabrics and surfaces. Guys don't understand why people wear things that are uncomfortable but look good. So you aren't alone. Except pants. But people have to wear pants. Not because they look good, but because it's the law. What's it like to go somewhere by yourself? Lonely. Quiet. Driving? Well not everyone concentrates and that's accidents. If you've ever played a video game or ran, it's like that. How do you not see something? You were looking or paying attention. Seeing does require some thought, like hearing. Not much, it's automatic. But you still have to think a little. How do you lose things when you can see? Take a box, fill it with lego and one marble. Find the marble. Same kind of thing. You can look on a table for something and somehow not see it when it's right under your nose. How do you lose your car in the parking lot? All cars look similar if not the same. You may be able to tell the difference between a baby crying and a cat fight, but it's not always easy. I hope you can read this with some kind of program.
My grandmother was blind for 50 or so years before she could get an operation to allow her to see. She was'nt all that impressed, she liked how convenient it was, and she loved seeing her family. So she would always say that looking at art or movies was the same as listening to music or stories when she could'nt see, she actually taught me a few things too, like a sunrise is pretty, sure, but when you sit for half an hour with your eyes closed (for us sighted people) and you'd rather feel the warmth on your skin as it gradually rose was amazing. She also hated the sky, she said it gave her vertigo and felt like she was falling into nothingness whenever she looked up. Her vision deteriorated and she's blind again now, i asked her about it and she answered "it's like trying out a new recipe for your favorite food, it's fun and enjoyable for a change, but when you go back to your old recipe, it's still your favorite" And finally to answer your "when driving a car, how do we remember everything?" pff, 99% of people cant even use a turning signal (in Norway at least, don't know about anywhere else), scary to think what else they don't remember to do.
On the question on how we remember what stuff and colors look like, and what it is like to come into a room and instantly see everything, I would like to make a simile to hearing different types of sounds. Like if you hear the sound of a bird you know right away that that is a bird, because you heard it before, but you might not be able to remember exactly how it sounds the day after. Sight works the same way. If you walk into a messy bedroom it's a little bit like is someone turned on the radio and a large orchestra is playing. Right away you see that this is a bedroom, because you see the big bed, it's hard to notice, and you also know instantly that there are a lot of stuff in there. The bed is like a tambourine or drum, that you hear through everything else right away. And you hear that there are a lot of other instruments, some you have to focus on to figure out what they are, others are to similar to tell apart. A pile of clothes on the floor can be like a big group of stringed instruments, you hear right away that it's stringed instruments, and that they play mostly high notes. That is like when you look at it you see instantly that it's a pile of clothes and that most of them are red. But it's only when you get closer and separate them that you can tell which are pants and which are violins, in the pile they cover each other so you can't see the shape of them. Maybe you'd have to pick the pants up and look at them without the rest to see that it's a pair or pants, just like how you might have to ask the rest of the stringed instruments to be quiet to make out if the one in the front is a violin. This is the world's longest comment. Even if this didn't help at all I get a A for effort, right?
I freaking love this person. In exchange for explaining the neuroscience of all your questions, I want to talk to you over coffee till it hurts to sit. You're my new favorite TH-cam person. One second while I watch all your videos.
A big part of being sighted is actually learning not to see. I studied art for a while and the most important thing the teacher would go through is to look carefully. Because people look at a door and see a rectangle with a handle, but miss the frame, the texture of the wood, any dents or chips in it. So they draw a rectangle and wonder why it isn't like what they wanted to draw. After so much time with so much stimulus, you just blank it out, otherwise all that stimulus would drive us mad. Like living near a train-station and not noticing the sounds of trains going by. And losing things is about perception too. Imagine you drop a high value coin into a box of low value coins or foreign coins of around the same size and shape. Even if you just pat the surface and don't stir them, it will take a lot of concentration and careful attention to find the one you wanted. That's what it's like when we drop something onto an area that has the same colour or texture. We look at it, but sometimes we need to really focus to see it and sometimes it isn't obviously there until we use another sense.
Remembering faces is so exceptionally important to humans' evolution that it has its own processing in the brain, different from "regular" image processing. Humans are ridiculously good at seeing and remembering and distinguishing faces. It is why we constantly see "face patterns" in other things as well, even though they dont really look like faces... I mean, sometimes all that is needed is two dots and a slightly curved line and our brains will immediately go "that looks like a face". Evolution also explains why we are better at distinguishing individual faces among our own ethnic and/or social group than in people with different ethnicities: you need to know which specific person you are looking at if it's a member of your own society, but you dont need to recognise a specific stranger, you only need to recognise that it is a stranger.
GroovingPict I think the better recognition of your own ethnicity has a simpler reason: Practice. Because we usually see the people of our ethnicity more than other ethnicities, we get more adept at distinguishing between "us" than between "them". A bit like a metal head that can distinguish between Black, Death and Thrash Metal but can't tell a trumpet from a saxophone by sound only. Someone who listens mostly jazz might have the opposite problem. I didn't do any research on this though, so have your pinch of salt at hand.
The same way we remember faces I bet Tom remembers voices. I mean we remember voices too but his ability to remember and distinguish between voices is as crucial as our ability to remember and distinguish between faces.
I can explain from a psychological perspective how we can remember all the different objects. You see the item from so many different angles throughout your life and the more you see them, the more the memory of the item is reinforced. :) It is probably the same way that you remember what certain things are shaped like through touch. People miss exits driving because they are paying NO attention to driving. Doing something so often makes it so that you can basically do it without thought. However, that can result in not seeing the person in front of you braking suddenly...or missing your exit because you weren't looking for the sign. It doesn't take much thought to just drive, but most people don't realize they should pay more attention than putting their brain on autopilot to drive (because anything can happen). Oh and we can lose change on the ground because sometimes it can blend in with the colors of the ground. Most coins are gray and so are concrete sidewalks and some floors. I am loving all of your videos. You are fun.
Oh and parking your car in a very large parking lot can make it hard to find if you don't remember the aisle number. Once you walk away from the cars and are now looking at the parking lot as a whole, each aisle can look very similar. And it is hard to see over cars to look for yours from across the lot.
Hmm, the ones about how we dont see things and how we lose things are interesting. I think a lot of it is dependent on memory and the sub conscious. For example, say your trying to remember somewhere youve been - you dont remember the whole room, you remember parts of it so it can depend on how good your memory is. Also, if you drop something like money onto a gravel surface it can go under bits of gravel and stuff so movement plays a role too. There is also something called a scotoma, which is a floating blindspot that some people have, and sometimes it can be psychological due to the way we learn things. For example the words "if" and "of". They both have an "f" in them, but because we often learn to speak phonetically, some people cant see the "f" in "of" because its pronounced as a "v" sound - "ov". Losing stuff is, I would imagine, like trying to pick out one sound in a room full of noise, or on a busy street - because its so specific. Also, people can have an idea of what something looks like and it might be wrong, if they havent seen the thing for a while for instance. Its a little bit like meeting people you havent seen for years and trying to recognise them by their voice, as you mention in another of your videos. :) And of course, light and dark make a difference.
You are awesome! I am legally blind since birth, so I can relate some some of your stories and experiences. I just found your videos this morning and I am going to sit here and watch all of them!!
You give sighted people more credit than we deserve. :) We don't remember what everything looks like. One of the biggest problems is distinguishing between two people of the same sex we don't know well but who have a similar body build and height, similar age, similar skin color, and similar hair color and length. We focus on a few key points to remember. If we are around the person a lot we memorize details, normally starting with the face and head, and going on to voice and mannerisms, unless all you think about is sex in which case a woman might have to say, "My face is up here!". We are poor at identifying details of people who are strangers to us, especially in another ethnic group, and often rely on what they wore, which doesn't help if they change clothes. Some children have to be taught to focus on facial details rather than clothes but others pick it up very quickly. People sometimes misidentify bodies of family members after bad car wrecks partly because their emotions get in the way of their objectivity and partly because we don't like to look intently at something horrible to spot the discrepancies. If you ask five people who witnessed a crime what they saw, you will get five different versions. Eye witness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Sight is very dependent on lighting conditions, distance, familiarity, alertness, weather, setting, health, mental state, a person's background and education, and how much is going on to add confusion and distraction, among many other things, because we don't just see, we interpret what we see, and the brain fills in what we expect to see, which is fun in optical illusions where we want to be tricked but not fun in a criminal trial. And it's important to remember that there is a tremendous variation in eyesight. We don't see the world the same way. I don't know if the red or blue I see is the same as someone else's, and I'm not even color blind which is another whole issue. :) A quirk of eyesight is if I want to find a four leaf clover in the grass I move my eyes so I am taking in the whole area in my vision field by going back and forth, and without trying to focus on anything in particular, I will notice the object that doesn't match, and there's my four leaf clover. :)
1. Like sound, we remember colors by experiencing them often. It's honestly hard to remember a color I haven't seen in a while. 2. I'm disorganized so when I look at my room I really only know where a third of my stuff is. Everything is on top of each other. 3. Staring at attractive people is like playing your favorite song over and over again. We just want to keep enjoying it. 4. We kind of having categories for how things look like and when we see a thing, our brains sort through the categories to narrow it down. We just do it really fast. My co-worker is always bring me potatoes that she things look like butts or baseballs or whatever. As for faces, some people are better at recognizing people that others. My husband can remember names for years, but I can't. I'll remember your face and by like "Hey you! What was your name again?" 5. Yeah, fashion is pretty dumb. But, like number three, some people enjoy being appreciated, even in an purely aesthetic way. I usually just wear comfy stuff though. 6. Not gonna lie, being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want is awesome! I've been asked if my husband "lets" me go certain places and I always laugh because I can't imagine not just going somewhere if I want to badly enough. Driving is almost like flying in how free it feels, especially on highways. 7. Driving in a big city or heavy traffic can be very stressful, but around my hometown, I'm familiar with everything, so I don't even pay attention to signs or anything I pay attention to the lights, and dance to my music and just enjoy driving. 8. I hate cold, so I don't like snow much and try to stay inside. Luckily I live in Texas so we don't get snow much. 9. Humans are kind of programmed to focus on one thing at once. We really only look at one thing at a time usually. Movement or very bright colors attract the eye, but we don't really see everything in front of us at once. Our brain picks one thing to focus on, like what we're holding, or the face of who we're talking to, and it can be hard to switch focus sometimes, especially if we are also trying to pay attention to sounds, smells, etc. 10. Losing results from us not paying attention. If we are looking up, or ahead, thing falling out of our pockets are totally outside our field of vision and we just don't notice. 11. A lot of cars look the same, and if you parked far away, then the closer cars can block your line of sight. I always end up parked behind a big truck that makes it hard. Hope this helped! Keep making great videos!
Very good point raised about wearing what looks good, even bearing pain to look good. What can I say, having the ability of sight does not necessarily mean you are not blind.
Your videos have given me so much in the way of understanding how the human mind works, thank you so much. I am going to put my all into giving you as good of answers to your questions as I possibly can. I apologize but that means some (or all) of my replies will be LONG... I hope that's ok. ^_^ *1. How do you remember all those colors?* Most people don't, not really. It's more of an 'input-recognition' thing than a conscious memory thing, though remembering the _names_ for the colors can be a bit trickier. For those that can differentiate and name a large number, their knowledge is usually the product of repeated experience with them. A non-vision based analogy for color could be smell. Smell is made when your nose and brain interpret chemical signals, color is made when your eye and brain interpret light(to simplify things). How we perceive these both can go from very generalized to very specified, depending on need. Everyone knows a generalized few from their own experience, like grass and green, or burnt and black. You can pick out a few smells that you encounter all the time, but because of the way smell (and light/color) works, there's a lot of variation to account for. For instance, _type_. Earlier I mentioned green and grass. "Grass is green" is a fair generalization, unless we want to get more specific. For instance, crabgrass is a specific kind of grass, and "lime" is a kind of green, but crabgrass isn't lime green. Using only smell, crabgrass and wheatgrass smell _vastly_ different, and you can smell that without knowing what crabrass and wheatgrass are called, or what the names for the chemicals that make up the smells are called-- _but_ you _could_ learn the names of those chemicals if you wanted to, and eventually recognize them if you experienced it enough. Moving onto burnt and black, another (hopefully interesting) analogy using smell and color is that you can watch something change in color similarly to the way you can smell a chemical change occur. (Food gods forgive my imminent blasphemy) Say you take a piece of beef, which begins as visually red, with white connective tissue and pink fat and starts off scentually (that's a word now, if it wasn't before) with a very (hmm...) clean, light coppery scent right (I guess?)? You then put some olive oil in a pan, get it too hot and add your beef. Instantly at the points of contact a chemical change happens that makes it visually change to a greyish-brown and scentually the Maillard reaction begins and you get that delicious oils bubbling "cooked meat" smell we all love. Very soon after, though, the heat gets to be too much for the meat, and it begins to turn a darker brown, and smell overcooked (happy smells going away) and dry as the fat and water burn off. Eventually, it turns black, and gives off a horrible acrid smell as the carbon combusts and it becomes burnt. In addition to this, like smell, colors can blend together and become something new, which may or may not have an entirely different look, and name (and the person may or may not know the name). And, for fun, there are colors that don't exist in concrete reality, but are a product of how our eyes see light... Kind of like walking into a Yankee Candle store, that smell (of all their merchandise at once) just doesn't exist in nature, but our brain dazzles us with it anyway (this is not a scientifically sound comparison with regards to cause, just fyi). A final analogy could be to note that while our eyes are well-known for being trickable, our noses can too (any sense can be fiddled with, to be honest). The body can trick our noses based on what it needs- a common problem some pregnant women come across is a sudden aversion to meat (it smells spoiled, rotting or even like feces), and many don't know that the cause of this is low hydrochloric acid levels in the stomach. Less acid isn't good for digesting meat, so the body uses smell tricks to cause meat-avoidance.
*2. What's it like to walk in a room and know exactly where everything is?* We don't exactly know where everything is upon walking into a room. For the sake of our senses not being overwhelmed, the brain actually tones down and/or completely discards a lot of the input from the eyes. Because there is SO MUCH _potential_ input, and we don't have a habit of sitting around and taking the time to really focus on things, a LOT gets outright thrown away and replaced with 'assumptions' that the brain makes based on previous experience. What we call "seeing" is really either scanning or focusing. We can "scan" and get a general idea, and memory is good at filling in the gaps, but most things are 'in the background', they become literally fuzzier, and harder to detect the form of (though context clues and memory still keep the knowledge of what they ARE in mind, they begin to lose visual recognition). Using touch as an analogy, in/out of focus is kind of like the difference between a plush toy bear and a plastic bear figurine. The figurine being 'in-focus' and the plush toy being 'out-of-focus'. Using touch alone, it's harder (or, would take longer, anyway) to tell the plush is a bear because the edges are fuzzier and less "concrete", there's more room for interpretation, whereas the plastic figurine has static edges, of a clear shape, it's easier to figure out what's being detected. Visually, we can scan out-of-focus to get a general idea of what is in a room, and memory fills the gap. We'll walk into a familiar room and SEE: large-rectangular-tan, medium-circle-black, small-triangle-red and our brain instantly fills this with KNOWING: Dresser, fan, video game figurine. But if some object were added, replaced, moved or removed, we would have to focus on the spot where the thing was expected to be to actually notice the difference (and even then, the brain can decide to withhold the information that anything changed from our consciousness until it 'decides' we need to know. Because: reasons.). The bigger the thing is can help, or if a big focus of the object was that it gave off another sense, the easier it would be to notice. For instance, most would notice a missing heater from the corner of a cold room without seeing it LONG before we'll notice a big, brightly-colored rug missing from the middle of the room.. except in summer of course. And a person could go for a long time, or even indefinitely, without noticing a piece of clutter on a shelf was gone if there was no outside reason for them to notice it's absence. In a new place, the brain draws as many analogies as quickly as it can, but the margin for error is much larger, which is why when people visit a place they haven't been for only a short period of time, they often find it very difficult to reconstruct in detail what they saw in the place they had just been- because the brain didn't make up itself on what they saw enough for them to reconstruct it. A non-vision based analogy might be like if every object gave off it's own distinct sound, without having to be acted upon to do so. Imagine a room of ticking clocks, of various shapes and sizes, with all different chimes, ticking rhythms, and levels of volume. You can hear them all, and can hear their different properties, but trying to actually *really* NOTICE the specific qualities of them all at once would be an overload. You can, however, focus on a specific one, and getting closer would effect your perception of it, give you more accurate or specific imnformation. etc. I think. I admit that I am making some assumptions about how blind people perceive sound, extrapolating based on my own experience of sound, and (hopefully rational) guesses about the difference being blind might make to that. Hopefully my guesses and extrapolations are accurate enough that the sound analogy wasn't nonsense.
*3. How do you stop and look at a hot chick?* This is honestly probably nearly the same as stopping to appreciate a person with any other sense. We can 'notice' a hot person (and what we each consider 'hot' is totally subjective and personal to each of us as much as the enjoyment of anything else) pretty quickly, actually. The brain is very good at high-speed information gathering, but actually stopping to look for a longer span of time, to take in the smaller details such as the particular shade of her eyes as opposed to just noticing "dark eyes", that's a bit different, and most people try not to spend too much time staring at a stranger, because it's considered rude (unless you're in a conversation with them). Imagine passing a lovely-smelling woman on the sidewalk, you could conceivably turn in her direction and maybe take more/deeper breaths to continue smell her better, maybe happening to notice that what you're smelling has hints of violets, sugar and vanilla as opposed to just "sweet and flowery" until distance prevented the scent from reaching your nose any longer. The problem with this is the longer you stand there just staring, or sniffing, at a stranger without _at least_ striking up a conversation, the less people will approve of it, lol.
*4. How do you remember how things look?* This one also works pretty much the same way as other senses. Just input and the brain filling in the blanks, by drawing parallels. Using food is a good analogy. We remember what apples look like the same way you remember what they taste, feel and smell like, even though all apples are different. Vision is another dimension of knowledge about a thing. It's another way of noticing that a thing is round, or soft, etc. There is overlap with all senses. Sometimes one sense can inform you about others and some senses are better at detecting different kinds of information. Whereas sight can tell you what color something is, it can't tell you what something smells like (though it can guess at some things), or what something feels like (though it can guess). Touch is a lot better for understanding the weight of a thing, than sound but sound could conceivably be used to do this. Smell would be absolutely useless at informing about weight, but it can give information that the other senses (and even the consciousness) wouldn't know what to do with. When it comes to _people_, that actually goes into a separate level of recognition because visuals area big component to sighted social interaction. Sometimes it's rational, but often it's not, that people draw conclusions about each other from something visual. People use their past experiences and knowledge to make quick judgements about others, "this body type means that thing about a person", "that hairstyle means they're that", and it's really hit or miss because of how society works. People will make choices about their own visuals because of the conclusions they want others to draw about them. A non-visual one might be perfume. People will pick perfumes because different scents give off different impressions. Someone who wanted to seem innocent, or sweet might use a candy-scented perfume, or something like a sweet food (more common among younger people), where someone trying to give the impression of power might use a stronger scent, one that includes a musk or an acrid tinge, etc. I know that a person's voice can effect how sighted people perceive each other, so I imagine that blind people might possibly make the same _types_ of associations about people over voice qualities, that sighted do with looks. Making these connections isn't perfectly rational, but there is correlative science behind it, so it's not _all_ prejudice and garbage. It's just part of the big, invisible and confusing way our subconscious brains work. :P
*5. What's it like to go somewhere alone?* It's not that special, really. It honestly only has any meaning in juxtaposition of being around other people, because there's almost no objective difference. There's nothing, in and of itself, different from _going_ somewhere alone, and just being somewhere alone. There's no conversation when you go somewhere alone, but that's really about it, aside that it grants you the capability to be somewhere without others knowing where you are.
*6. What about driving?* The thing about driving is that after the initial learning period, the car becomes little more than an extension of your body itself. The movements to control it become automatic, rather than conscious. To make a turn in an automatic transmission vehicle, a driver doesn't think "check for clearance, adjust hands on wheel, remove foot from gas, apply brake, check for clearance, begin turning wheel, readjust hands, move foot to gas, readjust hands, straighten wheel" they think "I need to go left" and the other stuff just happens, the same way, after learning to walk, we don't consciously go through the steps of walking, we just pick a direction and go.
