On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (24 page)

The street changed for me during those months, as it certainly
changes for anyone who is temporarily or permanently injured, or suffers the ultimate injury of simply aging. I had no balance on my left side, so to maneuver I had to plant my right foot. This meant that small adjustments—stepping back to make room for someone on an elevator; moving slightly to the side to let someone pass on a narrowed sidewalk—were impossible for me to do quickly, and even with time were laborious and graceless.

I became aware of the little movements that we do naturally when we see people approaching us on a path. I had learned from Fred Kent (and Whyte by implication) about the pedestrian sidewalk dance. Though interaction with your fellow pedestrians feels as though it begins when they come within handshake distance, you are each adjusting your path and stride to the other well before that. In
theory
. Now I saw it in practice. Without the nerves relaying messages to the muscles to make that adjustment, a walker becomes a blundering target. I made more personal, tactile contact with people in those months than I had over the decade of my urban residency.

 • • • 

I was very much in the throes of this handicap when I met Arlene Gordon. The day was still with heat. Along the sidewalks, air conditioners gurgled and thrummed with an unseen number of chilled apartment dwellers sealed away behind their windows. Park benches sat lonely. I could almost hear the “grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat.”

I turned a corner onto a broad street unshaded from the sun. A generator was sputtering nearby; a siren dopplered across the horizon, the toenails of a small dog being dragged out for his constitutional scraped the concrete, other sounds melted into the air. Hoses snaked the sidewalk and emptied themselves into tree pits smelling of moist dirt. At the third building on the left side of
the street, inset more deeply than its neighbors, I approached the doors. They sighed open for me. I passed through the marble-floored lobby, pulled myself up a few stairs, weaved over to the elevators, fingered their engraved buttons, entered, and emerged after six beeps. On that, the seventh floor, I turned left and heard someone call my name: “Alexandra?”

Gordon stood in the doorway across the hall. Tall, smiling, with perfectly white well-coiffed hair, she held the door open with one hand and held out the other. Her fingers were directed slightly to my left, but as I greeted her, she looked me straight in the eyes. Highlighted by her shocking blue shirt, Gordon’s eyes shone an iridescent blue-green. She led me into a compact, tidy apartment. The blinds were drawn and there was a low light on. A bookcase held a television, neat lines of hardbacks, and shelves and shelves of treasured objects: delicate porcelain boxes; figurative objects; tiny stone sculptures of seals, elephants, birds.

As I moved to examine these tchotchkes, Gordon spoke up: “Pick up anything; I’ll tell you about the trip.”

I placed one of the objects in her palms. She grasped it gently, gazing down at her hands. Her fingers quickly worked over its surface. As she dislodged a lid she said, “Oh, this is one of my little boxes. Let’s see what this is . . . this has a picture on the cover . . . flowers . . . I’m sure I got this in China. I’ve been to China twice—actually three times if you count Hong Kong.”

Over the last forty or so years Gordon has traveled the world, often with friends. She once took a three-week cruise up the North Atlantic, around Iceland and Greenland. On each trip, she gathered mementos, these souvenirs, which she calls her “pictures.” On this summer’s day, she had just returned from a visit to Storm King, an open-air art museum north of the city whose large-scale sculptures and site-specific pieces are scattered across a few hundred acres of manicured landscape.

“Storm King!” she smiled to tell the story. “I was absolutely flabbergasted when I got there because I was there many years ago. And nothing fit my memory of it.”

This flabbergastery, her many trips, and the souvenirs there-from might seem unremarkable were it not for the fact that for the last forty-two years Gordon has been blind.

Her memory of Storm King was a creative one—not concocted, but also not experienced entirely through her own senses. It was formed partially from the descriptions provided by her companions. Gordon experiences most trips through those she travels with. She prompts them to describe what they see, and not just the spectacles but also the ordinary details of every eyeful come alive for them both.

“I’ve traveled with friends all these years,” she offered. “Each one has said how much more
they
see because they’re walking with me.”

Her memory of Storm King was also the memory formed by experiencing the world with all her nonvisual senses. She might have captured the smell of the air, the way sound bounces off lawn and metal and into open sky, the scale of the space as felt by the amount of time spent traveling from one artwork to another.

I grappled with this while sitting in her cool, dusky apartment, Gordon three feet away, bolt upright and facing me. When speaking, her eyes seemed to find mine, then traveled someplace up and to her left, just as they might in a seeing person. Indeed, she was the model of conversational eye contact.
¹
When listening,
she stared calmly in my direction, her eyes locked onto mine. We chatted about her family and she pointed to a space over my left shoulder, roughly to the wall behind a wide couch. Following her point, I saw what she cannot herself see: two photographs that she nonetheless described perfectly. Her son, now grown, took them, ten minutes apart. They showed a natural jetty in the north Atlantic covered by waves and then bared as the tide receded. Light played on the water in just the way that Gordon said it did.

 • • • 

I had come to meet and walk with Gordon exactly because she is blind. After a handful of city walks I realized that what many of them were missing was any experience other than a visual experience. This was not terribly surprising. After all, humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains’ visual areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance—visual appearance.

But the world around us is not entirely or even mostly defined by its light-reflective qualities. What of the odors of the molecules making up every object, and those loosened odors wafting in the space around us? Or the perturbations of air that we can hear as
sound—and the frequencies higher or lower than we can hear? I imagined that someone who has lost her sense of sight could lead me, however superficially, into the invisible block that I miss with my wide open eyes.

