Transcriber: Zane Mitrevica Reviewer: Ilze Garda
I'm going to ask you to do something for me.
I'd like you to watch this video
and imagine you're standing at this intersection.
The traffic is going back and forth,
people are trying to get to where they're going; busy, busy day.
Next to you is this man, who happens to be blind.
So as you're waiting for your turn to cross the street,
what kind of thoughts are going through your mind right now?
Is it curiosity? Is it indifference?
You might be feeling a sense of pity.
You might be also feeling a sense of relief
that you yourself are not blind.
I'm not judging.
Now, let's say this person starts chatting with you.
He says: "Excuse me, I'm from out of town, I don't know my way around.
Can you tell me how do I get to the subway station?"
How do you give directions to someone who can't see?
I'll give you a hint.
Pointing? (Laughter)
Saying something like "over there"? (Laughter)
Not very helpful for a blind person.
Let's make this really interesting, let's say now all of a sudden --
Can we go back, please?
Let's say now all of a sudden, you lose your sight.
You become profoundly blind. You see nothing in front of you.
And, by the way, the light has changed, and it's time for you to cross the street.
Now, what are you thinking about?
So, obviously a very, very scary feeling.
This is completely hypothetical.
Not that you shouldn't stand next to a blind person
because it's contagious, you'll lose your sight; that's not the point.
What I'm trying to say here is that, as a blind person,
they're not necessarily scared the same way that you are.
It's normal that you're scared because you're highly dependent
on your vision to find your way around, but a blind person has learned to adapt
and not worry about these same sort of things.
Pierre Villey was a French writer, blind himself, and he said:
"A sighted person judges the blind not for what they are,
but by the fear that blindness inspires."
In other words, the way that we judge people,
the way that we think blind people can and cannot do, is largely driven
by our own innate fears and how we think
about what it must be like to be blind and to lose our sight.
But again, this is a misconception.
We're scared, and it turns out that the American Foundation for the Blind
conducted a survey.
They asked a thousand people to review a series of health conditions
and say which one do you think would have the greatest overall impact
on your quality of life.
And number one was blindness,
ranked higher than AIDS, cancer, stroke and heart disease,
all four of which are potentially life-threatening conditions.
I can tell you from my experience,
I've never had a blind patient who had died from being blind.
But yet, as sighted people,
what this survey tells us is that we would rather live
with a potentially life-threatening condition
and take our chances, than live as a blind person.
Where does this fear come from?
Why are we so scared about blindness?
I think, like many things in life, we're scared about what we don't know,
what we don't understand.
The important thing to think about here is there is a way to understand this.
If you want to understand what blindness is,
you have to first understand what it's not.
It turns out I like to go to cocktail parties and events,
and I ask people: "What do you think it's like to be blind?"
And I realized I don't get invited back very often.
(Laughter)
I know, right? (Laughter)
But when I do, this is what I hear, this is the answer:
"Darkness. Black. Dense fog."
I had one person tell me that blindness must be like being locked inside a coffin.
But I assure you as a sighted person,
blindness has nothing to do with living in the dark,
and here's one way I know.
This is Esref Armagan, he was born with one eye.
The one eye he does have was severely damaged
at a very, very young age, possibly even from birth.
Despite being profoundly blind, Esref is a painter.
I'm going to show you some of his paintings.
And one more.
All of you as sighted people can completely understand
the contents of his paintings.
There's nothing that would suggest that this was done by a blind person.
But you have to wonder,
how can you paint an ocean scene if you've never seen an ocean?
The answer is:
behind his eyes that don't see is a brain that does see.
How do I know that?
Because we looked inside his brain.
We used a technique called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,
or fMRI.
This is a brain scanning technique
that allows you to look inside the brain and identify parts of the brain
that are associated with a particular task.
So we asked Esref to lie in the scanner and make a series of drawings for us.
What we found was this spot of activity
in the back of his brain, called the occipital cortex.
Why is this interesting?
It turns out, this is exactly the same part of the brain
that's active if you're a sighted person looking at the drawings and paintings.
So this is the visual part of the brain in someone who's sighted,
but Esref, who's blind,
is using exactly the same part of the brain to paint.
So when you think about it,
maybe blindness is just another way of seeing.
Certainly at the level of the brain, it's quite interesting.
In fact, I asked Esraf: "Why do you paint?"
He said: "I paint because I want to show the world the images
that are live in my mind.
And when I paint, and I show my drawings to the sighted people,
and they tell me what they see, I feel connected to the sighted world."
Clearly this is not somebody living in the dark.
Let's now move to our situation of our friend whom we met earlier,
who is trying to find his way through the city.
Does he have an image of his mind as he's walking through?
How is he able to find his way?
Well, how do you find your way?
You use tools, you may have navigation in your car,
you may look at maps, for example.
You use the information you gather from your sight to make adjustments,
gather information, identify landmarks; blind people are exactly the same.
The only difference, of course, is they're not using visual cues.
Our friend, for example, is listening to traffic.
He knows that when the traffic stops, that's probably the safe time to cross.
He's also feeling vibrations in his cane
when tapping on the street to follow the sidewalk.
He knows that when the cane drops, that's the end of the curb
and that's when the street starts, for example.
But there are situations that blind people find particularly challenging.
That is when they arrive at a place that they're not familiar with.
This isn't very, very surprising.
Think about if you go to a large shopping mall,
or an airport, for example.
It's very, very hard to find your way around
if you don't have a sense of the overall layout of the building.
So with this challenge in minds,
we wanted to come up with new tools, new approaches
to help blind people circumvent this challenge.
In particular, we wanted to work with blind children,
because we know that this is a skill that's very important to develop early on.
We needed an approach that we felt they would enjoy using.
What do blind kids, or what do kids in general like to do?