Two things that may help you understand the answers better is an eye's focus, and its direction. When looking at something far or near, an eye physically changes shape in order to bring the thing into focus, to make it appear clear, well-defined, not blurry. The lens of the eye must redirect all the light it catches to the back of the eye, where light receptors are. But light bouncing from near or far objects come from different ranges of angles, so the lens must bend to be rounder or flatter, whichever is needed to get all the light from a certain object to hit the light sensors in about the same place. You can liken it to the shape of an ear. if you had a horse's ear, with a narrow shape and ability to bend in different directions (or like if you cupped your hands around your ears), you could more clearly hear in one particular direction something farther away. But a flat human ear is better shaped to pick up sound in any direction, as long as it's close enough. A healthy human eye can see clearly both far and near, but it takes a short adjustment time to go from one to the other. (That adjustment time can increase as you get older.) A baby is born able to see, but its ability to focus, and control that focus, develop during its first few years. Eventually, focus becomes as automatic as breathing. But like breathing, you can also take over the body's automatic process and choose to focus your eyes yourself. By pulling or relaxing the muscles in your eye, you can make certain distances appear blurry even if you're looking in their direction; but it's honestly kind of hard to override that automatic reflex. BUT, it cannot be overstated, focus is controlled by the brain. Thus, even if your eye is healthy, you can develop bad viewing habits which can effectively degrade your eyesight. If a person reads books, or looks at a screen day in and day out, their reflex for focusing on far-away things can degrade. Over more time, even the eye muscles responsible for changing the lens can lose their power. This is one way of becoming what is called "near-sighted". The opposite can happen, too, where one rarely looks at things up close, and becomes "far-sighted". This is a layman's explanation, though; there are many different ways an eye can be impaired,. Related to focus, the eye is also limited to a certain direction. You can turn your eyes to look in a certain direction; it's just a ball in a socket, with a hole for letting light in, the pupil. Now, even without turning, the eye has a wide range of vision; it can see things from many different angles at once. But it can only see things in the very center most clearly. Why? One reason is that the lens reflexively focuses to the distance of the object in that center of your vision. But the other reason is where the light receptors in your eye are placed. In the exact back of the eye, directly opposite the pupil, is an extremely high concentration of cone cells, sensitive to color. This sweet spot is much better at sensing details than the rest of the eye. Thus, only a very small part of your vision is super-clear, the very center of your vision. (Though this is technically direction, we often commonly call the direction of one's gaze a focus, and we call looking intently in one direction focusing. This is a reasonable misnomer because direction and focus in the eye are so closely intertwined.) Had to shorten comment. See reply.
Good questions! 1. The way we remember colors and faces is like the way we remember how things feel or smell. When our brain gets repetitive stimulation over a thing we see, smell or touch, it tends to "memorize" it. We take color and shape into account. If it's curved and yellow, it's a banana! We remember faces by remembering people's unique set of traits. Well, there are some people that look like eachother but usually they are not identical (unless they're twins!). We automatically remember eye, nose, mouth size and skin color, hair or even height. These are all aids that help us tell people apart. There are also a lot of things we are used to seeing like for example the the chairs of our own home, sidewalks, grass... but when we see something out of the ordinary, that's when we sometimes stop and stare. It's as if you smell something new or touch a new texture for the first time. You're curious and the brain just wants to know what's new. 2. I'm not very good at naming cars so I just know that if it has 4 wheels, it's huge and has an engine, it's hopefully a car. lol 3. I share your doubt as to why people wear uncomfortable things just to look good. By all means, be happy with your aching foot! But I can't deal with that, I don't care how it looks! I always dress in comfy clothes that happen to look nice to me. 4. I like going to places alone sometimes. To me, it's like recharging my batteries. When you're with someone, you're distracted with jokes, you're enjoying their company and you're just focused on that. But when you're alone, you just have yourself to think about and I think that's a good time to reflect. I don't know if this is weird but when I'm alone I like to pretend I'm on an adventure, as if I'm exploring the world for the first time. I analyze every little detail of everything. As if im an extraterrestrial trying to make sense of planet earth. 5. Driving is crazy! It's a task that I'm yet to fully get the hang of. Another commenter said it best, it's like having a lot of conversations at the same time but you really have to focus on at least 2! The road, mainly, and the other cars' movements. Driving is quite a ride! haha. 6. I have never seen snow! :( I live in a tropical island, it's almost always beach weather here. Walking through the sand is much easier I bet, although sometimes it's very fluffy and my feet sink in. I juggle trying to watch my step, looking forward and searching for seashells. I may trip once in a while but it's part of the beach experience. :) 7. Well I don't know if this happens to you, but do you ever space out? Like, there are things happening in the background and you're thinking about something else? That happens to me! Yes, I see all the time but I can sorta zone out looking at whatever. I may look attentive but I could be thinking about anything! So yes, people have reached out at me and I'll go: What! Sorry, I was somewhere else! 8. As for the losing things, the exit, and everything else we mess up: We just get so mindless. we miss things you would think are obvious. you're right, we should open our eyes! These were fun to answer. Thanks Tommy!
Answers form a sighted person: there are colors EVERYWHERE, so its just like a daily reminder when we are learning colors. then it is etched into our brain. i have no idea how people remember where everything is in the room... I cant do it. i dont know particular makes of cars... except "bugs" which are SUPER round. my grandma calls them pregnant roller skates. Jeeps are easy too. just rails on them, no siding like a normal car... except some normal cars are the brand jeep, not an actual jeep, which i dont understand. i only know a few veggies/fruit. there are a certain number of types where i live, and thats what i remember. i can also tell by the smell. i cant differentiate between all the "orange" fruits though... so if its round and orange i just call is an orange. clementine, maderine, orange, i dont know the difference, they all look and smell pretty much the same! faces: its easy to remember a persons FACE. my problem is remembering the NAME of the face! lol famous people are everywhere. in movies, on tv, in magazines, etc.. we see them everywhere so its, sometimes unfortunately, hard to forget. i have no sense of fashion. i wear whats comfortable. i rarely wear shoes that hurt my feet. i have ONE exception. a pair of sandals with a flower on them and maybe a half inch heal. i dont like going places by myself, depending on where. to the library or school or a small store. but not much elsewhere. 1:20 and thats why i dont drive...also i hate when trucks pass or when cars get too close. i dont understand the snow question just not paying attention, or looking in a different direction, or in "la la land" its been shown in scientific studies that when you arent paying attention, your ears are the LAST to "stop working", and your eyes are the first. its something to do with how your brain processes it. put things where they dont belong or are too lazy to put them away or clean up. money rolls away under places you cant see or sometimes blends into things, they kind of like camouflage into your carpet or the ground parking rows look similar, a lot of cars look similar, you dont really pay attention when you leave the car, because you are focused on chatting and what you need to buy, and forget to look at what row youre in.
Man, I feel so sad. He's asking all these questions and all these pictures and video and images are just flashing right in front of us on the screen. All stuff that he can't see
Excellent questions for sighted people. One is easy to answer: Sighted people miss seeing things all the time because vision is narrowly focused. Hearing is 360 degrees, but detailed vision is only a few degrees. There are usually many, many things in our field of view, so we cannot pay attention to them all at once. We can see many things at once, and it seems clear, but much of our vision is not actually very clear or detailed unless we really stop and look carefully, and our peripheral vision can see almost nothing except for sensing movement.
Well sometimes you might not see something cause your eyes are focused on something else so your brain doesn't pay attention to it and it just gets cast to your periphial vision
How do we remember faces... well, you just do. You can also remember things by hearing it, right? It is pretty much the same. When we lose things, we can't find it mostly because it either isn't there, it's being covered by something (towel, blanket or clothes) or because it just blends in with the surroundings. As for the high heels thing... I have no freaking idea.
We don't always know exactly where things are in a room. Drawers, and cabinets are a thing after all. And thanks to our friends color and perspective, things can blend in with each other, especially in a cluttered space, and make it hard to find anything. In fact, a lot of times, we just rely a general idea of where things are, based on past experience on where certain objects would normally be found. Like how most people keep socks and/or underwear in the top dresser drawer. After a little bit of searching, we'll usually find it there. This is also why we lose things. If something isn't where we'd normally perceive it to be, or where we thought we'd normally leave it, we don't exactly know what to do beyond looking everywhere. Which can take a while, even with sight. Past experience based on visual cues also causes people not to look in places they'd think of as being silly places to look for something, often causing the "always the last place you look" scenario. Because they didn't check that one place until they ran out of options. And your questions about remembering color, shapes and, well, everything are all related. Color and shapes are like building blocks in terms of visual recognition. When we're young, we learn the basic shapes, then colors, and then we put them together. For example, the first things we're likely to see that's both round and orange, is an orange (the fruit.) As we get older, we learn more complex shapes, and colors. Eventually, that leads into things like patterns, textures, depth and perspective. Those who wish to pursue learning about it even further are people like artists, designers, engineers, architects, etc. And when it comes to things like makes and brands, that actually goes back to the very basics, as most every brand logo is made of of very simple shapes and colors that are just arranged differently from each other, so they're easy to remember. And easy to remember is exactly what any business or company wants.
*My attempt to answer each question* 1. It's like remembering the letters of the alphabet. You're taught about colours from a very young age and after a while, it just comes naturally. 2. It's nice to know where everything is in a familiar room, but it's also easy to forget where things (such as your phone) are which can be frustrating. 3. It's like being distracted by a pleasant sound or smell (like music or if you were to walk past a bakery). It can be hard to take your eyes off an attractive girl/guy. 4. Just like remembering your friends' voices or how certain foods smell, it eventually becomes easy to remember. Also everyone has a very distinctive face. 5. A lot of people care far more about their appearance than how comfortable their clothes are. They just want to make a good impression. 6. Going somewhere all by yourself can sound lonely, but it can be peaceful, depending on how introverted/extroverted you are. 7. It might sound overwhelming, but it's really not because you only really concentrate on one thing you can see at a time. 8. You have to watch where you're going to avoid slipping. The snow also can be very pleasant to look at. 9. Like I previously mentioned, you only focus on one thing at a time, so it's easy to miss out on your other surroundings. 10. Small things like coins can be camouflaged, meaning it blends in with things that surround it. 11. A lot of cars can look very similar and it's easy to forget where exactly you parked.
0:31 It's kinda like braille, or words in general. once you have sight your whole life you sorta just... I don't know, REMEMBER. :I now that I think about it humans are genius :P
"how do you concentrate on all the stuff thats going on (while driving)" people dont and thats a hug part of why driving is so dangerous, too many people forget that theyre driving a 5000lbs missile
Great questions! I find it very difficult to find everything in a room because Unlike a blind persons organized apartment, sighted people often have cluttered rooms. It has a lot more to do with memory than whether or not we can actually see items too. For example if you keep items in drawers, not in sight, you still recall whats within the drawers because of memory. Just like you most likely recall things too. We remember things just like you do. We sighted folks have been exposed to every color there is since birth and it is more about memory. Kind of like you could hear the name of an item, recall what it is called forever, touch it and think its name. It is that way for us too. We could close our eyes too and feel around, locate an item and know its name without seeing it too. I did an experiment once blindfolded myself to try out things without sight, and it was difficult. But, I found that I could navigate my house perfectly and not bump items and this was due to memory. After the body repeats a task over and over it becomes automatic almost. Kind of like if your water was shut off in your place for a day for plumbing reasons, you might keep reaching to turn the faucet on anyhow, without even thinking " hey, the waters off", first because it is so automatic to our brains to do so. A lot of life is that way for us also. Personally I find navigation through snow to be extremely difficult because even though I can see the ground, I have completely flat feet that do not want to walk on uneven surfaces well, lack of balance, short legs at only 5'1. What I can do that a blind person would have trouble with, is walk around snow banks because I see them. I live in a very snowy place St Paul MN. It is an effort for me every year! We sighted people tend to recall the faces of others by associating it with the persons name and personality. This is subconscious but it is a fact. Also, some people have a hard time recalling faces. This is called face-blindness. It is not in any way equal to actual blindness, in that yes they do see. However they cannot absorb details in a face for some reason. This should be called Face-recognition disorder, not called blindness, I think. Some sighted people are more visually oriented than others. Some are more sound oriented. Because we have both senses we get the choice I suppose. I am sound oriented. Often times I watch a movie and look away from the screen for minutes at a time just listening to it instead. Music is the most important thing in the world in my opinion, music is something I do not just hear but feel. This is called fission I think? Often even in public I listen to music on headphones and close my eyes and feel it. I understand for a blind person closing off your hearing would be unwise, but for the sighted, we plug our ears with music in public quite often and rely solely on vision and touch. I for one, do not take my sight nor hearing for granted, and thank every day that I have them! Fashion is bizarre to me too! I do not wear high heels that hurt just because they look good! I wear boots that are comfortable. I wear Indian yoga pants, or long flowing shirts. I only wear black clothes, too. Some people wear tight, uncomfortable clothes, for fashion. Thats fine if they like it but not I!
00:34 Car is easy, and you can enjoy them like us car enthusiasts. All cars come with unique emblems (unless they have been removed, or de-badged in technical terms), bodywork, and such. Have someone allow you to feel the Spirit of Ecstasy on a Rolls Royce, or to feel the bodywork and panels of a car.
1: You dont remember all the colors, you remember like 5 and just stuff every single color as one of those five. 2: I don't KNOW where everything is, if you listen to 10 conversations at once you hear all of them but you only KNOW what is going on in one. 3: You dont usually stop, its like if you smelled something really good or heard a good song and decided to enjoy and appreciate it. 4: the same way you remember how things smell and sound. many people can tell what a car is by sound alone, a flat plane v8 sounds different than a cross plane v8 and that sounds different than a turbocharged inline 4 which sounds different than a v12 5: pretty fly, its actually really nice feeling the freedom (i'm 20 and still live with my parents) although watch out because the responsibility follows you like a tailgater 6: Vision definitely helps but i dont understand how being able to see helps me because i cant see past the snow either. 7: its hard to explain but vision takes a lot more brain power than smell or sound. its a lot more detailed. its more like touch if everything had an intricate texture. Imagine touching the whole room at once, you will not notice everything. 8: If i lost something that means I can see it anymore so my vision obviously doesnt help. there are some rules of sight: i cant see things behind anything else that isnt see-through (that concept is complicated) and i can only see in front of me (also complicated) Also i can only really focus on the center of my vision
Wow. I have never seen or heard anything more amazing in my 14 years on this planet. I just realized how lucky I am to be able to see and memorize all the colors and people and everything he talked about. This made me feel happy and grateful and a whole bunch of other emotions that I don't even know what to call. This blows my mind.
Wow, I feel a bit stupid answering these questions, being a sighted person and all, but it's not the first time I've questioned why I've missed something, lol! How do I remember where everything is and what objects or people look like? Well, you know how you can feel the size and shape of something to tell where something is? It's a similar concept, except instead of feeling what's in front of us, we see it. Well, this and imagine a set of objects representing people. Now, each of these objects feel and smell different from each other, right? It's like that, for seeing which person is your friend and which is a stranger, granted, when two people look very similar to each other it gets confusing, just like two things that feel the same are confusing, but I think you get my drift. How do I pay attention to everything going on around me while driving? Well, you know how you get good at doing something automatically with enough practice, so you can do something and do another thing at the same time? It's that idea. A good example would be say you're reading from the menu in a restaurant and listening to music, you're able to both read braille and listen to the lyrics and the tune of the song, right? In other words, your mind goes from one thing to the other and back again in seconds. It's like that with driving and reading a sign, driving and listening to the radio, or driving and talking with a friend in the passenger seat. What's it like to get around in snow? Imagine seeing one, very bright color that covers everything, a good metaphor is covering a space filled with objects with a white sheet, that's kind of how snow's like. I think that's the only difference, snow is still cold and crunches underneath the feet, though. What's it like to get around by yourself? Well, you walk certain places by yourself, don't you? It's that feeling, the excitement and nervousness of being in places and having the freedom to go wherever you want as long as you take yourself there, the only difference is instead of walking, you're driving. How do I not find a car in a parking lot? Because I don't pay attention to where specifically I parked my car, such as using visual cues like what row number I'm in or what my car is parked near to, then I have to deal with so many cars in the parking lot and some of them are the same color, size, and shape of MY car. I think everything else can be explained through knowledge of depth perception, which others have already explained. I hope I answered your questions adequately enough.
Before I finalize this comment, I'd like to say that I really enjoy this channel that I've recently found, and each of his videos makes me laugh and smile and appreciate my sight a bit more. The following was simply intended as food for thought for the questions Tommy asked in this video. "How do you remember _all_ those colors?" The same way you remember the braille alphabet - memorization, repetition, and practice. "What's it like to look at a room and you know exactly where everything is in the room?" It feels just like when you read braille and know exactly which dot combination corresponds to whichever letter or number. Normal! :D "How come you stop and look at a hot chick?" Lots of people are attracted to how people look. It's a sight thing XD "How do you remember what things look like?" How do you remember the braille alphabet? How do you use echolocation? "What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?" Depends. Some people love the feeling of independence, others crave communication and going in a party. "How do you concentrate on all the stuff that's goin' on [while driving]?" How do you concentrate on all the sounds individually when you're walking down a street? "What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?" Bro, it feels amazing to me. The crunching of the snow beneath my feet is just - _oh_. Oh, it's beautiful. "How do you miss somethin' that's goin' on right in front of your face?" Motion blur. Why don't you hear something if it happens behind multiple walls? Because it's too quiet. How don't we see something? When it's too quick. "How do you lose things when you can see?" How do you lose things when you can hear? Don't most objects make a sound when they fall to the ground? _Especially_ most of the objects you'd carry around in your pockets: Keys, a wallet, phone, etc.
My man you're amazing....I love your attitude. That's better than someone miserable and depressed with sight... it doesn't sound like you're missing out to me! Well done
Three years late? No problem. First of all, I think the sense closest to sight is the sense of sound. Sight is a more focused, more accurate sort of sound. Except, it feels totally different than sound. Unless you have synesthesia (the mixing of sensory perceptions, imagine hearing what coffee tastes like), you probably don't think of any connection between the senses of sight and sound. They are felt as differently as taste and touch are. Actually, I think it's probably fair to say that taste is to touch as sight is to sound. How do you remember all those colors? When I see a color, I think of it. When I think of a color, the color reveals itself in my mind. It's like hearing a certain pitch of a musical note, you will remember that note. What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in a room? Pretty cool, unless you can't find something. How can you stop and look at a hot chick? Imagine hearing a really beautiful sounding voice. But the voice was only audible if you were facing a certain direction, and only for a short time. And what if the beautiful voice was directly linked by millions of years of evolution to the drive to reproduce? How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things. Brains just have a lot of storage space devoted to images of things, I guess. But in general we don't actually store the shape of everything, we store a few basic shapes and how to put the shapes together, and our brains interpret it as a unique object. What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself? Pretty stressful, if I'm driving. But that's just me. What's it like to be able to get around in the snow? Super lots of fun! We can throw snowballs and hit people with them, and if they're in a good mood they'll throw some back. How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face? Sometimes we're just staring off into space. Our eyes might be open, and we're seeing visual information, but our mind isn't really processing it. And really, it is a case of only some people doing this. Not everyone does this as much as, say, I do. How do you lose things when you can see? Well, if we weren't looking in the exact place that the missing thing landed, we might struggle to make out the object from visual noise. Imagine dropping a cube onto a bunch of other cubes, and just feeling around to try to find the cube you're looking for. I don't know, maybe not the best analogy. But the main thing being that we can't see everywhere at once. Just a small region. Only directly forward we're able to see clearly. Towards the edge of our visual field it's blurry and colorless. The usable field of vision is something like 10% of the front view. Imagine if you could only hear things when looking a certain direction, and if you looked away, instead of your ears telling you which way the sound was coming from, they just couldn't hear anymore.
i wonder... what annoys you the most about sighted people? what i mean is, most people are idiots (let's be real here) and likely ask you some really dumb, not very well thought out questions....i'd think that would be annoying... what question or misconception annoys you the most?
1) Colors - it's a lot like sound pitches. They're just frequencies of energy. There are colors that are close to each other, like a semitone in music, but they are still distinguishable, and just like music, some people distinguish colors better than others. 2) Remembering where things are in a room - actually has nothing to do with visual memory, but association. You know your watch is in the top right drawer of the dresser, the drawer is in the dresser, and the dresser is to the right of the doorway. You know where the doorway is because you entered it. Some people have "photographic memory" where they can accurately remember the visual data itself, but that's rare. As for seeing everything in a part of the room… imagine having a giant hand that you can put everything at once, and everything has a braille tag. Kind of like that. 3) Attractive people stopping traffic - imagine that someone (or something) smells really good, and you stop to take another whiff. 4) Instant recognition of cars, food, faces - this is unique to sight, in how fast it works. It's practically instant. But think of it as each one of those things being a different chord in music. You can tell as soon as you hear it. And just like sound recordings can tell you what a chord sounds like, photos can tell you what a person looks like, even though you've never seen them IRL. 5) Why do people wear uncomfortable shoes that look good - as a sighted person, I'm really stomped by this one. I can't take more than two steps in uncomfortable shoes. 6) Paying attention to everything while driving - impossible. You concentrate on one thing at a time. Some people can switch their attention from one thing to another really quickly; others can't. 7) Getting around in the snow - I snowboard, so for me getting around in the snow is like this: wheeeeeeeeee! 8) Not seeing something that's right in front of your face - can happen with any senses; it's just attention span. You can fail at tasting something that's IN YOUR MOUTH! 9) Losing things - can happen in so many ways. Small objects are hard to see, but they can bounce around or roll to where they cannot be seen or reached. And remember, you can only see in a straight line, so anything opaque can block your sight. 10) Not finding your car in a parking lot - cars look very similar to one another, in general. The easiest way to distinguish a typical car is by color. But there are only so many colors that car manufacturers use. Plus, in a big parking lot, there's sometimes no way to identify where you are: no signs, no buildings, and everything just looks the same from every angle. Even in parking lots with signs, sometimes you just fail to memorize the location where you parked. Kind of like if every time you came home, you had a different address, you might not always find your home.