The notion that the blind might use their other senses better than the sighted is not fanciful conjecture. Born of necessity, and supported by a nervous system that is much more adaptable than scientists thought even a few decades ago, the blind simply use their other senses to see. Often, people blind from birth get around so smoothly in a seeing world that it is hard to tell from their movement that they cannot see where they are going.

Gordon went blind half a lifetime ago, when she was in her forties, after years of deteriorating vision and unsuccessful surgical interventions. At the time, coincidentally, she was working in the city at a facility that helps the visually impaired manage and negotiate the world. As a social worker and advocate for her blind clients, she knew about and had access to the best technologies for aiding herself. But going blind in adulthood is a slightly different prospect than hereditary or early-childhood blindness. In all groups whose blindness is due to problems in the eyes, the visual cortex remains intact: ready to interpret what we see, but suddenly getting no visitors, no information from the optic nerve. Waiting for the flood through a door that never opens, it eventually starts to get some noise from the side doors: the other sensory organs, or even other cortical areas. Rather than turn off, the area becomes busier than ever.

The result is striking. Though blindness is hardly trivial, the brain of a baby born without the ability to see can undergo significant reorganization, enabling the developing child to depend on other cues to entirely replace vision. Scientists first learned this, as well as most of our knowledge about our brains, not from examining our own brains, but from peering at monkey brains. The
monkeys did not submit to this voluntarily, of course: the content of the words you are about to read come from the poignant sacrifice of enough monkeys to type that Shakespearean play after all. A monkey’s brain is similar enough to ours that scientists find it informative about human brains, but different enough that the same scientists are willing to sacrifice a monkey life for that bit of information.

The similarities are many. First, our brains are shaped much the same: each resembles an overstuffed dumpling, a generous half-sphere with an extra dollop (the cerebellum, which controls movement, and thus is a crucially important dollop) on the back. In the early twentieth century a German neurologist named Brodmann made a map of the primate cortex, the outer layer of the brain, identifying dozens of distinctive areas whose cells essentially do different things. There are visual areas; smelling areas; hearing areas; areas that register when you are being tickled in your belly; areas that coordinate your reaching for a cup. What Brodmann effectively demonstrated with this mapping was that the brain does not serve as a general-purpose depository for sensation: when our eyes spy the horizontal line of a knife blade held over our thumb, that event registers in one specific area of the brain; the pain we feel when the blade slices into our thumb involves another area. What was stunning about Brodmann’s work, and the reason that the areas of the brain he identified still carry his name, is that he was able to create a map showing the shape and approximate location of each area in
every
brain. The “visual area” of your brain is going to match up, more or less, to mine (the “more or less” is important, too, of course, in making you
you
and me
me
). Were we skilled at such things, and if neurons regenerated like succulent roots (which they do not), we could each lop off this portion of our brains and we could swap. It appears that the role of the cells of the brain are designated in the genome. All
else being equal, twins are born with the same brain.
²
Later, as their lives unfold and their experiences diverge somewhat, their brains develop differently—as, indeed, does every brain. But no one’s brain reorganizes itself so much that it is not recognizable with Brodmann’s map.

Except. The brains of those who have prolonged sensory deprivation are different. What research on these people or other animals reveals is the
plasticity
of the brain: its ability to fundamentally reorganize itself, most especially (and in some ways exclusively) early in life.

This plasticity is rooted in the way the brain represents information about the world. Per Brodmann, something seen with the eyes gets sent to a very particular part of the brain: the occipital cortex, also called the visual area. When we perceive an object, and when we later remember perceiving that object, there are cells in that visual area that fire, generating electrical connections with other cells that light up fMRI machines and our imaginations. This is how the brain represents our experience, present and past.

Now, say you have been looking at many examples of a certain kind of object—to make it simple, let’s imagine you are employed to look for errant blue marbles at a green-marble production facility. Your occipital cortex will reflect this experience: it will change its very structure in a way that reflects that you have seen many green marbles, and it will react with a heightened interest and attention to the blues. This is a simplification of what happens in natural, real-world settings all the time. Our brains are changed by experience—in a way directly related to the details of that experience. If we have enough experience doing an action,
viewing a scene, or smelling an odor to become an “expert” in a field, then our brains are functionally—and visibly—different from nonexperts. So Charley Eiseman’s brain is insect changed; Paul Shaw’s is full of lettering; Sidney Horenstein sees rocks as we see faces. Examine the brain of a professional cellist (should such a brain make itself available to you), and you will find traces of her expertise in the gross anatomy of the organ. Not only will her auditory cortex be more developed—and larger—than that of someone who had not spent her life pursuing music, the traces are even more specific. In the somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that receives tactile input from our bodies, there are individual, identifiable groups of neurons that receive input from each finger. In other words, there are “first finger” cells, cells committed to the “second finger,” and so on. The somatosensory representation of the cellist has many more cells in the areas that map to the fingers of the left hand. Why? The expert cellist is a prodigious user of her left fingers to not only create, automatically and without reflection, the correct note on demand, but to do so with just the right pressure and vibrato to make it musical.

The brain is especially plastic early in life. Ordinarily, each baby’s occipital cortex represents largely visual information but also receives some input from the other senses. What if that baby cannot see? There is not yet a change in the brain that can make him see if his eyes do not function. But many studies have confirmed that if there is no input from the eyes, the neurons of the visual area begin to reorganize themselves. Rather than dying off, more and more neurons start to fire upon receiving sensory information from the ears, from the nose, from the mouth or the skin. This neural plasticity can involve changes in the structures of neurons, the neurons’ firing rates, or the connections between them. The result is that the blind baby grows up to be extra-attuned to his other senses.