The last thing 21-year-old Pat Fletcher saw before the explosion was a steel tank filled with chemicals that suddenly leaked. It was already late when she realized that the plastic hose in her hand was unusually hot. The world flashed with blinding brightness and turned blue, the color of the flame that engulfed her body.
When Pat woke up, she thought she was still asleep. The world around her was expressionless and gloomy, as if she had fallen into a gray, dense fog. The sedatives and painkillers did their job, her face wrapped in thick bandages. But soon the doctor came to the bed. And Pat knew everything. There was an accident caused by the reaction of two volatile chemicals at the weapons factory where she worked. One of her eyes was gone; the second remained, but will never open again. Pat was lucky to stay alive, the doctor told her. But there was no hope that she would begin to see again.
Almost thirty years later, it became clear that the doctor was wrong. Twenty-five years after the factory accident, a gray-haired woman from Buffalo, New York, was scouring the Internet using a program that converts text on a screen into speech and came across a computer program developed by a Dutch engineer. He argued that his vOICe program could turn pixels in images into sounds that would allow the blind to “see” the world around them. Pat, of course, didn’t believe it. She even smiled when she played a sample of "soundscape", a pastiche of dozens of different tones of different volume, sounding simultaneously. It seemed inconceivable. Indistinct noise.
Pat then tried out a "picture" of a long gate with a pair of stereo speakers in her office, and she literally took her breath away. Something was happening in her mental vision, something fundamentally different than when she heard just sounds.
“I turned around and practically saw the fence in my office. And I said: God, what is it? - recalls Pat. "I got goosebumps down my spine."
What made this feeling so incredible was that the sound came from outside - outside of the place the cane banged on, outside the tight leash of the guide dog - outside of its touch. From the dynamic cacophony of sounds, in an incomprehensible way, Pat got the feeling of a fence, its size, shape, gaps between the slats. The world of the blind is often described as deeply claustrophobic, because everything known and felt is represented by forms and objects that surround a person, abruptly breaking off at the tips of the fingers. But Pat's world suddenly expanded.
She couldn't understand how sound could change that.
“It felt like the shot was real,” she says. "This fence - there was a gate in it, and there was darkness in it, as if it were open … It was a shock."
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Pat went to the store, bought the smallest webcam she could find, attached it to her baseball cap, and plugged it into her laptop. Then she turned it on, went out into the hallway and looked around.
“I almost fell to my knees,” she says. “I could tell where the wall was, blindly identify plastic blinds, touch them and make sure. It’s like I’ve forgotten what the world is like.”
Pat soon found that she could distinguish patterns on cups that she hadn't seen in years. Lost in the decorative wallpaper in her dentist's waiting room. She could see the movement of leaves in the trees. She could see faces, although they remained blurry. Pat ordered binoculars with a camera hidden in a tiny hole at eye level and began refining her setup. She started using her device every day. She soon began wearing the cane only under her arm, in case her device became malfunctioning.
And then one afternoon, four years later, something completely amazing happened. Until that day, she looked and saw an essentially two-dimensional flat photograph. She saw the sofa in the living room or the shape of a tree against the sky, but she had no sense of depth. But that day, Pat stood by the sink washing the dishes, then dried her hands with a towel and looked down. The sink had always seemed like a simple square to her. But thanks to the new device, Pat suddenly gained depth of perception.
Pat Fletcher looked down the sink.
Her experience seems completely incredible, or, at least, as some say, a complex deception of the mind. Perhaps her story is compelling. But it cannot be true - after all, it overturns all accepted scientific theories. She spits in the face of common sense. How can you “see” with your ears? How can the brain regain the ability to perceive, lost a long time ago, as if at the flip of a switch?
But Pat Fletcher's claims were checked by the world's leading scientists. A few years ago, a fearless 58-year-old technology adventurer arrived with her instrument in Boston for testing at Harvard School of Medicine. Pat lay on a large table, which carried her into a tight tube in an MRI machine that could track the amount of oxygen being used by various parts of the brain. The doctor instructed her to listen to her soundscapes (soundscapes).
Pat Fletcher didn't have eyeballs to show her the world. But somehow, as she listened to her soundscapes, the brain regions associated with visual processing in sighted people activated - brain regions that are usually activated when we turn our eyes to an object in space. Meanwhile, when Pat heard the usual sound, when a scientist, for example, jingled keys nearby, Pat's auditory cortex was activated as usual. Her brain had somehow learned to distinguish between ordinary sounds and her soundscapes, and to pave the way for the latter into the corresponding visual processing area - even when the sounds entered her ears at the same time.
Subsequent experiments continued to confirm this. Pat Fletcher, who has been blind for over thirty years, has learned to see with her ears. Her brain rewound itself.
ILYA KHEL