In the advance publicity for At First Sight, the fact that it was a true story was emphasized. This was probably important for many who saw the movie, because otherwise they might have been unable to believe that someone whose sight was restored still couldn't see anything.
Sight is one of our senses, but it's also a metaphor for the ability to perceive or understand. Usually when somebody slaps themselves on the head and exclaims "How could I be so BLIND?" they're not talking about something they didn't see with their eyes.
You can be blind to somebody's faults or you can see them for what they are. You can be blind to the implications or you can see what I am talking about. Something can blindside you or you can see it coming.
Sight is a metaphor for perception and knowledge. I don't have to tell you this; you know it, that is, you've seen it used a thousand times if you've seen it once. The words for sight, seeing, looking, regarding, revelation, perception, meeting, understanding and blindness are so mixed up together that it's almost impossible to talk about seeing or looking and know for a fact that the sense of sight is all you're talking about.
But living a metaphor can be a different story. The metaphorical sayings about blindness are made by people who can see, based on their temporary experience of not seeing or not seeing clearly. Maybe they can't see a thing because there is not enough light. Maybe they can't see it because it is too far away or obscured. These circumstances of temporary not seeing are the basis for the metaphors. In these cases the blindness is only temporary and the passage of time or a closer approach or more attention to the item will solve the problem. A simple change, the addition of a piece to the puzzle, leads to sight, to understanding.
That is not what sight restored means to a real blind person. Sight is a flood of information, much of it unrelated to anything they already know. What do stars or the moon or the horizon mean to a blind person? These are things that are far away and can never be touched. Shadows, colors, stripes in the road and reflections in a mirror are all things that become prominent and distracting when they were imperceptible before. Virgil was not a metaphor. Sight restored for him was not a simple revelatory change of perception, but a struggle to use a flood of information his brain had to learn to process. Virgil with his sight restored was like a baby without the baby's advantages. A baby has months to learn to process visual information before she needs to use it to get around. She has years before she has to use her visual abilities to read.
There are other metaphors or analogies that actually model Virgil's situation better than sight restored. Learning another language is one. It's easier for people to learn another language as children, but many adults who have spoken one language all their lives find it hard to learn another language -- so hard that they never learn more than a few phrases.
Or, imagine you, a person with normal hearing, are transported to a country where everywhere beautiful music is playing. But, to survive and function, you can't just listen to the music, you have to pay attention to it and follow the instructions, every minute of every day. For Virgil, having sight was work, because he couldn't just look at things & enjoy them, he had to abandon what he knew about how to get around and do everything in a new way that wasn't always obvious.
What would you do if suddenly forced to depend on a new mode of perception?
What if you saw by infrared, that is, by heat waves? Everything gives off heat, though cold things give off less of it. Infrared radiation also reaches us from the sun, just as visible light does. The back of a functioning computer would be brighter than the front. A television screen would be a big dim blank to you, and a house would look like a big gray box leaking light from the edges of the doors and windows. Cars would look completely different to you if they were running than if they were parked. Would you see colors? You might, but they wouldn't be the same colors we see.
What if you had sonar, like a bat or a dolphin? Virgil wishes he had sonar, and in BATMAN FOREVER, Bruce Wayne invented a Batsuit with sonar capability. Sonar is a system of emitting sound waves and analyzing the reflections. So, first of all, you'd have to remember to keep making noise to "see" (pinging). You'd also be able to "see" in all directions. It would be easy for you to tell whether things were close or far away. But you wouldn't "see" colors. A printed page or a television screen would be just one color. You wouldn't be able to see through glass. On the other hand, you might be able to tell whether something was soft or hard just by "looking" at it with your sonar sense. You would probably be able to tell if there was a wall or a space behind a curtain. If you got close and "pinged" at the right frequency, you could "see" right through skin or clothes. Ultrasound is a form of sonar. If you had sonar, how long would it take you to get used to it and use it? How soon would you be able to make your way through a room by the reflections from things in the room? How long would it take before constantly "pinging" for reflections became second nature? How long would it take you to be able to recognize your friends by their sonar images? In what part of your brain would all this processing take place?
That's the key, really: In what part of your brain would all this processing take place? When human beings use sonar they don't have a sonar sense; they ping with machines and pick up the reflections with other machines, and use often very sophisticated processing to turn the pattern of sonar reflections into an image that makes sense to their eyes - a VISUAL image.
There is a lot of brain work involved in vision, a lot of processing "behind the eye." In studying brain damage, Dr. Oliver Sachs and other doctors and scientists find the processing of visual information by the brain is divided into many categories. Recognizing edges is separate from recognizing colors, for instance, which is again different from perceiving motion. The visual fields are actually "mapped" onto the brain, so that brain damage can cause a person to be unable to see anything to their right even when there is nothing wrong with their eyes. It's because of this brain work, because the use of the sense of sight actually has to be learned, that the real experience of restoring sight to the blind is so unlike the sudden revelation meant by the metaphor of sight restored.
The movie AT FIRST SIGHT uses the metaphor sight=perception to say a lot of things about both. In his struggle to deal with the sense of sight, to learn to see visually, Virgil neglects his ability to perceive, and it is only when he sees this, I mean, realizes this, that he is truly able to look at his life, I mean, examine his life, and see, I mean, know what to do with his vanishing sense of visual sight and with the rest of what he sees, I mean, knows. It's truly ironic that AT FIRST SIGHT illustrates how little the metaphor of sight restored relates to a blind person's actual experience, while demonstrating with the story of Virgil and Amy just how significant the experience -- a change in perception -- described by the metaphor can be in the lives of two people.
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Read the book "An Anthropologist on Mars" by Oliver Sachs for more about the real Virgil and other interesting stories about how the brain can make people see things differently.
Go here to see information about infrared and see an infrared image of the head of a cat. Colors are assigned to different heat levels. If you go here you can see an infrared image of a man holding a burning match. Notice that because different colors are assigned to the heat levels in the two pictures, the cat's cold nose and the man's hot match are both white.
Go here to see some pictures of shipwrecks taken with side-scan sonar. Side-scan sonar is a newer form of sonar that is closer to the kind of sonar used by bats and dolphins.