Hey Tommy, not sure if you'll read this but I just want to say thank you. Thank you for making us feel blessed by our sight with these videos, it puts our problems into a whole other perspective. And it's relieving to know how happy a blind person can still be, despise how unfair life was to you.
The answers to these questions can mostly be chalked up to experience. We see cars, foods, colors, etc. so often that we just naturally memorize it, just like you’d recognize a sound like someone’s voice or a popular song. Also, I remember an acronym I learned in elementary school to remember all the colors: Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Most all the other colors are just different shades or combinations of those colors. The “missing” things is actually a pretty good question. Sight is different than hearing in that the ears can hear everything in your immediate surroundings-in front, to the side of, and even behind you. The eyes, on the other hand, have to be aimed directly at the thing we’re seeing. We do have some peripheral vision (i.e., seeing things barely out of our field of view), but we can’t see things behind us like you can hear something behind you.
the way we lose things that are in our field of sight is because there is so many things around us that we are so used to seeing that our mind focuses on the things we find most important and because there is so much stuff around us sometimes it will be hard to find. Sight isn't perfect. also you can lose your car because many cars look the same so it makes it harder for us to pin point exactly which one is ours. I hope this helped! You are truly an inspiration
I have a question for you, Tom! Do blind people actually see and experience in their dreams? If so, what's it like to see in dreams when you can't see in reality? Is it a relief, or do you feel better and happier?
If you were once able to see but became blind, then you will see in your dreams. If you were always blind, then you won't be able to see anything in your dreams.
ThatGuyYouArent2 Agreed. Though with the caveat that it might be possible if they had some form of synesthesia, but even that's much more common in people who were previously sighted because of brain remapping. :)
PurpleGhost Wooah, there are seriously documented cases of blind people experiencing visual synesthesia? What about those who have always been blind?! How would they even know they're experiencing something visual? :O
***** Do you feel better about yourself? Yes the question may be a bit obvious, but what if he was 8? Also even if he is 35, would you still feel better about yourself? Their is no reason to insult someone for asking a question, or being wrong, or having a different opinion from your own. You have been wrong before in your life. You have stated obvious things before in your life. You have asked questions that seem obvious to others. How would you like it if people insulted you every time? No need to be insulting.
This almost brought me to tears, we really take things for granted. He seems like such a happy warm hearted person with a very pleasant spirit. People like him is the key to ending racism in my opinion. If we all were born blind, how could we judge one another, God bless you Mister!
During the video when you are asking how the sighted can lose things, it shows a picture of someone dropping an item on a surface with a busy pattern. This is a great way to fool a sighted person and it's not unusual for us to give up on looking and instead rely on touch. This is especially true for small objects. This is the same experience as camouflage. I have good positional awareness, so I'm able to remember where I parked or where I set something in a pretty absolute fashion. Others may not remember exactly where something is, but they know it's on their desk so it narrows their search. Parking lots are big and full of visual noise, so people who remember positions relative to others may find themselves searching too big of an area or in an area too noisy to search quickly. Sometimes a desk or a rug or a parking lot is so busy that it becomes difficult to find the anomaly in the pattern caused by what you are looking for, similar to how a bumpy piece of paper which has some Braille on it may be difficult to interpret.
we remember stuff like you remember stuff, you know how a cat feels like so when you touch a cat you pretty much know, oh that's a cat. Same way we know how something looks like
For remembering colors, it's like how you would know a bird chirping from a saxophone. It's really impossible to describe the *nature* of colors, but in terms of remembering them, you just get exposed to them over and over and eventually you just start to automatically categorize them. There are times though when it's not clear, like a color might be right on the brink between red and orange and people might disagree about if it's red or orange. It's like magic. Like, I take it for granted, but seeing this video made me realize that walking into a room and knowing where things are and how far away they are and just like, being able to immediately have all that information, it's like a magic trick. As for hot chicks, think about like, not to get too personal, but maybe the feeling of a woman's breast, or like a passionate kiss, those sensations. Looking at a beautiful woman is like that for your eyes, just less intensely. As for knowing what things look like, it's similar to what I said about colors, it's like, after exposure, you'll know the difference between the sound of a car honking and a goose honking. Same with vision, if I've seen a car and I've seen a goose, I'll probably know which is which. But things aren't always easy to remember, for example cars, lots of people don't know different cars by sight because lots of them look quite similar (like the difference of a duck honk and a goose quack perhaps, or the difference of taste between leeks and green onions). As for faces, I have prosopagnosia, so I actually don't remember faces well at all, they all look alike to me unless you've got something really obviously different like a wild hair color or are REALLY tall or short or wide or thin. So I don't know how people do that either. Fashion is kinda silly, I usually dress for comfort. But sometimes getting dressed up is sort of like.... making yourself sing at other people's eyes with your clothes? I don't know how else to put it; it's like, doing something to make yourself pleasing to other people's perceptions. So that's not a great example but it's sort of like that. I don't drive :o So as for how people can just not see things right in front of them, you've got to remember that besides closing your eyes, there's no visual equivalent of silence. Imagine if you were in a crowded room; you might just let all the voices blend together and become background noise if you weren't paying attention (or at least that happens to me); same thing happens with vision, sometimes it just all becomes background sight and you stop focusing and miss stuff. Sight works in straight lines (not being patronizing, but since you're blind I'm not sure if you know that or what), so when you can't find your car it's because there are lots and lots of cars and unless you've got a direct line of unobstructed space between your eyes and the car, you can't even see it, let alone recognize it. As for when it is in your vision, again, lots of cars look very similar. If you have a 4-door sedan that's a beige-gold color, you're going to be picking your car out of a lot that has 30 other beige-gold 4 door sedans. Imagine listening for one whistle but there are 20 other whistles blowing at the same time. It's hard to pick out which is the right one, especially from a distance. I hope this helped, love your channel! :D
1. Remembering colors is like remembering names, or objects - it's just what we grow and live with. How many names do you know? A lot of, you can't remember them all in a moment, but you also can't forget. Can you make a list of everything you have in your apartment? Not in a moment, but you can. Same thing with remembering colors. 2. Well... Imagine that every object around you has it's unique sound, and you constantly hear it all. And let's say you know all that sounds, and don't think about recognising them, like it was as easy as recognising words of the language. So the closer you get to the object, the louder is the sound, so you always know how war it is. Always. Non-stop. But it's not hard, it's just the everyday reality. 3. It's the same like enjoying everything else that you find pleasant. You can stop to listen to a beautifull song when walking near the window where it is played. 4. Just like remembering the words. But actualy, we remember it not as good as we think. Good enough to recognise it when next time see, but not good enough to even describe. 5. Knowing famouse people... You've never heard Bethoven playing his music himself)) But you know how it sounds) 6. Fashion... We chose what we like depending on what impression was stronger. For example pasta. You don't eat pasta cause it was disgusting thing to touch. What?)) Realy?)) It isn't made for touching, isn't the taste more important?)) Yeah, it is, but your impression of how it felt was so strong that you don't give a shit how it tastes) So sometimes we don't give a shit how uncomfortable are the shoes cause first impression was just WOW! 7. Going all by myself... ok, I can't describe that. But sometimes it can be scary and I can get lost) 8. Driving is a damn magic, I don't know how people do that)) I don't drive) 9. Snow... It feels like a cold and wet sand, and this is it. That's all)) 10. Imagine a big room with many people in it. You are talking to a person, and then you hear everyone aroung are laughing cause someone's just told best joke ever! But you were talking, you didn't hear the joke. So technically you hear everything around you, but you notice only what you concentrate on, and some loudest sounds the break through your concentration. Same thing with not seing something. 11. We can lose things because they are under or behind other things, and also because we forget where we put it. Can you lose a sock under the bed? I think you can) 12. To find a car is actualy pretty hard))) It's easier to remember where it was, then to look for it. 10 meters left from the front doors, for example))
All the colors? its like math. You know the basic ones and then u can say light red, or dark red. Or Reddish brown. Also Compare to things - sky blue or orange orange. Hot chicks? Well they DO slow traffic down.... Remembering stuff is like learning words - instead of unique sound u remember the shape and colors and details. And fashion blows my mind too.. its... just idiotic. Cannot see something just like you cannot hear things that were clearly loud enough. You weren't focused on it or were distracted by something else. Seeing is technically hearing. Just at a different wavelength.
what is light and dark? ;) lol seeing and hearing isnt the same thing, there are similarities like both are waves. but light is electromagnetism and hearing is particles bouncing on each other.
Best way I can describe how we remember and differentiate between everything is that we can see the depth of objects and color and shape with the same distinctness you can feel the slight bumps and ridges on someone's face. All that stuff has a visual representation to us, even light itself, which based on how wide spread and bright it is, we can tell where the source comes from and what distance it covers. Color varies immensely too, there's not really just one blue, there's a huge array of shades, tints, and hues that we consider blue, though at times another person might actually see that same blue as a purple or green based on how their specific eyes are registering those colors in the brain. Depth is seen by having one eye see one angle and the other eye see a different one. The brain combines the images into one and it let's us determine the placement of the objects in relation to each other. Shadow and light play into this too, based on where a light fixture is, shadows let me know when and where light is being blocked by an object. Basically we see in three dimensions just like you feel in three dimensions, but with the added distinction from colors and light and shadow. As far as why we notice someone attractive, it's an instinct driven thing, same as when someone brushes up against you that you like and you get tingles, it immediately grabs your attention and focus. Fashion is largely about attraction, but people just like to look nice and neat or cute, whatever fits their personality. A well dressed man in a suit is akin to a well organized desk where everything is exactly where it should be and easy for anyone to find. Someone in more relaxed clothing with mismatched socks is like a desk where you know where everything is immediately, but to anyone else it takes them a second to figure out where you've put everything. Clothing can tell you what someone is in the mood for, what types of things they like, a little bit about their personality even. A black dress, based on its shape, texture, and the accessories with it and could mean someone's going to a funeral, or an expensive restaurant, or they're going out to a club. It's all based on the context of what styles and colors mean within that particular culture though. A man in a suit is very common in New York City, but very uncommon in a small rural town. We can see whether people are organized, neat, clean, healthy, etc ( though they may or may not actually be healthy, eyes can trick you there ). That's about all I could think of, hope it helps and didn't sound like I was talking down to you or anything, I just like to explain as fully as I can.
Screenreading and braille display technology has been around for decades, pretty much as long as computers have... I am disturbed by how many people don't know that! How do you think blind lawyers or accountants or writers work???
This really made me think about how aware I actually am of the world. How do I lose things I set places? There's so much actively going on all the time it's hard to stay focused on the important things. Everything is so busy it's migraine inducing. There is no way to describe a gorgeous meadow or indulge in a painting, but I wish I could shut out the world and focus more on what's happening in my life.
1. How do you remember all of those colors? A: The same way you can differentiate between how things feel. Think of colors as a visual version of texture differentiation. In the same manner as sometimes you would feel something and say "This sorta feels like..." when you aren't sure, you have these defaults as a go-to. We do the same thing with colors - there are so many shades that sometimes we can only describe in base colors (Blue, Green, etc) or that it looks kind of like a cross between a green and yellow (and so on). The closest analogy I can make for somebody who is blind is to ask: How do you remember what all those sounds are? 2. How do you remember what everything looks like? A: See also - #1. You know what things feel like when touched, but not everything. So you generally can tell the difference between maybe an orange and banana in your hands, and more so with smell. Things that you can touch and are instantly recognizable is essentially the same thing to a sighted person on visual recognition. There are features we immediately pick out. 3. Fashion? A: It's really psychology. People are easily persuaded into the dumbest things sometimes. I mean, in the 1970s, somebody convinced everyone to buy a pet rock. Fashion is roughly the same idea... but it does a serve a purpose. In the fashion industry, it is more about taking a trend to the level of absurdity which (in turn) trickles down to the common clothing fashion which is less absurd (by comparison) and borrows from those higher up fashion trends. Then there are folks who just wear whatever is comfortable and ignore fashion trends. High heels... well, that actually started long ago as a fashion trend for men (aristocrats). Women began wearing high heels, which in turn feminized the fashion, and it more or less evolved into a hyper feminine stereotype (think: porn). 4. Driving? A: Actually, to be honest... most people aren't concentrating on all the visual things going on around them. The way vision seems to work is that the mind takes a hell of a lot of shortcuts, and often just sorta ignores a lot when things are repetitious. In effect, we are effectively on autopilot mentally while driving because sighted people aren't hyper-aware like other heightened senses (such as with blind people). I suppose the answer is closer to: It's roughly equivalent to how you can tune out the noise in a crowded restaurant and focus just on the person speaking to you. But we still multi-task horribly... so cell phones, talking to people in the passenger seat, etc... it does require splitting attention. So don't get into any existential and deep conversations while driving. 5. Getting around in the snow? A: Think of it like very cold sand. Often times less dense. 6. How do you miss something? A: See Answer 4. The brain only can pay attention to so much at the same time, takes a lot of shortcuts, and often omits things right in front of us. There's a famous study where people are asked to watch a bunch of people pass a basketball to each other and count how many times the ball is passed. Most people miss the guy in the Gorilla outfit walking clearly into view during this test. It's called Situational Blindness. Being sighted isn't as "all-seeing" as you may think. Our brains love to mess with us. 7. How do you lose things? A: Situational Blindness (again). Our brain simply doesn't pay attention or "record" everything in detail visually. So we often forget random information or don't "see" it. Which is to say the thing that happened doesn't get "remembered" or it is omitted in the brain when processing. Hence the thing we lost is literally in a mental black hole, big 'ol blank in the mind for where something is at because it was never remembered to begin with. Your brain figured it wasn't important to remember and skipped over it. Being blind (or or senses impaired or missing), heightens the remaining senses to a higher acuity... which may also essentially free up "informational bandwidth" for what the brain is able to "record" and remember. 8. Lost a parked car in a parking lot? A: Cars aren't as universally different as you might think. They all tend to look similar when there is a few hundred or a thousand parked in a group. Again with the situational blindness issue. Our brain just gets overloaded with information and it all sorta blurs together - as if you were looking for a single cello in an orchestra while a symphony was playing. 9. How do we miss the exit? A: Our good old friend, situational blindness strikes again.
I learned about colors by the time I was kindergarten. These days parents begin teaching kids about colors (and shapes) at least two to three years earlier than when I was growing up. For example, kids learn to distinguish red cars, red circles, red squares, red crayons, and it works the same way with learning the other colors (such as orange,yellow,green, blue,violet,gray,gold,silver,brown, and some other colors). We basically learn to see these things through many years of repetition. As for how people can see things and not notice them it is only the area near the center of one’s visual field where one can see well enough to read (for example). Peripheral vision is better for recognizing movement and the existence of objects outside the center of one’s vision (along with some basic information about size and shape (but not color)). Also most sighted people are good at recognizing faces and models of cars but others (like myself) are not good at this (even after decades of practice). It comes down to a combination of years of repetition and differences in brain development based on genetics and environment. For example there is a specific area of the brain that is more involved in recognizing faces by sight than the other areas and this area has a different level of development in each person.
Hi Tommy! I've listened to some of your videos, which are very interesting. I found the responses from watchers to be sometimes very awkward. For some reason, people compare sight with hearing... I got to tell you, as a visual artist, I feel that the geometry of things is more like touching, following the curves, the points, the throughs. Their color is more like smell, however less complex than smell. Color is easier to explain in technical terms than in emotional terms, because the emotions associated with colors are mostly cultural. The most common color model that exsits, a model that can map out all the possibilities, is the additive model, which is based on the way light transmits its wavelengths to the eyes. The additive model functions this way: You have three inputs of color that can vary in intensity, like three different direction choices. When you combine the intensity of each of the three, you get a brighter and brighter color that varies in hue depending on the amount of each of the three inputs (hue is a technical term for the actual color). The more you add intensity to the three values, the closer to white. If there is no light, so no color, it is black (which is almost impossible, unless we go in outerspace, and even there we could still see the small stars) White is not the absence of colors, but really the presence of all of them in the additive model. If you add an equal quantity of intensity for each of the inputs, it stays grey. It functions as a triplet of contrast. If you know the color wheel, it might give you a better understanding of the way things look colorwise. Another important fact is that object get smaller with distance. I can picture the same thing if I think of it in terms of touch. I imagine a spherical bubble arround me, and the further away from me, the bigger is the bubble. If I want to fit an object on the surface of that bubble, it will look smaller than the whole surface of the bubble as the object gets further. Imagine if your arms could strech to infinity. You could touch all the objects of the universe at the edge of it. So, those objects look smaller because they all fit in the sight. There is more information for the same surface area. However, we can't see all those objects because our vision blurs things as they get distant. So at a certain distance things start to merge and they are hard to be differenciated. So, to summarise, the way things feel when I personally look at them is different from what I usually read. When I focus on the geometry of things, I can "feel" the slopes and textures and points and throughs, just like if I was touching them from a distance. When I focus on the color, it is like if I smelled it, but in a rather more simple manner, because smell is much more complex than color. If there was more attention into developing a mathematical model for the olfactory system, a better understanding of color might be possible from a reductive approach of the olfactory sytem. So, the geometry of things can be comparedf to touch at a distance, and their color can be compared to smell at a distance. There is however another harder way to describe color. Because it can be modeled with 3 different values, it is like if every single bit of information in an object not only had a position in 3 dimensions, but it also contains information from an additional 3 other dimensions, which are red, green and blue. Also, I wanted to point out that the reason why the ocean is blue is because it acts like a mirror for the blue sky above. The blue ocean is just a reflection of the sky. Water is mostly transparent. We see it because it refracts light and bends the image which gives a gostly impression of it like glass. it distorts the coming light from behind. So, if you look at someone's face through it, it sometimes looks funny. A glass appears almost the same as if it was made of water. Lastly, the way we draw is just a projection of what I explained earlier about things getting smaller in distance. We fake the 3D space by making a projection of it on a 2D piece of paper. However a pretty good approximation, when we move arround that fake representation, things don't move in paralax like they do in 3D. Paralax could also be explained with streching arms that can touch. I hope this gives you a better perspective on the world of vision.
A lot of the answers to these are that vision works like sound: there's a LOT of background noise but only a few things that you really focus on. For example, if you're in a crowd, you'll concentrate more on the people's voices that are closest to you, while further away voices are muffled and lost in the background. Sight works this way. Bright colors (colors which are bright, similar to how high-pitched noises or louder noises will grab your attention more easily) will stand out and some of your attention will be brought to them. Then there's the functional aspect -- if you're going to sleep, you're much more likely to look at your bed rather than a hair pin on the floor. Another would be size. For example, in a bedroom the biggest objects are the walls, ceiling, floor, bed, wardrobe, etc. Smaller objects tend to go unnoticed because it's like that background noise in a crowd. Vision works in three basic ways, these are how people perceive what they see. There's figure and ground, perception of distance, and recognition. Figure and ground is when the brain organises sensory information into figures (objects) and ground (the background). A sighted example of this is looking at the silhouette of a man on a white page, recognizing that the man is the figure, what we're supposed to focus on, and the white page is the background, information that is 'extra' and is perceive as less important. A non-sighted example may be if there is a constant hum which doesn't change in tone or pitch. However, there's also music playing over the humming. The music is the main focus of attention. Camouflage uses this to its advantage. A figure (a person) wears camouflage to blend into the ground (the background, eg. a forest). Perception of distance mainly uses relative size and height. Imagine standing on a train platform. The train looks small because it's far away, however, you know its growing closer because it's getting bigger. The train isn't really getting bigger, obviously, and the brain goes through this process so we can understand distance. Our hands grow 'smaller' as we move them away from us, but it's just our perception of our hand, relative to our size. For non-sighted, imagine a train is approaching. The noise of the train is quiet, growing louder as it approaches. Two sounds of equal volume can appear louder or quieter because it's our relative positioning to the source of the sound that affects the perceived volume. Lastly, recognition. After years of listening to noises, you can separate the differences between a church bell, a phone ringtone, and an alarm because, even though they're all ringing noises, they sound different. Well, sight works in this way. We know what people look like because a human being has a typical shape. You can recognize a phone ringtone because, even though different phones use different tones, there's qualities that they all share. A face is expected to have a head, hair, eyebrows, eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth. There are qualities that differ, obviously (you might not have hair, you might have a beard, you might not have eyes, etc) but they mostly share this shape. Your brain puts together this information after years of looking at faces, years of hearing church bells and ringtones. To address the colors question and ow sighted people remember so many, you have to address the fact that there's really only three: red, blue, and yellow. White and black are complicated -- in light terms, white is light and all colour frequencies are in white, that's why you get rainbows when light diffracts through raindrops, and black is the absence of light -- but let's just talk about them as shades. Purple is really just red plus blue. A certain amount of both. Tip the balance and it's still red plus blue but it looks different. There's high pitches of sound and low pitches of sound. Anything in between is really just high plus low, with a specific balance. Shades (black and white) just make things duller (black) or paler (white) which is really just, for example, blue plus black equals dark blue. But there's a whole part of the brain dedicated to interpreting vision, which non-sighted people don't use, or use less. That's why it's difficult to understand, especially if you've never had sight. In any way, interpreting the world through a visual means is as little effort as interpreting the world through an auditory means. It's a natural thing that humans have learned to do, not something that requires effort or much thought for practical use. Anyway, I hope I helped answer some questions.
