Pawan Sinha

The November 22 Science News reports on the work of Pawan Sinha, a neuroscientist at MIT who has observed the effects of cataract surgery on youngsters born blind. One of the interesting findings is that correcting the cataracts does not immediately mean that the children are capable of what we think of as normal sight: “Researchers are just beginning to piece together how the brain responds to blindness early in life and then how it reacts to the sudden unleashing of vision, however years or even decades later. What’s evident, though, is that sight requires far more than simply opening one’s eyes and letting reality in. Perception, whether through vision or any other sense, is an acquired taste. People learn to make visual sense of faces and other items of interest, often during infancy and early childhood but sometimes over much longer periods. A person’s view of hte world feeds off his or her past experiences with three-dimensional space, the physical details of particular settings, and the predictable shapes and colors of various items, to name a few.” Another nail in the coffin of empiricism, as if another nail were needed.