Play video games.
If you have a teenager at home, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Video games today are immensely popular.
They have an incredible level of visual detail and realism
that we've never seen before.
But the important thing to think about is, just because video games are visual,
doesn't mean that they necessarily have to be visual to play them,
or to enjoy them.
I'm going to get back to this point in just a second.
I want to take you back to the mid '90s, to a video game called Doom.
Probably very, very popular.
If you know this video game like I do,
I've wasted months of my life playing this video game.
(Laughter)
In Doom, the idea is you find yourself in a maze.
You have to find your way through this maze
looking for various items
and at the same time avoiding these monsters that are chasing you.
But to succeed at this game, you have to build a map in your mind,
in order to find your way out and start the next level.
It turns out I have a friend named Jaime Sanchez
who is a computer scientist,
and he developed Audio Doom, which is exactly the same game,
except it's adapted for blind children.
You're not using visual cues to find your way around,
you're using audio-based cues.
So, for example, a knocking sound, if you hear it in your right ear,
that means there's a door to your right.
If I hear a growling sound in both ears,
it means that there's a monster in front of me.
By listening to these sounds, as the child walks through this maze,
they're able to find their way and navigate through this labyrinth here.
Now, the interesting thing is that after they've played this game,
if you give the child Lego pieces
and you ask him to build a map of what he's just walked through,
it turns out that they can build
a perfect representation of the map that they walked through,
even though they've never seen the maze.
In fact, they're doing this purely based on their auditory cues.
If you look at the start point, the end point,
every dead end, every step, every door is accounted for,
which means that the map in their mind is accurate,
and they can generate this based purely on auditory cues.
I asked Jaime:
"How complicated a maze can you make with this little system?"
He says: "As big and as complicated as you want."
We had this idea to kind of modify the game a little bit.
We modified it to make it a bit more complicated,
we added lots of rooms and so on.
We added these jewels, that was the goal of the game.
Your job is to go through this maze, all these little rooms,
find these jewels that are hidden,
and you have to be careful: if these monsters catch you,
they take the jewel and hide it somewhere else in the maze.
Because these are kids,
we have to keep them motivated, and this is how we did it.
What the kids didn't know was [that] the maze that they were playing in
was based on a floor plan of an actual building that exists,
that they've never been to before.
And after the game, we didn't give them Lego pieces,
we took them to the building.
We said: "Now, can you find your way around?"
It turns out, they can, and they do it quite well.
You can put them virtually anywhere in the real building and ask them:
"From this start point, can you get to this room?"
And they do extremely well, about 85% in terms of their success rate.
It also turns out that there's a correlation
between their navigation success and gameplay.
In other words, the better they play the game, the more jewels they find,
the better they do on these navigation tasks.
Remember, they've never seen, never been to this building before.
In fact, they didn't even know we were going to take them to a building.
All of this was purely based on gameplay.
Here's to show you also how well they get a sense of the layout of the building.
You could put them in various locations and say:
"Based on where you're standing right now,
what's the quickest way out of the building?"
They can find the shortest route as well,
which means they can manipulate the information in their mind
for the purposes of finding shortcuts, alternate routes and so on.
Remember, we never told them to memorize the layout of the building,
or the maze, or anything like that.
We just say: "This is a game, this is how you play it. We'll talk afterwards."
So you can think now, as a platform,
we want to expand this at a much larger level.
We want to apply this in situations
where people, or blind individuals, might use this information
to find their way, say, through an airport or a mall, or, say, the subway station.
You could think of our friend here using this information
to find his way to the subway.
I'm not saying that you have to play a game
every time you want to go somewhere,
but the preps, the idea of using the sounds,
or spatial audio sounds,
as a way to generating a map in your mind, seems to hold,
and that's the focus of our research right now.
I want to leave you with one last piece of information to this puzzle.
What parts of the brain are active
when this person, or these gamers, are playing the game?
So we went back to our fMRI machine, we found our best gamers,
and we asked them to find their way through the maze.
What we found was that a number of brain areas were active.
In the front of the brain,
- this is the part responsible for decision making and planning,
this is the frontal cortex -
we also saw activity responsible for touching the keyboard keys
because they use keys to move around into the maze.
This is activity associated with identifying sounds.
It's logical, they're using sounds
to identify the objects and find their way through the maze.
And if I showed you the other hemisphere here,
notice there's lots of activity in this, again, visual cortex.
So just like Esref, our blind painter, who was using his visual brain to paint,
our gamers are using their visual brain to find their way around.
Now, this is not a new idea,
it turns out a lot of researchers have found similar findings.
It turns out that the visual brain is active
when blind people read Braille, when they identify sounds,
when they recall words from memory, and finally identifying smells as well.
So that's the focus of research now:
understanding why do blind people use their visual brain for non-visual tasks,
and how is this related to the compensation of not having sight.
So we have come full circle.
Blindness is not living in the dark.
Blindness is living with other abilities.
It's a way of mentally imagining the world in your mind,
not based on what your eyes tell you, but rather what your other senses tell you
like smell, like hearing, like touch.
And the image in the mind of a blind person
is no less real or no less vivid that it is for a sighted person.
That's the important thing to keep in mind
because remember: behind eyes that don't see is a brain that does see,
and a mind that thinks, and a mind that dreams,
and a heart full of courage that wants to succeed and live independently,
but at the same time feel that they're a part of a community,
just like everybody else.
I'm a practical person,
I don't think we'll have a world where nobody will have disabilities.
But I do believe that if we continue to develop the right tools,
fundamentally change our mentality, and understand
that just because somebody has a disability, it does not mean inability,
maybe we won't even have use for the word "disabled" anymore.
That's the day I think we'd all like to see.
Thank you.
(Applause)