Sound is overpowering to our concentration. Smell is overpowering to our pheromones and gut. Touch is overpowering to the immersion to the moment. Taste is like an exaggeration of that. Sight is overpowering to the information unobstructed in front of your face. If you were only given random images you could not perceive them. With two eyes, but even with one, as we move around and interact with the world our eyes instinctually become familiar with what it's looking at just as seamlessly as sound. These senses show depth and form in different ways. Sight reveals all the information in front of your face all at once. The sight doesn't echo into your senses, it's just there when the eyelids are open. So much information is presented to us we become so used to it we would never describe the experience as sounding so incredible. If a door is in front of a barking dog, without sound we would not know a dog was there. From where your eyeball are spanning in every direction we see what you would scan with your hands moving forward all at once and the space in-between. Color is just another variable in the picture to give us a clearer image, it isn't even necessary.
I love the things you pointed out in this video. Sighted people remember what people look like, i guess the way you would remember a color. In another video you did where you smelt markers, you could say "this smells like grape". It's the same concept. The combination of the color shape (and style for the cars question) makes it very distinct and obvious. The question about missing things, imagine being in a huge crowd of people, having your sense of hearing constantly bombarded with new information. That's pretty much what sight is. All these shapes and colors at once, but we choose what to focus on, so we miss things. Plus, we have blind spots. Basically it would be for you if someone were talking to you from this one specific angle, you would not be able to hear it. I hope i explained these well! I really enjoy your videos!
I've recently discovered this channel and it blows my mind! Our bodies really are amazing and we take sight for granted so much. I wish we could swap for a day to experience and appreciate each other's lives. Fascinating. Thanks Tommy!
Hey Tommy, I would say that the reason we don't see stuff right in front of us is due to visual "noise". When there is so much to see, or a room is cluttered or a parking lot is full of all kinds of cars of the same color and different sizes, they all just muddle together and block the view. I would say it's like when a symphony is beginning and every musician is tuning up at once. You hear pops of each instrument every once in a while, or a continuous line of violin, but sometimes a little thing like a flute or a piccolo gets drowned out by a bass trombone, or cymabls etc. Sight is like hearing in the way that when there is too much to see, it is like when there is too much to hear. That's how you lose keys. And you lose change when it goes past your line of sight, like under a counter, down a gutter etc., just as you would lose the sound of a piano playing when you step outside. :) I have a question for you! :) Do you ever feel uncomfortable when a seat is too straight or at an angle that seems to push you forward and down? For me, that makes me uncomfortable and claustrophobic. How do you experience spacial comfort? Is it in soft textures, the angle of furniture, the ability to sink in to a cushion or the firmness of one? Do you like the texture of brick or concrete or polished stone walls, and the minute changes in information that comes with pulling your finger over a surface with little cracks and holes in it? What makes you feel safe and at home?
wow we really do take sight for granted...
for real
Yeah man definitely
+Timour Iskarous As a stutterer who would spend my only wish on removing my stutter, I'd say people also take having a nice conversation for granted as well.
Maybe I'm unlucky, still. Sighted, non-deaf, non-stuttering and without any other diagnose people should be much more happy.
+Mike Wright I feel you on the stuttering. I don't get how people can talk so fast and clearly without any problem. And fast rapping blows my mind lol.
+Mike Wright Hey I have a stutter too and I don't know where you live but you should check in your country if there is a course called McGuire Program. It's helped me a lot to learn to control it. And yes I agree, many people take "having a conversation" for granted. I'm glad I can now comfortably participate in any conversation I want and know I have control over my speech. It used to be a lot different.
"What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?" This broke my heart.
G Skub being blind must be hell. At least he has been blind since birth and has learned this lifestyle and doesn't understand what he is missing. I cant imagine what i'd do if i were to lose my sight. He is a great man.
u would still live and havea happy life.. u just cant see.. some people cant hear.. some cant talk .. some even cant feel.. and they are still happy people :D not different from u and me..
Happiest person I know can't speak.
Then again, nobody listens anyway.
Powder except they are disabled
Kieran, he seems happier and more successful than most (sighted) people I know. He seems to enjoy listening to movies, and he has intelligent conversation with his intelligent friends. He gets paid to listen to movies, then talk about his opinion of them. He's hilarious. He has a fantastic sense-of-humor that invites everyone to the party. I wish I was as happy and successful in life as this man. I wish I had awesome friends like his.
Tommy Edison makes me feel like I have superpowers. And I love it.
You know, human sight is actually kind of superpower. It's so much better than sight of most living beings out there. Yeah, some birds have zoom, snakes see infrared, butterflies see ultraviolet, chicken see many more colours etc, but human sight is much more powerful in terms of versatility and vast usefulness (including social interaction).
Cats can hear in 3D, for example, and have much more sensivity to silent sounds, and also have better night vision, but at daytime they have much more impaired vision than humans' (they see just some basic blurry forms and motion during high light conditions, unfocused and mostly uncolored, and they never can focus at objects right in front of them).
@@lagduck2209 how did humans know what animals can see with thier eyes...... Its impossible
@@coderdude9417 It's about position of the eye, type, number and sensitivity of receptors in retina and also the characteristics of lens, m. ciliaris and vitreous body.
Also, one of the main factors is how developed is the occipital lobe of the brain that given species has.
show off
Blind guy - "OPEN YOUR EYES!"
+Original E they're referring to the irony of a blind person telling us to "open our eyes", not telling him to open his.
+Original E his eyes aren't rolled back and some blind people wear sunglasses because their eyes are sensitive to light
Josh is right. just saying it was ironic for him to say that lol
I'm going to answer all the questions as best I can. I feel like you've answered so many of my curiosities that I want to do the same.
1. How do you remember all those colours?
I guess in the same way you remember a sound, for example, in a song. You can think of a sound in a song after having heard it only once. You can even try to replicate it in your own mind - it may not be exactly the same when you come to actually listen to the song again, but it'll be close. I suppose in the same way that, unless you have a great memory or talent for pitch, when you sing a song to yourself and then play the song, although you may have been singing the correct melody, you can often be a note or two too high / low.
2. What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in the room?
Knowing where most things are is useful. I've never really thought about it before, but I get stressed enough when I have to run from room to room, late for work, looking for my keys. However, not being able to see that whole room in a snapshot would be even more frustrating. That being said, if an object is behind something else, it's totally hidden to sighted people too. Using your sight (touch) as comparison, if you imagine having a completely straight, unlimited extendable finger which cannot bend. In front of you is a brick and behind that brick is a pea. You can extend your finger to touch that brick and know it's there, however until you re-position either yourself or move the brick, you are not able to touch (/see) the pea that is behind it.
3. How can you stop and look at a hot chick?
It's fairly difficult not to. Not really sure why, just something that takes the attention! Imagine you're walking down a very narrow street, people are behind you and cannot get past, but then someone tells you the thing you like to touch most is on your right hand side for a short period of time only. You slow down a little to appreciate it, but you know you cant stop completely, you're in a rush and there's loads of people behind yo that you're holding up. That's it I suppose.
4. How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things.
It's less that I remember things detail in detail, but I can remember a general concept. Even if I were the world's best painter, I couldn't paint people I know as a perfect replication without having them there in the flesh. I think this is the same for most people. Until you remind yourself of the actual image, it's just a vague representation in your memory. It's the same sort of thing as the singing example in answer 1.
5. What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?
So until I was 16, I lived most of my life in the countryside, no buses, no way of getting anywhere unless my parents drove me. I remember on my 16th Birthday getting a motorbike and that first journey. I take it for granted now, but that freedom is incredible. It's hard to describe. I felt proud of myself. I can't think of something to liken it to for you.
6. What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?
Wet and cold! It's fun for a few minutes, especially if you have a little snow fight, but really it's just inconvenient! You never know if you're stepping on hard or soft snow, if your foot is going to sink or be fine, if it's going to be icy and slippery or not. It's not that fun if you're actually trying to get somewhere. Too many unknowns.
7. How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face?
Concentration. When you're not concentrating on vision, you can be seeing things but not really processing them. Like in a busy bar where the're lots of conversations going on, and if you listen hard you can pick out each conversation, but if you don't try to listen to them, they sink in to the background and you have no idea what anyone is saying around you, it's just a blur of sound.
8. How do you lose things when you can see?
I would reference my answer to question 2 with the example of the brick, the pea and the extendable non-bendable finger. That's one way. Another way is camouflage. If something is a close enough colour to that upon which it lays, then it can be difficult to differentiate the two. For example, if you were played a continual pitch noise, and then that noise was very slightly pitched up for a fraction of a second, you may notice the change, but the likelihood is you wouldn't first time round. So you play that sound again (i.e. look around again) and try and hear the difference. Eventually you'll get it - or give up!
you seem a bit lonely there with nobody replying or reading your comment, so im gonna say...i noticed your comment and read it. it was good. like
Cheers! :)
I think this was a very good explanation of how we see. Well done!
Thank you :)
+Ochtone Wow, nice! I really liked some of those explanations. Hope Tommy sees this.... no wait.
Each color has a unique appearance. We can distinguish between colors just as easily as you can distinguish between sounds. Imagine the difference between the sound of a dog barking and a phone ringing. That's how different the colors red and blue look to sighted people.
We don't always know exactly where everything is in a room just by looking. If the room is too dark, we have just as much trouble finding things as you might. Also, if the room is really cluttered, a small object might be difficult to find if it's mixed in with a lot of other objects of similar size, shape, and color. Imagine playing a bunch of songs on different radios at the same time, then trying to tell which song is coming from which radio. The same sort of blending of sensations can happen with our sight.
Sighted people can see shapes from a distance. Different objects feature a particular combination of shapes which can be used to identify them just by looking. Although objects such as cars often vary widely in appearance, they can still be identified as cars because of common features such as wheels and windows. You can know the model of a particular car because different manufacturers like to include distinguishing features in their designs. It's similar with faces. You can identify a person by looking at their face because even though we all have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, the size, spacing, and color of these features are unique enough that we can associate them with a particular individual. Just like you might be able to identify a person by their voice, we can identify a person by their facial appearance, and remembering and keeping track of them isn't difficult. Just like how you can keep track of different words and their meaning, we can keep track of different faces.
We can know what somebody looks like without ever actually meeting them by looking at at picture of them. A printed picture consists of ink on paper. Ink comes in different colors, and those colored inks can be printed on paper in such a way as to correspond to the appearance of a person or object.
Things can happen right in front of us without us realizing it because of limitations in the way the human brain processes information. It's kind of like how you could be having a conversation with somebody in a crowded shopping mall, and you tune out the other people to listen to the person you're talking to because the conversations of other people aren't a concern to you. There can be so much visual information to absorb that the brain can't handle it all, so it chooses to ignore certain things, and it often ignores things that it shouldn't have. So it's not that we didn't see it; it's that we simply didn't take notice of it.
We can lose things when we drop them because if we drop something, it can fall out of our field of view and bounce away somewhere where we couldn't see it. It can end up underneath something, or it could blend in with its surroundings and become difficult to see.
When there are a hundred other cars in a parking lot, they can obstruct your view of your own car. They can also look really similar to your own car, so you might struggle to tell which one is yours from a distance. The amount of detail we can resolve decreases with distance, so it can become difficult to identify something when it's too far away.
i really hope someone will read this comment to him because you explained it very well :)
the only thing I found a bit off balance is your explanation of colours. a dog's bark and a phone's ring are very specific sounds. they are more equivalent to visuals of real objects (like a dog or a telephone).
but colors are more like if there were a bunch of flat surfaces lined up in a row like square sheets, and each of them had a different coarseness/smoothness and temperature to the touch. and some of them were softer and some firmer. that's how distinguished colours are and how different they get. but they still vary on a spectre and each color can be darkened with black and lightened with white.
kingStormy Sky still does not explain what white or black is...
Fetish_Graffiti
well Tommy can register the presence of light, so presence of light is a touch of white and absence of it is black
an even better analogy to colours would be just a scale of sound frequencies. even though they're just various frequencies of a similar monotonous sound pattern, each one can sound pretty distinct and have certain character to it. the same thing are colours to the eye. because colour after all is a wavelength characteristic of light.
This made me feel so sad. I take sight for granted and dont even appreciate the beauty of the world :/
I hear you man, definitely the same for me. I know I'm a bit late, but I love your videos. It's nice to see that know about him. I normally watch rocket league videos like yours, but after discovering this guy, this this is all I can watch.
Oh hey mertzy, didn't expect to see you here.
Its because its so easy to take for granted what you have, you have to really try not too
I noticed others answering your questions, so I wanted to take a stab at it too, I hope you like!
1. How do you remember all those colors?
Same way you remember smells, building layouts, or people's voices. It's repetition and association with other known things.
2. What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in the room?
You say "know" and it's really just the same as how you "know" where everything is in your house, except our sight gives us one extra element to remember with.
Memory plays a big role in how we know where everything is.
3. How can you stop and look at a hot chick?
Imagine a beautiful song being played on the street, would you stop or slow down to listen? Beauty is like a song, so it's going to be different for everyone, but that's why some people stop when they see something beautiful.
4. How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things.
Repetition and association with other known things.
We learn a lot of these things when we're still developing language skills, so there's lots of stuff that people just know because they learned it while they were learning how to talk and walk.
But things like the Make and Model of Cars kind of falls under a specific interest. I know the difference between cars and trucks and minivans, but I can't tell a subaru from a honda.
5. What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?
I don't understand this question, because from past videos it sounds like you go places on your own as well.
But if you mean driving, Phones, radio, and conversation are all distractions that need to be managed. Some people can drive with lots of distractions, some can't. Our brains can focus on things that matter, like stop lights and how fast we're moving, and ignore things like billboards and music. It's like a priority thing.
6. What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?
I find getting around in the snow to be incredibly difficult. unfortunately, sight doesn't replace coordination and quality footwear, and even then the snow is concealing our view of the ground, which can cause our eyes to be misled.
I personally stay inside.
7. How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face?
Our brain does a lot of "filling in" of what we see, and we can't always put 100% focus into everything, much like you probably can't listen to every conversation in a busy room, so sometimes things are glossed over and we don't see them.
Seeing isn't like hearing. You can hear all around you, but you can't see all around you. Imagine if your ears only picked up sounds that were on your right or left side of your head, but not things that were directly above, below, in front of, or behind you. This is what seeing is like, so you can only see what's in your range.
Sure we can see all around us, but only if we're also moving our necks, and heads, and turning around constantly... we can't possibly do that all the time though, it'd be exhausting and overstimulating lol.
8. How do you lose things when you can see?
It's more a matter of forgetting. The lost thing might be obscured by another object that was carelessly placed, maybe a blanket was draped over the book you're looking for. Just as you wouldn't be able to find a button or sign if it were covered by a piece of glass, a sighted person can't always see an object that's covered by another object. This is where taking action and moving things can help reveal the lost item, but not all sighted people do that, myself included. :P
ChibiCloud that's fantastic, thanks so much for giving it a go. Thanks for watching the video as well. :-)
I feel special, I got a reply! Thanks for reading my comment! I love your videos and your personality.
That was an amazing answer! Thank-you! I love well thought out responses.
This entire thing is incredible. You are really good at describing these experiences. Well done!
Hey ! That was good ! You should have finished on a song it would have been perfect~!
I am hoping that within the next twenty years science makes a major breakthrough for blind people and helping them see. I would love to see Tommy's reaction to the world, it would be amazing.
sight is way more than eyes, your brain needs many years as a baby to learn how to interpret the signals from your eyes. Like a deaf person, who doesn't speak any languages would not be able to understand anyone speaking just because they got their hearing.
It's not a perfect analogy but I think it's as close as I can come up with.
Kostas Sterling yes
the problem is no the eyes, we can make "artificial eyes" - cameras. The real problem is our limited perception of our brains. I really hope we'll fully understand them soon.
There already is technology that allows some blind people to see... As it turns out, Most blind people who have their sight fixed will actually keep their eyes closed anyways- since the information is unfamiliar, overwhelming, and even scary. Most blind people who get the change don't use it like they think they will. There must be exceptions- but you can't miss what you don't have. He's happy.
It would probably scare the hell out of him. The overwhelming amount of information he would be flooded with would almost like being born again.
Seeing is a lot like having a dozen conversations at once. You can really only pay attention to the conversations that you're most interested, the rest turns into background noise. If you're at a crowded restaurant and you hear everyone talking while you're having an actual conversation with the people you came with, you may be able to pick up on words or snippets from what others in the restaurant are talking about, but if someone quizzed you later on all the words and conversations you heard, you wouldn't remember. It's like that with sight. You can see everything around you, but you an hour later you can't remember most of it.
Or back to the restaurant analogy, say you're at the table and are supposed to be deciding what to order, but you get side tracked talking to your friends and the waitress comes back and asks what you want but you haven't even looked yet. Missing your exit is the same way. You're supposed to be looking for your exit but you get side tracked with talking or listening to music or looking at something else on the road and next thing you know you've driven past it.
For the hot girl question, back to the restaurant analogy, you're talking to your friends and trying to concentrate over all the other loud noise and chatter when suddenly you hear your favorite song. Or suddenly you smell something amazing. You're likely to stop paying full attention to the conversation you were having and focus on the song or try to figure out what it is that you're smelling. With an attractive girl you're walking along constantly surrounded by sights and sounds but for some reason she appeals to your senses and it's hard not to stop and look because what you're seeing gives you a good feeling.
Last one I'll try to explain is picking out clothes. Imagine if instead of things having a visual quality, they had smell in place of it. A shirt may feel really comfortable, but if it smells like straight up dog poop, you're not going to want to wear it. Or say you have a pair of shoes that aren't the most comfortable, but they smell like your favorite scent in the world and wearing them means you get to smell that scent all day long. For people with sight, sure, a shirt may feel good, but if looking at it gives you a feeling of disgust the way smelling poop or mold would, you don't want to wear it. If we see shoes that are beautiful to look at and make you want to keep staring the same way you want to keep smelling vanilla or pumpkin pie or cinnamon,
Then you're going to want those shoes. And seeing an attractive man or woman whose well dressed is like walking down a crowded, noisy city street, filled with cars honking and people shouting, that smells like garbage and gasoline when you suddenly walk past a bake shop filled with your favorite smells and playing your favorite music. Not only does it catch your attention but it makes you feel good and it's something you WANT to be around.
And I lied, I have one more attempt at an answer for losing your keys or money. Back to the crowded restaurant. You're in there talking to your friend but if your friend suddenly runs across the room and you have no idea where they went, trying to hear them and continue the conversation is damn near impossible. You'd have to wonder around the entire place listening to each person and sound trying to pin point your friends voice. Finding keys is the same way. You don't always see exactly where they fell and sometimes things bounce or roll further away than you'd think. You have to look and distinguish your keys from all the other things around you. And if you drop your keys in a messy room where they could have fallen under something, it's like trying to pin point your friends voice if they're hiding underneath someone else's table. And that table is filled with a drunk fighting couple, a bunch of screaming kids playing with iPads and a crying baby lol
another example for fashion could be eating something that tastes delicious but is terrible for you (maybe you know you will have discomfort later from it). The food that is really healthy for you doesn't always taste very good like the clothes that are the most comfortable, like sweatpants, don't always look very good (or professional). Try going to a job interview wearing sweatpants.
"Good old ears" Fucking true.
We, sighted people, take for granted so many things. I'm so inspired by u tommy!!! This video is so deep. :)
I was trying to think of an answer to your question about 'how do we know where stuff is in your room?' and i ended up with more of an odd situation than a real 'answer'
Well, imagine if everything you owned made a little different sound... your chair makes a low hum, while your keys chirp... nothing particularly loud or anything, just everything making its own noise... eventually you'd start to register what made what sound, and you'd be able to tune things out so you could listen and find that one specific item. sure everything is still MAKING its own sound, and your ears are receiving all the information, but you can focus in on certain frequencies and examine those objects like that.
Maybe you walk into your room and you notice something doesnt sound the same.... You hear the chair's hum, you hear the key chirping... but something is off... did someone move something? is something gone? you can't place your finger on it, but what sound is missing? you've been in this room a million times and the sound is ALWAYS the same... but today some sound is just not there but you can't tell what...
What about when you're looking for your keys? You try to tune out the humming and the spring noises and focus on chirping... you hear something chirping and you think its your keys, but nope, it was your mini tool set that is a very similar sound to your keys
Maybe you listen and notice your cup sounds a bit weird... like... something just doesnt sound right... then you realize "Oh! It's the can of soda sending sound waves THROUGH my cup's sound waves, that's why it sounded weird...
So yeah... not really an answer i guess, but maybe its a way of thinking that gives you an idea how sight and sound can be similar...
Amazing explanation!
Too Tall Gaming This is genious
Too Tall Gaming Perfect explanation yes! I hope this can help blind people understand better how seeing is like.
