Seeing is Believing

I love to learn new scientific reasons not to buy into old religious hype. Take the miracle of Jesus making the blind man see. Did you know that even if he had performed this act, the man still wouldn't see like we do? He'd still need a cane even if he had the benefits of modern surgery and eyewear.

The problem doesn't lay in Jesus healing the man's eyes, it's in the brain itself. Instead of laying his hands on the man's eyes, he would have had to lay them on his head because vision is more about the brain than the actual eyes. See?

Since infancy, our brain is constantly learning new shapes, dimensions and colors and putting those together with words. How do we know that a cup, for instance, is a cup? Our brain catalogs everything the eye sees that relate to the word, "cup" and stores that away for future reference. This is an integral part of our early life and if a person, say our friend the Blind Man, doesn't go through this in his childhood, he's not going to recognize anything.

I saw a special on telly a few weeks ago that demonstrated this, using a man who had been blind for 40 years. After undergoing stem cell surgery, all he saw was weird, blurry amorphous shapes. While walking outside, he still needed a cane because his brain had never learned how to discern distance and depth perception. His vision did not include spacial relationships. When coming upon a curb, he saw it as flat and had to teach himself to step up or down, as the case may be.

Michael May's sight is skewed. He can see things well, but he doesn't understand the language of the visual world. He has trouble recognizing objects and faces and things that take a lot of experience to make sense of.

"Taking off the bandages was a very new vista," May said. "First thing I saw was this whoosh of light and black and white instruments in the exam room and my wife." But even after seeing his wife's face, and his son's faces, May can't readily recognize them. Mike has the same experience with faces as some may have with distinguishing sheep. To him, human faces all look alike. Doctor Ione Fine has been tracking May's vision since the surgery. She says visual pathways in the brain withered from lack of use.

Three years after his surgery, May still walks like a blind man—relying on a cane rather than his eyes.

"If I was using my eyes for mobility, I'd have to be looking all the time: Is that a shadow? Is that a curb," he said. "And it would be so much hard work."

I found this fascinating. Jesus making the blind man see is one thing, but making his brain pick up on all that lost information and patterning would have been a real miracle.

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