Functional Blindness

The role of personal factors and past experience in perception can be extended to a discussion of functional
blindness, or what Freud would have called hysterical blindness. Electrophysiologist
Gretchen Van Boehmel and psychologist Patricia Rozee-Koker of California State University,
Long Beach, have identified 150 Cambodian women in southern California with
unexplained vision loss. Doctors and specialists can find no physical explanation. Yet, it is
clear that these women are not faking their reactions to get help or attention. The lack of
vision in the women, aged 51 to 70, ranges from 20/200 to no light perception at all.

Interviews indicate that all the women had lost their vision sometime after Pol Pot became prime minister of
Cambodia. Under his Communist government (1975 to 1978), more than a million Cambodians were executed or died
of starvation. Millions more became slave laborers and suffered severe torture. One Cambodian woman saw Khmer
Rouge soldiers tie up her parents, cut their throats, and throw them into a river. Another saw her child bashed to
death against a tree. A third watched as her three youngest children starved to death. Many were forced to spy on
their own families. At times they lived on earthworms, rats, or even the flesh of their own country people. In the
refugee camps, Cambodian women were sexually abused by both the Khmer Rouge and the refugee camp guards.

In talking with the women, Van Boehmel discovered that all had witnessed some horrible trauma, like seeing their
child killed, and then they couldnt see. One victim reported, My family was killed in 1975, and I cried for four years.
When I stopped crying, I was blind. Rozee-Koker reports, Our main finding was that the longer the time spent in the
camps, the worse their psychological condition in terms of blindness. Its almost like a see-no-evil kind of thing.

With limited funding from the United Cambodian Community, the researchers used standard group therapy and skillbuilding training to help as many women as would agree to participate in the program. Many of the women were
isolated, didnt speak English, and rarely left home, so it was difficult to get them to participate. Mistrust of authority
figures also produced a relatively low participation rate (during the Khmer Rouge period, people who were told by the
army, The government needs you would never be seen again). However, of those who came for therapy, 40 percent
showed improvement in their vision.
De Angelis, T. (1990, July). Cambodians sight loss tied to seeing atrocities. APA Monitor, 3637.

Cases of Restored Vision

As Myers notes, Michael Mays vision was restored in March 2000. May has had difficulty
recognizing faces of family and friends as well as emotional expressions on unfamiliar
faces. He has also had difficulty mastering depth perception. For example, he perceives
people who walk away from him as shrinking. On the other hand, he does track his own
and others movements with precision. He can play soccer with his sons, and he enjoys
movies. He also distinguishes shaded areas from illuminated surfaces. Hes successfully
made the transition from being an expert blind skier using verbal guidance to being a
competent sighted skier. May sees learning to see as an exciting challenge, perhaps
partly because he is an outgoing, optimistic person with a supportive spouse.
Adults who regain sight after being blind for most or all of their lives often experience
initial elation followed by emotional distress, depression, and sometimes even suicide. For example, in An
Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks relates the case of Virgil who saw little until after having cataract surgery at age
50. Sacks describes Virgil as a mental blind person who could see but could not decipher what was out there. Virgil
was often in conflict between looking at objects or touching them as he had always done. And when feeling visually
overwhelmed, he would act as if he were still blind. Virgil quickly fell into depression and just four months after his
surgery died of pneumonia. As Bruce Bower explains, restored vision requires enormous accommodation from the
brain. Brain imaging studies reveal that in primates as much as one quarter of the brain is normally devoted to vision.
In blind individuals, these areas take on entirely new responsibilities. For example, the visual cortex shows increased
activity when blind people use their fingers to read Braille publications. With restored vision, they must be reclaimed.
Of special interest are studies of blind children in India and Canada who, as a
result of cataract surgery, regain vision early in life. For example,
neuroscientist Pawan Sinha describes the case of a 10-year old in Calcutta
who, not long after surgery, could catch a paper ball thrown to him, recognize
drawings of animals, and greet all of his physicians and nurses by name. Sinha
and his colleagues are tracking the progress of 20 Indian children, ages 6 to
15, who grew up sightless before surgical removal of their cataracts. They are
surprised by how much the kids recognize shortly after their surgery. These
findings do not seem entirely consistent with those who have studied children
elsewhere.
Working at McGill University in Canada, psychologist Daphne Maurer has
studied young children who have had cataract-induced blindness in only
one eye. During infancy, visual information entering the left eye goes
mainly to the right hemisphere, while the right eye sends its input mainly
to the left eye. Interestingly, those who are blind in only the left eye for
the first two to six months of life lose elements crucial for discerning
facial recognition, for example, the ability to detect differences in the
spacing of the eyes. Those of the same age with right-eye cataracts do
not have this difficulty. It seems that the capacity to notice the spacing of
facial features develops only if the right hemisphere receives visual
stimulation during a brief period early in life.
Bower, B. (2003, November 22). Vision seekers: Giving eyesight to the blind raises questions about how people see. Science News,
331332.