Too Tall Gaming Just if something is in the way of the object it goes silent.. and everything behind you is silent as well.
+Niklas Forsman This interprets as an object being behind another object. The object does not register in your eyes. You can't see it because another object covers the view of it
The part about looking in a room and knowing exactly where everything is? I would almost bet money that you have a better idea of where shit is then I do Tommy :P I can never find anything! EVER! Even when it's sitting on my desk in front of me. Sight is over rated man! :D
Woah Barnacules!! Hello!
+Barnacules Nerdgasm Hi.
+hebbocake Well that's rude...
Yes it sure is! Sometimes i wish that i cant see whats going on in this world! Sometimes people has to see bad things they never can forget.
Howdy Barnacules! :) And I totally agree. I never know where shit is. lol
To answer "how do you remember what things look like?", the same way you remember what things feel like
or what they sound like
or smell like or taste like. how we missplace a car in a big parking lot is similar to too many sounds going on drowning out the uniqueness of what we are concentrating on (looking for/listening for). these are some very interesting questions getting answered!
That's the perfect analogy, even better than sound.
Alright, I'm gonna try to answer all the questions *cracks knuckles*
1.) How do you remember all those colors?
Well, we just sort of learn them over time. It's no different from how you can recognize a smell or a sound or a taste, we just learn each color over time.
2.) What's it like to look at a room, and you know exactly where everything is in a room?
We probably kind of take it for granted all the time. The best thing I can compare it to is when you're walking in a place that's really familiar. If you know where everything is, you can walk confidently, and you just sort of know where to go.
3.) So how come you stop and look at a hot chick?
There are certain features in a person that make them attractive. Symmetry, hair, clothing, and obviously your chest. When guys see an attractive girl or vice versa, there's got to be some sort of chemical reaction in the brain that makes you want to meet that person. If they look good, it means they're healthy physically, and from a biological standpoint that makes them viable mating material, or atleast friend material. It's sort of like when you hear a sound you really like, or feel something really soft, or taste something really good. You want to stop and just savor the feeling for a little longer.
4.) How do you remember what things look like?
Just like colors, we learn over time. How do you know how to read Braille, or type on a keyboard without being able to see the keys? How do you know what everything tastes like or feels like? It's like that. You just learn over time.
5.) You would choose to wear something that looks good, rather than something that's real comfortable?
As I said before, there's just certain color combinations and shapes that look pleasing to the eye. If you look good, people will want to be around you.
6.) What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?
I don't know, you just sort of... you just do?
7.) What about driving?
Well, obviously not everyone can focus very well when driving, and there's lots of terrible drivers. You just have to tune everything else out and focus on the driving.
8.) What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?
Terrible. Cold. Wet. You try to step so that you won't fall in the snow, but you do anyway.
9.) How do you miss something?
Well, sight's a funny thing. In the center of our vision, everything's really clear and focused, sort of like when someone's talking right by you and you can hear them perfectly. But towards the edge of our vision, it gets fuzzy, less accurate. We can only really see basic shapes and colors. Peripheral vision is mostly just to detect movement, you can't really do anything else with it. Sight is a lot more overwhelming than the other senses. There's absolutely no way that you can focus on every single thing you see all at once. I think it's most comparable to touch. You usually feel really well on your hands, since there's the most nerve endings there. But are you really paying attention to what your feet are feeling right now? To how it feels under your armpit? No, you're really not focusing on it. That's why pickpockets can get away with it, because when you're not focusing on a specific area of your body, you really don't seem to feel anything there. Ditto sight. If you space out, you stop paying attention to what you're seeing as much, and just get lost in your thoughts.
10.) How do you lose things when you can see?
We don't always see that we lost it. Obviously, as in the previous question, we may not notice. Or it may fall out of our back pocket, and since we can't see behind us, we won't realize it's gone. Also, we sometimes put something in a cupboard or drawer and forget which cupboard or drawer it was we put it in. We can't see through objects, it's only a surface thing. Like touch. If you feel a desk, you can't feel under the desk, you can only feel the desk. We have to remember which drawer we put it in first, so we can open it and subsequently find whatever we lost.
11.) How do you not find your car in a parking lot?
Parking lots are big. Cars are tall, and people are relatively short. We can't see over the cars to where our cars are. Also, as things get farther away, they get tinier and blurrier, harder to see.
12.) When you're driving, how do you miss the exit?
Well, you're focusing on driving, and it's easy to miss a sign.
HA, done. That's a half hour of my life I'll never get back.
Nice job!
Except the snow part, that may be your opinion. But I actually love snow. If you just have enough clothes on, you won't get wet or cold.
What is it like to go somewhere by yourself?
Being single, just about everywhere I go, I go by myself. It is a mixed bag of emotions. On the positive side, I don't have to wait on anyone. I can't thing of anything worse than when you are on vacation with friends or family, and you finished your shower first and are ready to go, but you have to wait another 30 minutes or hour for everyone else to get ready. I can just go.
This gets even better when I want to do something that costs money. I don't have to worry about if the other person can afford it, or if I will have to cover them, I don't have to worry if I have enough money if they suggest something. So that is really nice.
However, it can be lonely as well. That 10 minute drive to work doesn't really bother me, but what if I am driving across the state? I got relatives who live 3 hours away. I've gotten used to making the trips alone, but I have gotten to where I usually call someone on the phone to talk to just to keep me sane.
Worst trip I ever made on my own was to go see my parents in Arizona. That is 15 hours if you drive straight through. I start going crazy after about 2 hours in the car by myself. It is HORRIBLE, and the thoughts start going through your mind of if you are ever going to make it alive, if you will ever see people you care about again, am I going to be able to point this car straight for the next 10 hours, because the land is flat and featureless and nothing to look at, so your brain starts cutting in and out. I will explain that later. In any case, that gets dangerous. Your brain starts to try to entertain yourself, taking you away from reality, which makes you suddenly less concentrated. As strange as this may sound, it is actually good to have SOME distraction, like a radio, or a person talking to you, as it keeps the brain alert.
That is, however, my experience. I have a friend who is a cross country trucker, and he is usually driving while his co-driver is sleeping in the back, so you can say he is really driving alone as well. Yet he loves it.
How do you miss something?
Great comment by Somehow Still Sane. I want to comment on this as well.
Let's start out with sound. Let's say you are at a park. In this park, you hear the wind. The groundskeeper is cutting the grass. Kids are playing on the playground. Parents are around, talking, some to each other, others on their cell phones. There is the sound of the fountain in the middle of the pond. Off in the distance, you hear the sound of traffic on a highway, and closer, you hear the sound of cars going by on the side street.
Got the picture in your mind? Good. Now, I want you to tell me every word of the conversation the one mom is having on her cell phone, as well as a summery of the conversation the two other parents are having with each other. Oh, and what are the kids talking about?
Can't tell me? Okay, how about this. You listened to the conversation of the kids. Let's say you can tell me every word. Got the scene in your mind? Okay, now tell me how many cars passed by on the side street while that conversation was going on?
Can't do it? Why not? You were there weren't you? You heard all this stuff, didn't you? So why can't you give me an accurate description of everything that you heard?
The answer is that your brain throws out excess information. There is too much to process. Now let's try reconstructing this scene again, the day after it happened. So, you say you heard the wind blowing and the birds singing. But what if I was to say there was no wind, and no birds anywhere around. Wait, we can't both be right. You swear that you heard birds. So I play back a recording and.... There are no birds. So why do you remember birds? Because your mind fills in the blanks. It cannot process all the information going to it, so a lot of it gets tuned out, but your mind, based on past experiences, has incorrectly filled in missing information.
Okay, so let's take site here for a minute. With our eyes, we take in significantly more information than we here. How do we process all that information? Well, we can't. Just like in the example of the above park, you cannot recall how many cars went by on the side road or how many motorcycles are going by on the freeway, even though they make a distinctly different sound than a car. Your mind is processing too much information, so it throws out the junk information. In fact, your eyes can take in so much information, that it can overwhelm the senses. Or, if you are taking in much of the same information for long periods of time (ie driving a straight road at night in the desert), the brain starts shutting down parts of your senses, and starts feeling in the missing information. Both of these are known as "your eyes playing tricks on you". In fact, a person could doze off at the wheel, but the brain still sends images of the straight road to the processing centers. Wait, aren't their eyes closed? Yes, they are.
So, in the case of the desert, the mind has both filtered out a lot of what you do see, and even produces images of things that you do not see.
Let's do an experiment. You are a movie critic. So, let's take a movie such as The Hobbit. Find someone who has never seen it. Let's take a scene, say when Bilbo first meets Gandalf at Bag End. Got the scene in your mind? Good. Okay, play this scene for them, but only once. Then wait about 10 minutes. Now, go back and ask the person to describe the clothes Bilbo was wearing - the color, the pattern, etc. They can''t do it? Did they not just see it? Okay, what shape were the windows, and how many panes of glass were there? Okay, fine. How was the yard decorated? Were there flowers? If so, where, and what colors?
Hmmm, interesting. Well, let's turn the tables and ask you about what you heard. Did Gandalf arrive on foot or on a cart or on a horse? Based on ambiet sound, describe the weather. What instrument was most dominate in the score?Does Bilbo live in the village or in the country? Were any animals present in the scene? If so, name them.
Actually, have you ever watched this movie? If so, and if it has been a while, just by me asking those questions, your mind is reconstructing the scene, and you may be remembering sounds even though they were not in the movie. Strange, huh?
How do you remember all those colors?
How many people do you know? How many men, women, and children? Let's take two little girls that you may know, and have them both say something? Can you distinguish between them? How, they are both little girls? Can you distinguish between them and the sound of their parents? By their voice alone, can you identify them? How, they are all people, how do you remember all those people? Because you have made associations in your mind for them.
But, let's say that today I play you a sound of a little girl you do not know who is about five years old, and tomorrow I play you a sound of her sister who is about six years old. But I don't tell you who these people are. Based on sound alone, can you tell me if these two are the same voice, or different? If they are the same person, were the voices recorded at the same time, or a few months or years apart? If they are different people, are they the same age, and if not, which one is older?
Do you think their mom can distinguish between the two girls? Than why can't you?
Last question, what if you think they are the same girl, but someone else says they are two different girls? Which one is correct? In your mind, there is only one girl, even though the other person knows there are two
Likewise, we associate colors in our mind. Some people have a harder time distinguishing between shades than other people - like a girl may say "this is red, this is maroon, this is blood red" whereas a guy may say "that is all red". Who is correct? My then can't the guy see that there are three different shades?
I hope I was able to answer some questions. It took me an hour to write this
gravis778 A+
Also, with the parking lot thing, lots of cars look alike. There are a limited number of colors that cars are usually painted in -- so in a parking lot of hundreds of cars, there may be 50 or so that are the same color as yours. And cars can be shaped very similarly too. One trick some people use is attaching something bright to the top of their car antenna (which sticks up a couple of feet above the roof), so it can be seen above all of the other cars.
Another problem I have is my mind blending together different incidents of parking. If I go outside to find my car in a place where I've done so many times, I can't remember if today I parked way over to the left like usual, or in the back like I've done a few times before, or right near the entrance like I did yesterday. Even if it's very close by, my car could be completely hidden behind a large van.
If I could get a job explaining sight, I would take it in a second, this is really fun!
This is very helpful! As a blind person myself, these are questions that I have had as well! Thank you for posting this
XD I don't care about fashion, I always wear what is comfortable.
ttimo123456 exactly
I had to get old before I didn't care anymore. Now, I've gone to seed. Somebody's gotta do it, so I volunteered! :)
Not seeing things with sight is because just like you said there are so many things to see that essentially you cant see everything. A good way to explain it maybe is when you are hearing a crowd of people talking but are only trying to listen to one person talk. Its like that but with sight, you are trying to focus your sight and mind to a task so something right in your vision can go un-noticed.
1) We remember colours because to sighted people, it is like learning your ABC, once you learn it, you just remember it forever.
2) We remember what things look like by learning a certain aspect to remember, like a logo for a car or a shape of a vegetable. For people, we mostly remember their personality I guess, being able to see them is just a benefit that we can also remember.
3) To go somewhere by yourself is a different experience for all people. For some, being alone is a good time to relax and for others, being alone is the worst thing ever as there is no one to help you out. Driving, you just focus on the road and multitask I guess to listen to music and chat.
4) As someone who is constantly looking around, I normally miss things. For example, if my friend was to hand me something, I could be looking in the other direction, so my visual radius wouldn't catch what is in their hand (if that makes any sense whatsoever).
5) I lose things all the time, as again, I could be looking at my friend (not focusing on an item) and then it could fall out of my pocket or I could leave it on the table as I was busy looking at other things.
Don't know if you will ever come across this, but I hope it is helpful!
We would also remember things by sight like he remembers things by touch, smell and sound
If it's possible we need to raise money to get him sight
I don't know. But it would be a lot!
+Duck $300 dollars to make him see?
THEN WHY HASN"T HE DONE THAT?!
Because he wouldn't be able to answer questions he never thought of before.
+Duck There are different kind of blindnesses. And I think that kind of surgery wouldn't work on Tommy.
OMG That was the best video of yours I've seen so far! A few answers...
We miss things because our brains can only focus on one thing at a time. Think about when you are in a crowded coffee shop. You have loud espresso machines running, music playing, and lots of people talking, not to mention the smaller sounds like people walking and stirring their drinks. But in order to hear your companion, you have to tune all that out and focus on what that one voice is saying. So you might miss something being said at the table next to you. That's what it's like to miss things visually, because you're focused on what's important to you at the moment.
As for remembering what things look like, that's because we've seen them since we were born. Normally we can't see something once and memorize it. A few special people can, because they have "photographic memory," but most people have to see something a lot in order to remember it clearly. And again, our focus plays a role. You ask how people know what brand a car is. I've wondered that myself! But then, I don't give a hoot about such things. I'm sure if I cared, I would pay attention to details of a car's appearance, and thus be able to identify them. However, I'm an artist, and I can identify subtle color variations more easily than the average person. As for remembering faces, some people are really good at that and can remember a person after just one brief encounter, while others, like me, usually need to meet someone several times before readily remembering them (let alone matching their name to their face). These things all very from person to person.
How do you remember all the colours? - How do you remember sounds? You hear them, and you know.
What's it like to look at a room? - It's kind of like one piece of information, you get all at once. Like when you mix different flavours together.
Why do you stop to look at pretty girls? - You've had sex right? It's like that but to the eyes. And not quite as great, but like hearing sex compared to feeling it.
How do you remember the look of things? - Same with how do you remember sounds and the feel of different fabrics and surfaces.
Guys don't understand why people wear things that are uncomfortable but look good. So you aren't alone. Except pants. But people have to wear pants. Not because they look good, but because it's the law.
What's it like to go somewhere by yourself? Lonely. Quiet.
Driving? Well not everyone concentrates and that's accidents. If you've ever played a video game or ran, it's like that.
How do you not see something? You were looking or paying attention. Seeing does require some thought, like hearing. Not much, it's automatic. But you still have to think a little.
How do you lose things when you can see? Take a box, fill it with lego and one marble. Find the marble. Same kind of thing. You can look on a table for something and somehow not see it when it's right under your nose.
How do you lose your car in the parking lot? All cars look similar if not the same. You may be able to tell the difference between a baby crying and a cat fight, but it's not always easy.
I hope you can read this with some kind of program.
Great description man props 👌 👍I hope he gets to read that comment
***** Thanks I hope so too.
+Hamster Lord Man ,,Love your avatar
If you want the answer to 5, refer to your answer to 3
My grandmother was blind for 50 or so years before she could get an operation to allow her to see. She was'nt all that impressed, she liked how convenient it was, and she loved seeing her family. So she would always say that looking at art or movies was the same as listening to music or stories when she could'nt see, she actually taught me a few things too, like a sunrise is pretty, sure, but when you sit for half an hour with your eyes closed (for us sighted people) and you'd rather feel the warmth on your skin as it gradually rose was amazing.
She also hated the sky, she said it gave her vertigo and felt like she was falling into nothingness whenever she looked up.
Her vision deteriorated and she's blind again now, i asked her about it and she answered "it's like trying out a new recipe for your favorite food, it's fun and enjoyable for a change, but when you go back to your old recipe, it's still your favorite"
And finally to answer your "when driving a car, how do we remember everything?" pff, 99% of people cant even use a turning signal (in Norway at least, don't know about anywhere else), scary to think what else they don't remember to do.
YES.
0:49 fashion blows a lot of peoples minds not just you lmao
"What does it feel like to go somewhere by yourself"
that made me sad
Why?
I don't actually like to go places myself but it may be because of my social anxiety and autism?
On the question on how we remember what stuff and colors look like, and what it is like to come into a room and instantly see everything, I would like to make a simile to hearing different types of sounds.
Like if you hear the sound of a bird you know right away that that is a bird, because you heard it before, but you might not be able to remember exactly how it sounds the day after. Sight works the same way.
If you walk into a messy bedroom it's a little bit like is someone turned on the radio and a large orchestra is playing. Right away you see that this is a bedroom, because you see the big bed, it's hard to notice, and you also know instantly that there are a lot of stuff in there. The bed is like a tambourine or drum, that you hear through everything else right away. And you hear that there are a lot of other instruments, some you have to focus on to figure out what they are, others are to similar to tell apart.
A pile of clothes on the floor can be like a big group of stringed instruments, you hear right away that it's stringed instruments, and that they play mostly high notes. That is like when you look at it you see instantly that it's a pile of clothes and that most of them are red. But it's only when you get closer and separate them that you can tell which are pants and which are violins, in the pile they cover each other so you can't see the shape of them. Maybe you'd have to pick the pants up and look at them without the rest to see that it's a pair or pants, just like how you might have to ask the rest of the stringed instruments to be quiet to make out if the one in the front is a violin.
This is the world's longest comment. Even if this didn't help at all I get a A for effort, right?
Dude that was amazing! I hope somebody reads this to him!
I freaking love this person. In exchange for explaining the neuroscience of all your questions, I want to talk to you over coffee till it hurts to sit. You're my new favorite TH-cam person. One second while I watch all your videos.
A big part of being sighted is actually learning not to see. I studied art for a while and the most important thing the teacher would go through is to look carefully. Because people look at a door and see a rectangle with a handle, but miss the frame, the texture of the wood, any dents or chips in it. So they draw a rectangle and wonder why it isn't like what they wanted to draw. After so much time with so much stimulus, you just blank it out, otherwise all that stimulus would drive us mad. Like living near a train-station and not noticing the sounds of trains going by.
And losing things is about perception too. Imagine you drop a high value coin into a box of low value coins or foreign coins of around the same size and shape. Even if you just pat the surface and don't stir them, it will take a lot of concentration and careful attention to find the one you wanted. That's what it's like when we drop something onto an area that has the same colour or texture. We look at it, but sometimes we need to really focus to see it and sometimes it isn't obviously there until we use another sense.
Remembering faces is so exceptionally important to humans' evolution that it has its own processing in the brain, different from "regular" image processing. Humans are ridiculously good at seeing and remembering and distinguishing faces. It is why we constantly see "face patterns" in other things as well, even though they dont really look like faces... I mean, sometimes all that is needed is two dots and a slightly curved line and our brains will immediately go "that looks like a face".
Evolution also explains why we are better at distinguishing individual faces among our own ethnic and/or social group than in people with different ethnicities: you need to know which specific person you are looking at if it's a member of your own society, but you dont need to recognise a specific stranger, you only need to recognise that it is a stranger.
GroovingPict I think the better recognition of your own ethnicity has a simpler reason: Practice. Because we usually see the people of our ethnicity more than other ethnicities, we get more adept at distinguishing between "us" than between "them". A bit like a metal head that can distinguish between Black, Death and Thrash Metal but can't tell a trumpet from a saxophone by sound only. Someone who listens mostly jazz might have the opposite problem. I didn't do any research on this though, so have your pinch of salt at hand.
The same way we remember faces I bet Tom remembers voices. I mean we remember voices too but his ability to remember and distinguish between voices is as crucial as our ability to remember and distinguish between faces.
I can explain from a psychological perspective how we can remember all the different objects. You see the item from so many different angles throughout your life and the more you see them, the more the memory of the item is reinforced. :) It is probably the same way that you remember what certain things are shaped like through touch. People miss exits driving because they are paying NO attention to driving. Doing something so often makes it so that you can basically do it without thought. However, that can result in not seeing the person in front of you braking suddenly...or missing your exit because you weren't looking for the sign. It doesn't take much thought to just drive, but most people don't realize they should pay more attention than putting their brain on autopilot to drive (because anything can happen). Oh and we can lose change on the ground because sometimes it can blend in with the colors of the ground. Most coins are gray and so are concrete sidewalks and some floors. I am loving all of your videos. You are fun.
Oh and parking your car in a very large parking lot can make it hard to find if you don't remember the aisle number. Once you walk away from the cars and are now looking at the parking lot as a whole, each aisle can look very similar. And it is hard to see over cars to look for yours from across the lot.
Hmm, the ones about how we dont see things and how we lose things are interesting. I think a lot of it is dependent on memory and the sub conscious. For example, say your trying to remember somewhere youve been - you dont remember the whole room, you remember parts of it so it can depend on how good your memory is. Also, if you drop something like money onto a gravel surface it can go under bits of gravel and stuff so movement plays a role too. There is also something called a scotoma, which is a floating blindspot that some people have, and sometimes it can be psychological due to the way we learn things. For example the words "if" and "of". They both have an "f" in them, but because we often learn to speak phonetically, some people cant see the "f" in "of" because its pronounced as a "v" sound - "ov".
Losing stuff is, I would imagine, like trying to pick out one sound in a room full of noise, or on a busy street - because its so specific. Also, people can have an idea of what something looks like and it might be wrong, if they havent seen the thing for a while for instance. Its a little bit like meeting people you havent seen for years and trying to recognise them by their voice, as you mention in another of your videos. :) And of course, light and dark make a difference.
*THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE 4TH DIMENTION*
Ah ver nice.
You are awesome! I am legally blind since birth, so I can relate some some of your stories and experiences. I just found your videos this morning and I am going to sit here and watch all of them!!
You give sighted people more credit than we deserve. :) We don't remember what everything looks like. One of the biggest problems is distinguishing between two people of the same sex we don't know well but who have a similar body build and height, similar age, similar skin color, and similar hair color and length. We focus on a few key points to remember. If we are around the person a lot we memorize details, normally starting with the face and head, and going on to voice and mannerisms, unless all you think about is sex in which case a woman might have to say, "My face is up here!". We are poor at identifying details of people who are strangers to us, especially in another ethnic group, and often rely on what they wore, which doesn't help if they change clothes. Some children have to be taught to focus on facial details rather than clothes but others pick it up very quickly. People sometimes misidentify bodies of family members after bad car wrecks partly because their emotions get in the way of their objectivity and partly because we don't like to look intently at something horrible to spot the discrepancies. If you ask five people who witnessed a crime what they saw, you will get five different versions. Eye witness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Sight is very dependent on lighting conditions, distance, familiarity, alertness, weather, setting, health, mental state, a person's background and education, and how much is going on to add confusion and distraction, among many other things, because we don't just see, we interpret what we see, and the brain fills in what we expect to see, which is fun in optical illusions where we want to be tricked but not fun in a criminal trial. And it's important to remember that there is a tremendous variation in eyesight. We don't see the world the same way. I don't know if the red or blue I see is the same as someone else's, and I'm not even color blind which is another whole issue. :)
A quirk of eyesight is if I want to find a four leaf clover in the grass I move my eyes so I am taking in the whole area in my vision field by going back and forth, and without trying to focus on anything in particular, I will notice the object that doesn't match, and there's my four leaf clover. :)
1. Like sound, we remember colors by experiencing them often. It's honestly hard to remember a color I haven't seen in a while.
2. I'm disorganized so when I look at my room I really only know where a third of my stuff is. Everything is on top of each other.
3. Staring at attractive people is like playing your favorite song over and over again. We just want to keep enjoying it.
4. We kind of having categories for how things look like and when we see a thing, our brains sort through the categories to narrow it down. We just do it really fast. My co-worker is always bring me potatoes that she things look like butts or baseballs or whatever. As for faces, some people are better at recognizing people that others. My husband can remember names for years, but I can't. I'll remember your face and by like "Hey you! What was your name again?"
5. Yeah, fashion is pretty dumb. But, like number three, some people enjoy being appreciated, even in an purely aesthetic way. I usually just wear comfy stuff though.
6. Not gonna lie, being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want is awesome! I've been asked if my husband "lets" me go certain places and I always laugh because I can't imagine not just going somewhere if I want to badly enough. Driving is almost like flying in how free it feels, especially on highways.
7. Driving in a big city or heavy traffic can be very stressful, but around my hometown, I'm familiar with everything, so I don't even pay attention to signs or anything I pay attention to the lights, and dance to my music and just enjoy driving.
8. I hate cold, so I don't like snow much and try to stay inside. Luckily I live in Texas so we don't get snow much.
9. Humans are kind of programmed to focus on one thing at once. We really only look at one thing at a time usually. Movement or very bright colors attract the eye, but we don't really see everything in front of us at once. Our brain picks one thing to focus on, like what we're holding, or the face of who we're talking to, and it can be hard to switch focus sometimes, especially if we are also trying to pay attention to sounds, smells, etc.
10. Losing results from us not paying attention. If we are looking up, or ahead, thing falling out of our pockets are totally outside our field of vision and we just don't notice.
11. A lot of cars look the same, and if you parked far away, then the closer cars can block your line of sight. I always end up parked behind a big truck that makes it hard.
Hope this helped! Keep making great videos!
"good old ears come to the rescue" *GOT EM*
HAHAHA I like his snark =D
Very good point raised about wearing what looks good, even bearing pain to look good. What can I say, having the ability of sight does not necessarily mean you are not blind.
Your videos have given me so much in the way of understanding how the human mind works, thank you so much. I am going to put my all into giving you as good of answers to your questions as I possibly can. I apologize but that means some (or all) of my replies will be LONG... I hope that's ok. ^_^
*1. How do you remember all those colors?*
Most people don't, not really. It's more of an 'input-recognition' thing than a conscious memory thing, though remembering the _names_ for the colors can be a bit trickier. For those that can differentiate and name a large number, their knowledge is usually the product of repeated experience with them.
A non-vision based analogy for color could be smell. Smell is made when your nose and brain interpret chemical signals, color is made when your eye and brain interpret light(to simplify things). How we perceive these both can go from very generalized to very specified, depending on need. Everyone knows a generalized few from their own experience, like grass and green, or burnt and black. You can pick out a few smells that you encounter all the time, but because of the way smell (and light/color) works, there's a lot of variation to account for. For instance, _type_. Earlier I mentioned green and grass. "Grass is green" is a fair generalization, unless we want to get more specific. For instance, crabgrass is a specific kind of grass, and "lime" is a kind of green, but crabgrass isn't lime green. Using only smell, crabgrass and wheatgrass smell _vastly_ different, and you can smell that without knowing what crabrass and wheatgrass are called, or what the names for the chemicals that make up the smells are called-- _but_ you _could_ learn the names of those chemicals if you wanted to, and eventually recognize them if you experienced it enough.
Moving onto burnt and black, another (hopefully interesting) analogy using smell and color is that you can watch something change in color similarly to the way you can smell a chemical change occur. (Food gods forgive my imminent blasphemy) Say you take a piece of beef, which begins as visually red, with white connective tissue and pink fat and starts off scentually (that's a word now, if it wasn't before) with a very (hmm...) clean, light coppery scent right (I guess?)? You then put some olive oil in a pan, get it too hot and add your beef. Instantly at the points of contact a chemical change happens that makes it visually change to a greyish-brown and scentually the Maillard reaction begins and you get that delicious oils bubbling "cooked meat" smell we all love. Very soon after, though, the heat gets to be too much for the meat, and it begins to turn a darker brown, and smell overcooked (happy smells going away) and dry as the fat and water burn off. Eventually, it turns black, and gives off a horrible acrid smell as the carbon combusts and it becomes burnt.
In addition to this, like smell, colors can blend together and become something new, which may or may not have an entirely different look, and name (and the person may or may not know the name). And, for fun, there are colors that don't exist in concrete reality, but are a product of how our eyes see light... Kind of like walking into a Yankee Candle store, that smell (of all their merchandise at once) just doesn't exist in nature, but our brain dazzles us with it anyway (this is not a scientifically sound comparison with regards to cause, just fyi).
A final analogy could be to note that while our eyes are well-known for being trickable, our noses can too (any sense can be fiddled with, to be honest). The body can trick our noses based on what it needs- a common problem some pregnant women come across is a sudden aversion to meat (it smells spoiled, rotting or even like feces), and many don't know that the cause of this is low hydrochloric acid levels in the stomach. Less acid isn't good for digesting meat, so the body uses smell tricks to cause meat-avoidance.
*2. What's it like to walk in a room and know exactly where everything is?*
We don't exactly know where everything is upon walking into a room. For the sake of our senses not being overwhelmed, the brain actually tones down and/or completely discards a lot of the input from the eyes. Because there is SO MUCH _potential_ input, and we don't have a habit of sitting around and taking the time to really focus on things, a LOT gets outright thrown away and replaced with 'assumptions' that the brain makes based on previous experience.
What we call "seeing" is really either scanning or focusing. We can "scan" and get a general idea, and memory is good at filling in the gaps, but most things are 'in the background', they become literally fuzzier, and harder to detect the form of (though context clues and memory still keep the knowledge of what they ARE in mind, they begin to lose visual recognition).
Using touch as an analogy, in/out of focus is kind of like the difference between a plush toy bear and a plastic bear figurine. The figurine being 'in-focus' and the plush toy being 'out-of-focus'. Using touch alone, it's harder (or, would take longer, anyway) to tell the plush is a bear because the edges are fuzzier and less "concrete", there's more room for interpretation, whereas the plastic figurine has static edges, of a clear shape, it's easier to figure out what's being detected.
Visually, we can scan out-of-focus to get a general idea of what is in a room, and memory fills the gap. We'll walk into a familiar room and SEE: large-rectangular-tan, medium-circle-black, small-triangle-red and our brain instantly fills this with KNOWING: Dresser, fan, video game figurine. But if some object were added, replaced, moved or removed, we would have to focus on the spot where the thing was expected to be to actually notice the difference (and even then, the brain can decide to withhold the information that anything changed from our consciousness until it 'decides' we need to know. Because: reasons.). The bigger the thing is can help, or if a big focus of the object was that it gave off another sense, the easier it would be to notice. For instance, most would notice a missing heater from the corner of a cold room without seeing it LONG before we'll notice a big, brightly-colored rug missing from the middle of the room.. except in summer of course. And a person could go for a long time, or even indefinitely, without noticing a piece of clutter on a shelf was gone if there was no outside reason for them to notice it's absence.
In a new place, the brain draws as many analogies as quickly as it can, but the margin for error is much larger, which is why when people visit a place they haven't been for only a short period of time, they often find it very difficult to reconstruct in detail what they saw in the place they had just been- because the brain didn't make up itself on what they saw enough for them to reconstruct it.
A non-vision based analogy might be like if every object gave off it's own distinct sound, without having to be acted upon to do so. Imagine a room of ticking clocks, of various shapes and sizes, with all different chimes, ticking rhythms, and levels of volume. You can hear them all, and can hear their different properties, but trying to actually *really* NOTICE the specific qualities of them all at once would be an overload. You can, however, focus on a specific one, and getting closer would effect your perception of it, give you more accurate or specific imnformation. etc.
I think.
I admit that I am making some assumptions about how blind people perceive sound, extrapolating based on my own experience of sound, and (hopefully rational) guesses about the difference being blind might make to that. Hopefully my guesses and extrapolations are accurate enough that the sound analogy wasn't nonsense.
*3. How do you stop and look at a hot chick?*
This is honestly probably nearly the same as stopping to appreciate a person with any other sense. We can 'notice' a hot person (and what we each consider 'hot' is totally subjective and personal to each of us as much as the enjoyment of anything else) pretty quickly, actually. The brain is very good at high-speed information gathering, but actually stopping to look for a longer span of time, to take in the smaller details such as the particular shade of her eyes as opposed to just noticing "dark eyes", that's a bit different, and most people try not to spend too much time staring at a stranger, because it's considered rude (unless you're in a conversation with them).
Imagine passing a lovely-smelling woman on the sidewalk, you could conceivably turn in her direction and maybe take more/deeper breaths to continue smell her better, maybe happening to notice that what you're smelling has hints of violets, sugar and vanilla as opposed to just "sweet and flowery" until distance prevented the scent from reaching your nose any longer.
The problem with this is the longer you stand there just staring, or sniffing, at a stranger without _at least_ striking up a conversation, the less people will approve of it, lol.
*4. How do you remember how things look?*
This one also works pretty much the same way as other senses. Just input and the brain filling in the blanks, by drawing parallels. Using food is a good analogy. We remember what apples look like the same way you remember what they taste, feel and smell like, even though all apples are different. Vision is another dimension of knowledge about a thing. It's another way of noticing that a thing is round, or soft, etc.
There is overlap with all senses. Sometimes one sense can inform you about others and some senses are better at detecting different kinds of information.
Whereas sight can tell you what color something is, it can't tell you what something smells like (though it can guess at some things), or what something feels like (though it can guess). Touch is a lot better for understanding the weight of a thing, than sound but sound could conceivably be used to do this. Smell would be absolutely useless at informing about weight, but it can give information that the other senses (and even the consciousness) wouldn't know what to do with.
When it comes to _people_, that actually goes into a separate level of recognition because visuals area big component to sighted social interaction. Sometimes it's rational, but often it's not, that people draw conclusions about each other from something visual. People use their past experiences and knowledge to make quick judgements about others, "this body type means that thing about a person", "that hairstyle means they're that", and it's really hit or miss because of how society works. People will make choices about their own visuals because of the conclusions they want others to draw about them.
A non-visual one might be perfume. People will pick perfumes because different scents give off different impressions. Someone who wanted to seem innocent, or sweet might use a candy-scented perfume, or something like a sweet food (more common among younger people), where someone trying to give the impression of power might use a stronger scent, one that includes a musk or an acrid tinge, etc.
I know that a person's voice can effect how sighted people perceive each other, so I imagine that blind people might possibly make the same _types_ of associations about people over voice qualities, that sighted do with looks.
Making these connections isn't perfectly rational, but there is correlative science behind it, so it's not _all_ prejudice and garbage. It's just part of the big, invisible and confusing way our subconscious brains work. :P
*5. What's it like to go somewhere alone?*
It's not that special, really. It honestly only has any meaning in juxtaposition of being around other people, because there's almost no objective difference. There's nothing, in and of itself, different from _going_ somewhere alone, and just being somewhere alone. There's no conversation when you go somewhere alone, but that's really about it, aside that it grants you the capability to be somewhere without others knowing where you are.
*6. What about driving?*
The thing about driving is that after the initial learning period, the car becomes little more than an extension of your body itself. The movements to control it become automatic, rather than conscious. To make a turn in an automatic transmission vehicle, a driver doesn't think "check for clearance, adjust hands on wheel, remove foot from gas, apply brake, check for clearance, begin turning wheel, readjust hands, move foot to gas, readjust hands, straighten wheel" they think "I need to go left" and the other stuff just happens, the same way, after learning to walk, we don't consciously go through the steps of walking, we just pick a direction and go.
Two things that may help you understand the answers better is an eye's focus, and its direction.
When looking at something far or near, an eye physically changes shape in order to bring the thing into focus, to make it appear clear, well-defined, not blurry. The lens of the eye must redirect all the light it catches to the back of the eye, where light receptors are. But light bouncing from near or far objects come from different ranges of angles, so the lens must bend to be rounder or flatter, whichever is needed to get all the light from a certain object to hit the light sensors in about the same place. You can liken it to the shape of an ear. if you had a horse's ear, with a narrow shape and ability to bend in different directions (or like if you cupped your hands around your ears), you could more clearly hear in one particular direction something farther away. But a flat human ear is better shaped to pick up sound in any direction, as long as it's close enough. A healthy human eye can see clearly both far and near, but it takes a short adjustment time to go from one to the other. (That adjustment time can increase as you get older.)
A baby is born able to see, but its ability to focus, and control that focus, develop during its first few years. Eventually, focus becomes as automatic as breathing. But like breathing, you can also take over the body's automatic process and choose to focus your eyes yourself. By pulling or relaxing the muscles in your eye, you can make certain distances appear blurry even if you're looking in their direction; but it's honestly kind of hard to override that automatic reflex.
BUT, it cannot be overstated, focus is controlled by the brain. Thus, even if your eye is healthy, you can develop bad viewing habits which can effectively degrade your eyesight. If a person reads books, or looks at a screen day in and day out, their reflex for focusing on far-away things can degrade. Over more time, even the eye muscles responsible for changing the lens can lose their power. This is one way of becoming what is called "near-sighted". The opposite can happen, too, where one rarely looks at things up close, and becomes "far-sighted". This is a layman's explanation, though; there are many different ways an eye can be impaired,.
Related to focus, the eye is also limited to a certain direction. You can turn your eyes to look in a certain direction; it's just a ball in a socket, with a hole for letting light in, the pupil. Now, even without turning, the eye has a wide range of vision; it can see things from many different angles at once. But it can only see things in the very center most clearly. Why? One reason is that the lens reflexively focuses to the distance of the object in that center of your vision. But the other reason is where the light receptors in your eye are placed. In the exact back of the eye, directly opposite the pupil, is an extremely high concentration of cone cells, sensitive to color. This sweet spot is much better at sensing details than the rest of the eye. Thus, only a very small part of your vision is super-clear, the very center of your vision. (Though this is technically direction, we often commonly call the direction of one's gaze a focus, and we call looking intently in one direction focusing. This is a reasonable misnomer because direction and focus in the eye are so closely intertwined.)
Had to shorten comment. See reply.
Good questions!
1. The way we remember colors and faces is like the way we remember how things feel or smell. When our brain gets repetitive stimulation over a thing we see, smell or touch, it tends to "memorize" it. We take color and shape into account. If it's curved and yellow, it's a banana! We remember faces by remembering people's unique set of traits. Well, there are some people that look like eachother but usually they are not identical (unless they're twins!). We automatically remember eye, nose, mouth size and skin color, hair or even height. These are all aids that help us tell people apart. There are also a lot of things we are used to seeing like for example the the chairs of our own home, sidewalks, grass... but when we see something out of the ordinary, that's when we sometimes stop and stare. It's as if you smell something new or touch a new texture for the first time. You're curious and the brain just wants to know what's new.
2. I'm not very good at naming cars so I just know that if it has 4 wheels, it's huge and has an engine, it's hopefully a car. lol
3. I share your doubt as to why people wear uncomfortable things just to look good. By all means, be happy with your aching foot! But I can't deal with that, I don't care how it looks! I always dress in comfy clothes that happen to look nice to me.
4. I like going to places alone sometimes. To me, it's like recharging my batteries. When you're with someone, you're distracted with jokes, you're enjoying their company and you're just focused on that. But when you're alone, you just have yourself to think about and I think that's a good time to reflect. I don't know if this is weird but when I'm alone I like to pretend I'm on an adventure, as if I'm exploring the world for the first time. I analyze every little detail of everything. As if im an extraterrestrial trying to make sense of planet earth.
5. Driving is crazy! It's a task that I'm yet to fully get the hang of. Another commenter said it best, it's like having a lot of conversations at the same time but you really have to focus on at least 2! The road, mainly, and the other cars' movements. Driving is quite a ride! haha.
6. I have never seen snow! :( I live in a tropical island, it's almost always beach weather here. Walking through the sand is much easier I bet, although sometimes it's very fluffy and my feet sink in. I juggle trying to watch my step, looking forward and searching for seashells. I may trip once in a while but it's part of the beach experience. :)
7. Well I don't know if this happens to you, but do you ever space out? Like, there are things happening in the background and you're thinking about something else? That happens to me! Yes, I see all the time but I can sorta zone out looking at whatever. I may look attentive but I could be thinking about anything! So yes, people have reached out at me and I'll go: What! Sorry, I was somewhere else!
8. As for the losing things, the exit, and everything else we mess up: We just get so mindless. we miss things you would think are obvious. you're right, we should open our eyes!
These were fun to answer. Thanks Tommy!
Answers form a sighted person:
there are colors EVERYWHERE, so its just like a daily reminder when we are learning colors. then it is etched into our brain.
i have no idea how people remember where everything is in the room... I cant do it.
i dont know particular makes of cars... except "bugs" which are SUPER round. my grandma calls them pregnant roller skates. Jeeps are easy too. just rails on them, no siding like a normal car... except some normal cars are the brand jeep, not an actual jeep, which i dont understand.
i only know a few veggies/fruit. there are a certain number of types where i live, and thats what i remember. i can also tell by the smell. i cant differentiate between all the "orange" fruits though... so if its round and orange i just call is an orange. clementine, maderine, orange, i dont know the difference, they all look and smell pretty much the same!
faces: its easy to remember a persons FACE. my problem is remembering the NAME of the face! lol
famous people are everywhere. in movies, on tv, in magazines, etc.. we see them everywhere so its, sometimes unfortunately, hard to forget.
i have no sense of fashion. i wear whats comfortable.
i rarely wear shoes that hurt my feet. i have ONE exception. a pair of sandals with a flower on them and maybe a half inch heal.
i dont like going places by myself, depending on where. to the library or school or a small store. but not much elsewhere.
1:20 and thats why i dont drive...also i hate when trucks pass or when cars get too close.
i dont understand the snow question
just not paying attention, or looking in a different direction, or in "la la land" its been shown in scientific studies that when you arent paying attention, your ears are the LAST to "stop working", and your eyes are the first. its something to do with how your brain processes it.
put things where they dont belong or are too lazy to put them away or clean up. money rolls away under places you cant see or sometimes blends into things, they kind of like camouflage into your carpet or the ground
parking rows look similar, a lot of cars look similar, you dont really pay attention when you leave the car, because you are focused on chatting and what you need to buy, and forget to look at what row youre in.
That actually made me feel really stupid. Way to go Tommy. Great video as always.
Man, I feel so sad. He's asking all these questions and all these pictures and video and images are just flashing right in front of us on the screen. All stuff that he can't see
This man... he makes me so happy in a way. So smiling, so positive. I love him, he's awesome! :)
Dude meee tooo.
Excellent questions for sighted people. One is easy to answer: Sighted people miss seeing things all the time because vision is narrowly focused. Hearing is 360 degrees, but detailed vision is only a few degrees. There are usually many, many things in our field of view, so we cannot pay attention to them all at once. We can see many things at once, and it seems clear, but much of our vision is not actually very clear or detailed unless we really stop and look carefully, and our peripheral vision can see almost nothing except for sensing movement.
00:11 - 00:14 if those colors flicked a little faster, you'd have sent a few hundred people to the hostpital lolz.
More than a little lol and yes I'm 4 years late
Well sometimes you might not see something cause your eyes are focused on something else so your brain doesn't pay attention to it and it just gets cast to your periphial vision
*peripheral
thats not how it works but its close
How do we remember faces... well, you just do. You can also remember things by hearing it, right? It is pretty much the same.
When we lose things, we can't find it mostly because it either isn't there, it's being covered by something (towel, blanket or clothes) or because it just blends in with the surroundings.
As for the high heels thing... I have no freaking idea.
He was joking.... It's not real questions, like for someone to respond....
We don't always know exactly where things are in a room. Drawers, and cabinets are a thing after all. And thanks to our friends color and perspective, things can blend in with each other, especially in a cluttered space, and make it hard to find anything. In fact, a lot of times, we just rely a general idea of where things are, based on past experience on where certain objects would normally be found. Like how most people keep socks and/or underwear in the top dresser drawer. After a little bit of searching, we'll usually find it there.
This is also why we lose things. If something isn't where we'd normally perceive it to be, or where we thought we'd normally leave it, we don't exactly know what to do beyond looking everywhere. Which can take a while, even with sight. Past experience based on visual cues also causes people not to look in places they'd think of as being silly places to look for something, often causing the "always the last place you look" scenario. Because they didn't check that one place until they ran out of options.
And your questions about remembering color, shapes and, well, everything are all related. Color and shapes are like building blocks in terms of visual recognition. When we're young, we learn the basic shapes, then colors, and then we put them together. For example, the first things we're likely to see that's both round and orange, is an orange (the fruit.) As we get older, we learn more complex shapes, and colors. Eventually, that leads into things like patterns, textures, depth and perspective. Those who wish to pursue learning about it even further are people like artists, designers, engineers, architects, etc.
And when it comes to things like makes and brands, that actually goes back to the very basics, as most every brand logo is made of of very simple shapes and colors that are just arranged differently from each other, so they're easy to remember. And easy to remember is exactly what any business or company wants.
*My attempt to answer each question*
1. It's like remembering the letters of the alphabet. You're taught about colours from a very young age and after a while, it just comes naturally.
2. It's nice to know where everything is in a familiar room, but it's also easy to forget where things (such as your phone) are which can be frustrating.
3. It's like being distracted by a pleasant sound or smell (like music or if you were to walk past a bakery). It can be hard to take your eyes off an attractive girl/guy.
4. Just like remembering your friends' voices or how certain foods smell, it eventually becomes easy to remember. Also everyone has a very distinctive face.
5. A lot of people care far more about their appearance than how comfortable their clothes are. They just want to make a good impression.
6. Going somewhere all by yourself can sound lonely, but it can be peaceful, depending on how introverted/extroverted you are.
7. It might sound overwhelming, but it's really not because you only really concentrate on one thing you can see at a time.
8. You have to watch where you're going to avoid slipping. The snow also can be very pleasant to look at.
9. Like I previously mentioned, you only focus on one thing at a time, so it's easy to miss out on your other surroundings.
10. Small things like coins can be camouflaged, meaning it blends in with things that surround it.
11. A lot of cars can look very similar and it's easy to forget where exactly you parked.
All of this makes me feel stupid. lol Great videos!
0:31 It's kinda like braille, or words in general. once you have sight your whole life you sorta just... I don't know, REMEMBER. :I now that I think about it humans are genius :P
"how do you concentrate on all the stuff thats going on (while driving)"
people dont and thats a hug part of why driving is so dangerous, too many people forget that theyre driving a 5000lbs missile
HAHAHA Ya. True. 2 ton killing machine.
Great questions! I find it very difficult to find everything in a room because Unlike a blind persons organized apartment, sighted people often have cluttered rooms. It has a lot more to do with memory than whether or not we can actually see items too. For example if you keep items in drawers, not in sight, you still recall whats within the drawers because of memory. Just like you most likely recall things too. We remember things just like you do. We sighted folks have been exposed to every color there is since birth and it is more about memory. Kind of like you could hear the name of an item, recall what it is called forever, touch it and think its name. It is that way for us too. We could close our eyes too and feel around, locate an item and know its name without seeing it too.
I did an experiment once blindfolded myself to try out things without sight, and it was difficult. But, I found that I could navigate my house perfectly and not bump items and this was due to memory. After the body repeats a task over and over it becomes automatic almost. Kind of like if your water was shut off in your place for a day for plumbing reasons, you might keep reaching to turn the faucet on anyhow, without even thinking " hey, the waters off", first because it is so automatic to our brains to do so. A lot of life is that way for us also.
Personally I find navigation through snow to be extremely difficult because even though I can see the ground, I have completely flat feet that do not want to walk on uneven surfaces well, lack of balance, short legs at only 5'1. What I can do that a blind person would have trouble with, is walk around snow banks because I see them. I live in a very snowy place St Paul MN. It is an effort for me every year!
We sighted people tend to recall the faces of others by associating it with the persons name and personality. This is subconscious but it is a fact. Also, some people have a hard time recalling faces. This is called face-blindness. It is not in any way equal to actual blindness, in that yes they do see. However they cannot absorb details in a face for some reason. This should be called Face-recognition disorder, not called blindness, I think.
Some sighted people are more visually oriented than others. Some are more sound oriented. Because we have both senses we get the choice I suppose. I am sound oriented. Often times I watch a movie and look away from the screen for minutes at a time just listening to it instead. Music is the most important thing in the world in my opinion, music is something I do not just hear but feel. This is called fission I think? Often even in public I listen to music on headphones and close my eyes and feel it. I understand for a blind person closing off your hearing would be unwise, but for the sighted, we plug our ears with music in public quite often and rely solely on vision and touch.
I for one, do not take my sight nor hearing for granted, and thank every day that I have them!
Fashion is bizarre to me too! I do not wear high heels that hurt just because they look good! I wear boots that are comfortable. I wear Indian yoga pants, or long flowing shirts. I only wear black clothes, too. Some people wear tight, uncomfortable clothes, for fashion. Thats fine if they like it but not I!
00:34 Car is easy, and you can enjoy them like us car enthusiasts. All cars come with unique emblems (unless they have been removed, or de-badged in technical terms), bodywork, and such. Have someone allow you to feel the Spirit of Ecstasy on a Rolls Royce, or to feel the bodywork and panels of a car.
1: You dont remember all the colors, you remember like 5 and just stuff every single color as one of those five.
2: I don't KNOW where everything is, if you listen to 10 conversations at once you hear all of them but you only KNOW what is going on in one.
3: You dont usually stop, its like if you smelled something really good or heard a good song and decided to enjoy and appreciate it.
4: the same way you remember how things smell and sound. many people can tell what a car is by sound alone, a flat plane v8 sounds different than a cross plane v8 and that sounds different than a turbocharged inline 4 which sounds different than a v12
5: pretty fly, its actually really nice feeling the freedom (i'm 20 and still live with my parents) although watch out because the responsibility follows you like a tailgater
6: Vision definitely helps but i dont understand how being able to see helps me because i cant see past the snow either.
7: its hard to explain but vision takes a lot more brain power than smell or sound. its a lot more detailed. its more like touch if everything had an intricate texture. Imagine touching the whole room at once, you will not notice everything.
8: If i lost something that means I can see it anymore so my vision obviously doesnt help. there are some rules of sight: i cant see things behind anything else that isnt see-through (that concept is complicated) and i can only see in front of me (also complicated) Also i can only really focus on the center of my vision
Wow. I have never seen or heard anything more amazing in my 14 years on this planet. I just realized how lucky I am to be able to see and memorize all the colors and people and everything he talked about. This made me feel happy and grateful and a whole bunch of other emotions that I don't even know what to call. This blows my mind.
Wow, I feel a bit stupid answering these questions, being a sighted person and all, but it's not the first time I've questioned why I've missed something, lol!
How do I remember where everything is and what objects or people look like? Well, you know how you can feel the size and shape of something to tell where something is? It's a similar concept, except instead of feeling what's in front of us, we see it. Well, this and imagine a set of objects representing people. Now, each of these objects feel and smell different from each other, right? It's like that, for seeing which person is your friend and which is a stranger, granted, when two people look very similar to each other it gets confusing, just like two things that feel the same are confusing, but I think you get my drift. How do I pay attention to everything going on around me while driving? Well, you know how you get good at doing something automatically with enough practice, so you can do something and do another thing at the same time? It's that idea. A good example would be say you're reading from the menu in a restaurant and listening to music, you're able to both read braille and listen to the lyrics and the tune of the song, right? In other words, your mind goes from one thing to the other and back again in seconds. It's like that with driving and reading a sign, driving and listening to the radio, or driving and talking with a friend in the passenger seat.
What's it like to get around in snow? Imagine seeing one, very bright color that covers everything, a good metaphor is covering a space filled with objects with a white sheet, that's kind of how snow's like. I think that's the only difference, snow is still cold and crunches underneath the feet, though.
What's it like to get around by yourself? Well, you walk certain places by yourself, don't you? It's that feeling, the excitement and nervousness of being in places and having the freedom to go wherever you want as long as you take yourself there, the only difference is instead of walking, you're driving.
How do I not find a car in a parking lot? Because I don't pay attention to where specifically I parked my car, such as using visual cues like what row number I'm in or what my car is parked near to, then I have to deal with so many cars in the parking lot and some of them are the same color, size, and shape of MY car.
I think everything else can be explained through knowledge of depth perception, which others have already explained.
I hope I answered your questions adequately enough.
Before I finalize this comment, I'd like to say that I really enjoy this channel that I've recently found, and each of his videos makes me laugh and smile and appreciate my sight a bit more. The following was simply intended as food for thought for the questions Tommy asked in this video.
"How do you remember _all_ those colors?" The same way you remember the braille alphabet - memorization, repetition, and practice.
"What's it like to look at a room and you know exactly where everything is in the room?" It feels just like when you read braille and know exactly which dot combination corresponds to whichever letter or number. Normal! :D
"How come you stop and look at a hot chick?" Lots of people are attracted to how people look. It's a sight thing XD
"How do you remember what things look like?" How do you remember the braille alphabet? How do you use echolocation?
"What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?" Depends. Some people love the feeling of independence, others crave communication and going in a party.
"How do you concentrate on all the stuff that's goin' on [while driving]?" How do you concentrate on all the sounds individually when you're walking down a street?
"What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?" Bro, it feels amazing to me. The crunching of the snow beneath my feet is just - _oh_. Oh, it's beautiful.
"How do you miss somethin' that's goin' on right in front of your face?" Motion blur. Why don't you hear something if it happens behind multiple walls? Because it's too quiet. How don't we see something? When it's too quick.
"How do you lose things when you can see?" How do you lose things when you can hear? Don't most objects make a sound when they fall to the ground? _Especially_ most of the objects you'd carry around in your pockets: Keys, a wallet, phone, etc.
My man you're amazing....I love your attitude. That's better than someone miserable and depressed with sight... it doesn't sound like you're missing out to me! Well done
Remembering colours and people's faces is the same as remembering all those words in the English language that you used in this video.
Three years late? No problem.
First of all, I think the sense closest to sight is the sense of sound. Sight is a more focused, more accurate sort of sound. Except, it feels totally different than sound. Unless you have synesthesia (the mixing of sensory perceptions, imagine hearing what coffee tastes like), you probably don't think of any connection between the senses of sight and sound. They are felt as differently as taste and touch are. Actually, I think it's probably fair to say that taste is to touch as sight is to sound.
How do you remember all those colors?
When I see a color, I think of it. When I think of a color, the color reveals itself in my mind. It's like hearing a certain pitch of a musical note, you will remember that note.
What's it like to look at a room and know exactly where everything is in a room?
Pretty cool, unless you can't find something.
How can you stop and look at a hot chick?
Imagine hearing a really beautiful sounding voice. But the voice was only audible if you were facing a certain direction, and only for a short time. And what if the beautiful voice was directly linked by millions of years of evolution to the drive to reproduce?
How do you remember what things look like? There's so many things.
Brains just have a lot of storage space devoted to images of things, I guess. But in general we don't actually store the shape of everything, we store a few basic shapes and how to put the shapes together, and our brains interpret it as a unique object.
What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?
Pretty stressful, if I'm driving. But that's just me.
What's it like to be able to get around in the snow?
Super lots of fun! We can throw snowballs and hit people with them, and if they're in a good mood they'll throw some back.
How do you miss something that's going on right in front of your face?
Sometimes we're just staring off into space. Our eyes might be open, and we're seeing visual information, but our mind isn't really processing it. And really, it is a case of only some people doing this. Not everyone does this as much as, say, I do.
How do you lose things when you can see?
Well, if we weren't looking in the exact place that the missing thing landed, we might struggle to make out the object from visual noise. Imagine dropping a cube onto a bunch of other cubes, and just feeling around to try to find the cube you're looking for. I don't know, maybe not the best analogy. But the main thing being that we can't see everywhere at once. Just a small region. Only directly forward we're able to see clearly. Towards the edge of our visual field it's blurry and colorless. The usable field of vision is something like 10% of the front view. Imagine if you could only hear things when looking a certain direction, and if you looked away, instead of your ears telling you which way the sound was coming from, they just couldn't hear anymore.
And i'm 6 years late
i wonder... what annoys you the most about sighted people? what i mean is, most people are idiots (let's be real here) and likely ask you some really dumb, not very well thought out questions....i'd think that would be annoying... what question or misconception annoys you the most?
1) Colors - it's a lot like sound pitches. They're just frequencies of energy. There are colors that are close to each other, like a semitone in music, but they are still distinguishable, and just like music, some people distinguish colors better than others.
2) Remembering where things are in a room - actually has nothing to do with visual memory, but association. You know your watch is in the top right drawer of the dresser, the drawer is in the dresser, and the dresser is to the right of the doorway. You know where the doorway is because you entered it. Some people have "photographic memory" where they can accurately remember the visual data itself, but that's rare. As for seeing everything in a part of the room… imagine having a giant hand that you can put everything at once, and everything has a braille tag. Kind of like that.
3) Attractive people stopping traffic - imagine that someone (or something) smells really good, and you stop to take another whiff.
4) Instant recognition of cars, food, faces - this is unique to sight, in how fast it works. It's practically instant. But think of it as each one of those things being a different chord in music. You can tell as soon as you hear it. And just like sound recordings can tell you what a chord sounds like, photos can tell you what a person looks like, even though you've never seen them IRL.
5) Why do people wear uncomfortable shoes that look good - as a sighted person, I'm really stomped by this one. I can't take more than two steps in uncomfortable shoes.
6) Paying attention to everything while driving - impossible. You concentrate on one thing at a time. Some people can switch their attention from one thing to another really quickly; others can't.
7) Getting around in the snow - I snowboard, so for me getting around in the snow is like this: wheeeeeeeeee!
8) Not seeing something that's right in front of your face - can happen with any senses; it's just attention span. You can fail at tasting something that's IN YOUR MOUTH!
9) Losing things - can happen in so many ways. Small objects are hard to see, but they can bounce around or roll to where they cannot be seen or reached. And remember, you can only see in a straight line, so anything opaque can block your sight.
10) Not finding your car in a parking lot - cars look very similar to one another, in general. The easiest way to distinguish a typical car is by color. But there are only so many colors that car manufacturers use. Plus, in a big parking lot, there's sometimes no way to identify where you are: no signs, no buildings, and everything just looks the same from every angle. Even in parking lots with signs, sometimes you just fail to memorize the location where you parked. Kind of like if every time you came home, you had a different address, you might not always find your home.
Hey Tommy, not sure if you'll read this but I just want to say thank you. Thank you for making us feel blessed by our sight with these videos, it puts our problems into a whole other perspective. And it's relieving to know how happy a blind person can still be, despise how unfair life was to you.
Parking lot.. It's really large. Difficult to remember where you parked.
The reason we miss all these things: because we have all of this info on what everything looks like in our brain.
How do I remember what all kinds of fruits and vegetables look like? I don't.
The answers to these questions can mostly be chalked up to experience. We see cars, foods, colors, etc. so often that we just naturally memorize it, just like you’d recognize a sound like someone’s voice or a popular song. Also, I remember an acronym I learned in elementary school to remember all the colors: Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Most all the other colors are just different shades or combinations of those colors.
The “missing” things is actually a pretty good question. Sight is different than hearing in that the ears can hear everything in your immediate surroundings-in front, to the side of, and even behind you. The eyes, on the other hand, have to be aimed directly at the thing we’re seeing. We do have some peripheral vision (i.e., seeing things barely out of our field of view), but we can’t see things behind us like you can hear something behind you.
the way we lose things that are in our field of sight is because there is so many things around us that we are so used to seeing that our mind focuses on the things we find most important and because there is so much stuff around us sometimes it will be hard to find. Sight isn't perfect. also you can lose your car because many cars look the same so it makes it harder for us to pin point exactly which one is ours. I hope this helped! You are truly an inspiration
I have a question for you, Tom! Do blind people actually see and experience in their dreams? If so, what's it like to see in dreams when you can't see in reality? Is it a relief, or do you feel better and happier?
If you were once able to see but became blind, then you will see in your dreams. If you were always blind, then you won't be able to see anything in your dreams.
ThatGuyYouArent2 Agreed. Though with the caveat that it might be possible if they had some form of synesthesia, but even that's much more common in people who were previously sighted because of brain remapping. :)
PurpleGhost
Wooah, there are seriously documented cases of blind people experiencing visual synesthesia? What about those who have always been blind?! How would they even know they're experiencing something visual? :O
***** Do you feel better about yourself? Yes the question may be a bit obvious, but what if he was 8?
Also even if he is 35, would you still feel better about yourself? Their is no reason to insult someone for asking a question, or being wrong, or having a different opinion from your own.
You have been wrong before in your life. You have stated obvious things before in your life. You have asked questions that seem obvious to others. How would you like it if people insulted you every time? No need to be insulting.
Man I didn't even notice how many things I'm capable of.....
We remember things because we see them so often it just sticks.
This almost brought me to tears, we really take things for granted. He seems like such a happy warm hearted person with a very pleasant spirit. People like him is the key to ending racism in my opinion. If we all were born blind, how could we judge one another, God bless you Mister!
During the video when you are asking how the sighted can lose things, it shows a picture of someone dropping an item on a surface with a busy pattern.
This is a great way to fool a sighted person and it's not unusual for us to give up on looking and instead rely on touch. This is especially true for small objects. This is the same experience as camouflage.
I have good positional awareness, so I'm able to remember where I parked or where I set something in a pretty absolute fashion. Others may not remember exactly where something is, but they know it's on their desk so it narrows their search.
Parking lots are big and full of visual noise, so people who remember positions relative to others may find themselves searching too big of an area or in an area too noisy to search quickly.
Sometimes a desk or a rug or a parking lot is so busy that it becomes difficult to find the anomaly in the pattern caused by what you are looking for, similar to how a bumpy piece of paper which has some Braille on it may be difficult to interpret.
Sometimes you lose something because all of the other things around you distract or hude the thing you're looking for
*hide
+OnlyMichaelJackson (Angel) you can edit a comment by clicking the dots by it
awsam I can only do that on Google+
I was on TH-cam, duh.
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A blind guy telling me to open my eyes, thats powerful. No sarcasm here
we remember stuff like you remember stuff, you know how a cat feels like so when you touch a cat you pretty much know, oh that's a cat. Same way we know how something looks like
Unless its a skunk. =D
For remembering colors, it's like how you would know a bird chirping from a saxophone. It's really impossible to describe the *nature* of colors, but in terms of remembering them, you just get exposed to them over and over and eventually you just start to automatically categorize them. There are times though when it's not clear, like a color might be right on the brink between red and orange and people might disagree about if it's red or orange.
It's like magic. Like, I take it for granted, but seeing this video made me realize that walking into a room and knowing where things are and how far away they are and just like, being able to immediately have all that information, it's like a magic trick.
As for hot chicks, think about like, not to get too personal, but maybe the feeling of a woman's breast, or like a passionate kiss, those sensations. Looking at a beautiful woman is like that for your eyes, just less intensely.
As for knowing what things look like, it's similar to what I said about colors, it's like, after exposure, you'll know the difference between the sound of a car honking and a goose honking. Same with vision, if I've seen a car and I've seen a goose, I'll probably know which is which. But things aren't always easy to remember, for example cars, lots of people don't know different cars by sight because lots of them look quite similar (like the difference of a duck honk and a goose quack perhaps, or the difference of taste between leeks and green onions).
As for faces, I have prosopagnosia, so I actually don't remember faces well at all, they all look alike to me unless you've got something really obviously different like a wild hair color or are REALLY tall or short or wide or thin. So I don't know how people do that either.
Fashion is kinda silly, I usually dress for comfort. But sometimes getting dressed up is sort of like.... making yourself sing at other people's eyes with your clothes? I don't know how else to put it; it's like, doing something to make yourself pleasing to other people's perceptions. So that's not a great example but it's sort of like that.
I don't drive :o
So as for how people can just not see things right in front of them, you've got to remember that besides closing your eyes, there's no visual equivalent of silence. Imagine if you were in a crowded room; you might just let all the voices blend together and become background noise if you weren't paying attention (or at least that happens to me); same thing happens with vision, sometimes it just all becomes background sight and you stop focusing and miss stuff.
Sight works in straight lines (not being patronizing, but since you're blind I'm not sure if you know that or what), so when you can't find your car it's because there are lots and lots of cars and unless you've got a direct line of unobstructed space between your eyes and the car, you can't even see it, let alone recognize it. As for when it is in your vision, again, lots of cars look very similar. If you have a 4-door sedan that's a beige-gold color, you're going to be picking your car out of a lot that has 30 other beige-gold 4 door sedans. Imagine listening for one whistle but there are 20 other whistles blowing at the same time. It's hard to pick out which is the right one, especially from a distance.
I hope this helped, love your channel! :D
1. Remembering colors is like remembering names, or objects - it's just what we grow and live with. How many names do you know? A lot of, you can't remember them all in a moment, but you also can't forget. Can you make a list of everything you have in your apartment? Not in a moment, but you can. Same thing with remembering colors.
2. Well... Imagine that every object around you has it's unique sound, and you constantly hear it all. And let's say you know all that sounds, and don't think about recognising them, like it was as easy as recognising words of the language. So the closer you get to the object, the louder is the sound, so you always know how war it is. Always. Non-stop. But it's not hard, it's just the everyday reality.
3. It's the same like enjoying everything else that you find pleasant. You can stop to listen to a beautifull song when walking near the window where it is played.
4. Just like remembering the words. But actualy, we remember it not as good as we think. Good enough to recognise it when next time see, but not good enough to even describe.
5. Knowing famouse people... You've never heard Bethoven playing his music himself)) But you know how it sounds)
6. Fashion... We chose what we like depending on what impression was stronger. For example pasta. You don't eat pasta cause it was disgusting thing to touch. What?)) Realy?)) It isn't made for touching, isn't the taste more important?)) Yeah, it is, but your impression of how it felt was so strong that you don't give a shit how it tastes) So sometimes we don't give a shit how uncomfortable are the shoes cause first impression was just WOW!
7. Going all by myself... ok, I can't describe that. But sometimes it can be scary and I can get lost)
8. Driving is a damn magic, I don't know how people do that)) I don't drive)
9. Snow... It feels like a cold and wet sand, and this is it. That's all))
10. Imagine a big room with many people in it. You are talking to a person, and then you hear everyone aroung are laughing cause someone's just told best joke ever! But you were talking, you didn't hear the joke. So technically you hear everything around you, but you notice only what you concentrate on, and some loudest sounds the break through your concentration. Same thing with not seing something.
11. We can lose things because they are under or behind other things, and also because we forget where we put it. Can you lose a sock under the bed? I think you can)
12. To find a car is actualy pretty hard))) It's easier to remember where it was, then to look for it. 10 meters left from the front doors, for example))
"How do you remember all those faces?" Simple answer from me: I don't
Damn this really makes me realize how lucky I am to have sight, and how much I take it for granted. You also crack me up, tommy
All the colors? its like math. You know the basic ones and then u can say light red, or dark red. Or Reddish brown. Also Compare to things - sky blue or orange orange.
Hot chicks? Well they DO slow traffic down....
Remembering stuff is like learning words - instead of unique sound u remember the shape and colors and details.
And fashion blows my mind too.. its... just idiotic.
Cannot see something just like you cannot hear things that were clearly loud enough. You weren't focused on it or were distracted by something else.
Seeing is technically hearing. Just at a different wavelength.
what is light and dark? ;) lol
seeing and hearing isnt the same thing, there are similarities like both are waves. but light is electromagnetism and hearing is particles bouncing on each other.
afroninjadeluxe "hearing is particles bouncing on each other" no not really
your sense of humour kills me. i love these videos :)
Best way I can describe how we remember and differentiate between everything is that we can see the depth of objects and color and shape with the same distinctness you can feel the slight bumps and ridges on someone's face. All that stuff has a visual representation to us, even light itself, which based on how wide spread and bright it is, we can tell where the source comes from and what distance it covers. Color varies immensely too, there's not really just one blue, there's a huge array of shades, tints, and hues that we consider blue, though at times another person might actually see that same blue as a purple or green based on how their specific eyes are registering those colors in the brain. Depth is seen by having one eye see one angle and the other eye see a different one. The brain combines the images into one and it let's us determine the placement of the objects in relation to each other. Shadow and light play into this too, based on where a light fixture is, shadows let me know when and where light is being blocked by an object. Basically we see in three dimensions just like you feel in three dimensions, but with the added distinction from colors and light and shadow. As far as why we notice someone attractive, it's an instinct driven thing, same as when someone brushes up against you that you like and you get tingles, it immediately grabs your attention and focus. Fashion is largely about attraction, but people just like to look nice and neat or cute, whatever fits their personality. A well dressed man in a suit is akin to a well organized desk where everything is exactly where it should be and easy for anyone to find. Someone in more relaxed clothing with mismatched socks is like a desk where you know where everything is immediately, but to anyone else it takes them a second to figure out where you've put everything. Clothing can tell you what someone is in the mood for, what types of things they like, a little bit about their personality even. A black dress, based on its shape, texture, and the accessories with it and could mean someone's going to a funeral, or an expensive restaurant, or they're going out to a club. It's all based on the context of what styles and colors mean within that particular culture though. A man in a suit is very common in New York City, but very uncommon in a small rural town. We can see whether people are organized, neat, clean, healthy, etc ( though they may or may not actually be healthy, eyes can trick you there ). That's about all I could think of, hope it helps and didn't sound like I was talking down to you or anything, I just like to explain as fully as I can.
Maybe you would be able to see better if you opened your eyes.
Dumbass.
I'm ashamed but I laughed
* face plam * DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW IT WORKS TO BE BLIND?!?! HE CAN'T SEE ANY THING NO MADDER WHAT! Jeez some people.
What is he suppost to answer now? "Oh right .... ohhhh all this years- where have YOU been all time ??"
You
Sir
Are
A
Fucking
Idiot
Guys! He is blind, he can't read your comments
when accessibility is turned on siri reads everything to him
He has someone to tell him of the comments. Who do you think that edits the videos?
+Alexandra Carpenter There's software that can read the screen for blind people.
+ariel sharpe no go to accessibility and when you tap on things it says what it is out loud
Screenreading and braille display technology has been around for decades, pretty much as long as computers have... I am disturbed by how many people don't know that! How do you think blind lawyers or accountants or writers work???
This really made me think about how aware I actually am of the world. How do I lose things I set places? There's so much actively going on all the time it's hard to stay focused on the important things. Everything is so busy it's migraine inducing. There is no way to describe a gorgeous meadow or indulge in a painting, but I wish I could shut out the world and focus more on what's happening in my life.
1. How do you remember all of those colors?
A: The same way you can differentiate between how things feel. Think of colors as a visual version of texture differentiation. In the same manner as sometimes you would feel something and say "This sorta feels like..." when you aren't sure, you have these defaults as a go-to. We do the same thing with colors - there are so many shades that sometimes we can only describe in base colors (Blue, Green, etc) or that it looks kind of like a cross between a green and yellow (and so on). The closest analogy I can make for somebody who is blind is to ask: How do you remember what all those sounds are?
2. How do you remember what everything looks like?
A: See also - #1. You know what things feel like when touched, but not everything. So you generally can tell the difference between maybe an orange and banana in your hands, and more so with smell. Things that you can touch and are instantly recognizable is essentially the same thing to a sighted person on visual recognition. There are features we immediately pick out.
3. Fashion?
A: It's really psychology. People are easily persuaded into the dumbest things sometimes. I mean, in the 1970s, somebody convinced everyone to buy a pet rock. Fashion is roughly the same idea... but it does a serve a purpose. In the fashion industry, it is more about taking a trend to the level of absurdity which (in turn) trickles down to the common clothing fashion which is less absurd (by comparison) and borrows from those higher up fashion trends. Then there are folks who just wear whatever is comfortable and ignore fashion trends.
High heels... well, that actually started long ago as a fashion trend for men (aristocrats). Women began wearing high heels, which in turn feminized the fashion, and it more or less evolved into a hyper feminine stereotype (think: porn).
4. Driving?
A: Actually, to be honest... most people aren't concentrating on all the visual things going on around them. The way vision seems to work is that the mind takes a hell of a lot of shortcuts, and often just sorta ignores a lot when things are repetitious. In effect, we are effectively on autopilot mentally while driving because sighted people aren't hyper-aware like other heightened senses (such as with blind people). I suppose the answer is closer to: It's roughly equivalent to how you can tune out the noise in a crowded restaurant and focus just on the person speaking to you.
But we still multi-task horribly... so cell phones, talking to people in the passenger seat, etc... it does require splitting attention. So don't get into any existential and deep conversations while driving.
5. Getting around in the snow?
A: Think of it like very cold sand. Often times less dense.
6. How do you miss something?
A: See Answer 4. The brain only can pay attention to so much at the same time, takes a lot of shortcuts, and often omits things right in front of us. There's a famous study where people are asked to watch a bunch of people pass a basketball to each other and count how many times the ball is passed. Most people miss the guy in the Gorilla outfit walking clearly into view during this test. It's called Situational Blindness. Being sighted isn't as "all-seeing" as you may think. Our brains love to mess with us.
7. How do you lose things?
A: Situational Blindness (again). Our brain simply doesn't pay attention or "record" everything in detail visually. So we often forget random information or don't "see" it. Which is to say the thing that happened doesn't get "remembered" or it is omitted in the brain when processing. Hence the thing we lost is literally in a mental black hole, big 'ol blank in the mind for where something is at because it was never remembered to begin with. Your brain figured it wasn't important to remember and skipped over it. Being blind (or or senses impaired or missing), heightens the remaining senses to a higher acuity... which may also essentially free up "informational bandwidth" for what the brain is able to "record" and remember.
8. Lost a parked car in a parking lot?
A: Cars aren't as universally different as you might think. They all tend to look similar when there is a few hundred or a thousand parked in a group. Again with the situational blindness issue. Our brain just gets overloaded with information and it all sorta blurs together - as if you were looking for a single cello in an orchestra while a symphony was playing.
9. How do we miss the exit?
A: Our good old friend, situational blindness strikes again.
I learned about colors by the time I was kindergarten. These days parents begin teaching kids about colors (and shapes) at least two to three years earlier than when I was growing up. For example, kids learn to distinguish red cars, red circles, red squares, red crayons, and it works the same way with learning the other colors (such as orange,yellow,green, blue,violet,gray,gold,silver,brown, and some other colors). We basically learn to see these things through many years of repetition.
As for how people can see things and not notice them it is only the area near the center of one’s visual field where one can see well enough to read (for example). Peripheral vision is better for recognizing movement and the existence of objects outside the center of one’s vision (along with some basic information about size and shape (but not color)).
Also most sighted people are good at recognizing faces and models of cars but others (like myself) are not good at this (even after decades of practice). It comes down to a combination of years of repetition and differences in brain development based on genetics and environment. For example there is a specific area of the brain that is more involved in recognizing faces by sight than the other areas and this area has a different level of development in each person.
I love Tommy so much. He makes me question things I never thought to question.
I love this guys channel. He is so cool about his condition, accepts it and makes life fun. Props to u
Hi Tommy!
I've listened to some of your videos, which are very interesting. I found the responses from watchers to be sometimes very awkward. For some reason, people compare sight with hearing... I got to tell you, as a visual artist, I feel that the geometry of things is more like touching, following the curves, the points, the throughs. Their color is more like smell, however less complex than smell. Color is easier to explain in technical terms than in emotional terms, because the emotions associated with colors are mostly cultural. The most common color model that exsits, a model that can map out all the possibilities, is the additive model, which is based on the way light transmits its wavelengths to the eyes. The additive model functions this way: You have three inputs of color that can vary in intensity, like three different direction choices. When you combine the intensity of each of the three, you get a brighter and brighter color that varies in hue depending on the amount of each of the three inputs (hue is a technical term for the actual color). The more you add intensity to the three values, the closer to white. If there is no light, so no color, it is black (which is almost impossible, unless we go in outerspace, and even there we could still see the small stars) White is not the absence of colors, but really the presence of all of them in the additive model. If you add an equal quantity of intensity for each of the inputs, it stays grey. It functions as a triplet of contrast. If you know the color wheel, it might give you a better understanding of the way things look colorwise. Another important fact is that object get smaller with distance. I can picture the same thing if I think of it in terms of touch. I imagine a spherical bubble arround me, and the further away from me, the bigger is the bubble. If I want to fit an object on the surface of that bubble, it will look smaller than the whole surface of the bubble as the object gets further. Imagine if your arms could strech to infinity. You could touch all the objects of the universe at the edge of it. So, those objects look smaller because they all fit in the sight. There is more information for the same surface area. However, we can't see all those objects because our vision blurs things as they get distant. So at a certain distance things start to merge and they are hard to be differenciated.
So, to summarise, the way things feel when I personally look at them is different from what I usually read. When I focus on the geometry of things, I can "feel" the slopes and textures and points and throughs, just like if I was touching them from a distance. When I focus on the color, it is like if I smelled it, but in a rather more simple manner, because smell is much more complex than color. If there was more attention into developing a mathematical model for the olfactory system, a better understanding of color might be possible from a reductive approach of the olfactory sytem. So, the geometry of things can be comparedf to touch at a distance, and their color can be compared to smell at a distance.
There is however another harder way to describe color. Because it can be modeled with 3 different values, it is like if every single bit of information in an object not only had a position in 3 dimensions, but it also contains information from an additional 3 other dimensions, which are red, green and blue.
Also, I wanted to point out that the reason why the ocean is blue is because it acts like a mirror for the blue sky above. The blue ocean is just a reflection of the sky. Water is mostly transparent. We see it because it refracts light and bends the image which gives a gostly impression of it like glass. it distorts the coming light from behind. So, if you look at someone's face through it, it sometimes looks funny. A glass appears almost the same as if it was made of water. Lastly, the way we draw is just a projection of what I explained earlier about things getting smaller in distance. We fake the 3D space by making a projection of it on a 2D piece of paper. However a pretty good approximation, when we move arround that fake representation, things don't move in paralax like they do in 3D. Paralax could also be explained with streching arms that can touch.
I hope this gives you a better perspective on the world of vision.
A lot of the answers to these are that vision works like sound: there's a LOT of background noise but only a few things that you really focus on. For example, if you're in a crowd, you'll concentrate more on the people's voices that are closest to you, while further away voices are muffled and lost in the background. Sight works this way. Bright colors (colors which are bright, similar to how high-pitched noises or louder noises will grab your attention more easily) will stand out and some of your attention will be brought to them. Then there's the functional aspect -- if you're going to sleep, you're much more likely to look at your bed rather than a hair pin on the floor. Another would be size. For example, in a bedroom the biggest objects are the walls, ceiling, floor, bed, wardrobe, etc. Smaller objects tend to go unnoticed because it's like that background noise in a crowd.
Vision works in three basic ways, these are how people perceive what they see. There's figure and ground, perception of distance, and recognition. Figure and ground is when the brain organises sensory information into figures (objects) and ground (the background). A sighted example of this is looking at the silhouette of a man on a white page, recognizing that the man is the figure, what we're supposed to focus on, and the white page is the background, information that is 'extra' and is perceive as less important. A non-sighted example may be if there is a constant hum which doesn't change in tone or pitch. However, there's also music playing over the humming. The music is the main focus of attention. Camouflage uses this to its advantage. A figure (a person) wears camouflage to blend into the ground (the background, eg. a forest).
Perception of distance mainly uses relative size and height. Imagine standing on a train platform. The train looks small because it's far away, however, you know its growing closer because it's getting bigger. The train isn't really getting bigger, obviously, and the brain goes through this process so we can understand distance. Our hands grow 'smaller' as we move them away from us, but it's just our perception of our hand, relative to our size. For non-sighted, imagine a train is approaching. The noise of the train is quiet, growing louder as it approaches. Two sounds of equal volume can appear louder or quieter because it's our relative positioning to the source of the sound that affects the perceived volume.
Lastly, recognition. After years of listening to noises, you can separate the differences between a church bell, a phone ringtone, and an alarm because, even though they're all ringing noises, they sound different. Well, sight works in this way. We know what people look like because a human being has a typical shape. You can recognize a phone ringtone because, even though different phones use different tones, there's qualities that they all share. A face is expected to have a head, hair, eyebrows, eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth. There are qualities that differ, obviously (you might not have hair, you might have a beard, you might not have eyes, etc) but they mostly share this shape. Your brain puts together this information after years of looking at faces, years of hearing church bells and ringtones. To address the colors question and ow sighted people remember so many, you have to address the fact that there's really only three: red, blue, and yellow. White and black are complicated -- in light terms, white is light and all colour frequencies are in white, that's why you get rainbows when light diffracts through raindrops, and black is the absence of light -- but let's just talk about them as shades. Purple is really just red plus blue. A certain amount of both. Tip the balance and it's still red plus blue but it looks different. There's high pitches of sound and low pitches of sound. Anything in between is really just high plus low, with a specific balance. Shades (black and white) just make things duller (black) or paler (white) which is really just, for example, blue plus black equals dark blue.
But there's a whole part of the brain dedicated to interpreting vision, which non-sighted people don't use, or use less. That's why it's difficult to understand, especially if you've never had sight. In any way, interpreting the world through a visual means is as little effort as interpreting the world through an auditory means. It's a natural thing that humans have learned to do, not something that requires effort or much thought for practical use. Anyway, I hope I helped answer some questions.
You, sir, made me appreciate so many things in the last few minutes. Thank you.
Sound is overpowering to our concentration. Smell is overpowering to our pheromones and gut. Touch is overpowering to the immersion to the moment. Taste is like an exaggeration of that. Sight is overpowering to the information unobstructed in front of your face. If you were only given random images you could not perceive them. With two eyes, but even with one, as we move around and interact with the world our eyes instinctually become familiar with what it's looking at just as seamlessly as sound. These senses show depth and form in different ways. Sight reveals all the information in front of your face all at once. The sight doesn't echo into your senses, it's just there when the eyelids are open. So much information is presented to us we become so used to it we would never describe the experience as sounding so incredible. If a door is in front of a barking dog, without sound we would not know a dog was there. From where your eyeball are spanning in every direction we see what you would scan with your hands moving forward all at once and the space in-between. Color is just another variable in the picture to give us a clearer image, it isn't even necessary.
I love the things you pointed out in this video. Sighted people remember what people look like, i guess the way you would remember a color. In another video you did where you smelt markers, you could say "this smells like grape". It's the same concept. The combination of the color shape (and style for the cars question) makes it very distinct and obvious. The question about missing things, imagine being in a huge crowd of people, having your sense of hearing constantly bombarded with new information. That's pretty much what sight is. All these shapes and colors at once, but we choose what to focus on, so we miss things. Plus, we have blind spots. Basically it would be for you if someone were talking to you from this one specific angle, you would not be able to hear it. I hope i explained these well! I really enjoy your videos!
I've recently discovered this channel and it blows my mind! Our bodies really are amazing and we take sight for granted so much. I wish we could swap for a day to experience and appreciate each other's lives. Fascinating. Thanks Tommy!
Hey Tommy, I would say that the reason we don't see stuff right in front of us is due to visual "noise". When there is so much to see, or a room is cluttered or a parking lot is full of all kinds of cars of the same color and different sizes, they all just muddle together and block the view. I would say it's like when a symphony is beginning and every musician is tuning up at once. You hear pops of each instrument every once in a while, or a continuous line of violin, but sometimes a little thing like a flute or a piccolo gets drowned out by a bass trombone, or cymabls etc. Sight is like hearing in the way that when there is too much to see, it is like when there is too much to hear. That's how you lose keys. And you lose change when it goes past your line of sight, like under a counter, down a gutter etc., just as you would lose the sound of a piano playing when you step outside. :)
I have a question for you! :) Do you ever feel uncomfortable when a seat is too straight or at an angle that seems to push you forward and down? For me, that makes me uncomfortable and claustrophobic. How do you experience spacial comfort? Is it in soft textures, the angle of furniture, the ability to sink in to a cushion or the firmness of one? Do you like the texture of brick or concrete or polished stone walls, and the minute changes in information that comes with pulling your finger over a surface with little cracks and holes in it? What makes you feel safe and at home?