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00:00 / 05:52





BLINDNESS ISN'T A TRAGIC BINARY -- IT'S A RICH SPECTRUM

416,965 views | Andrew Leland • TED Studio

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Read transcript
When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew
Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth
about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us
see the world.


TALK DETAILS


When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew
Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth
about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us
see the world.

Explore Bookshare's free library of content for people with dyslexia, blindness,
cerebral palsy and other reading barriers.
visit


ABOUT THE SPEAKER


Andrew Leland
Writer, audio producer, teacher
See speaker profile

Andrew Leland's work often explores the experience of disability, including his
transition from sightedness to blindness -- and his quest to learn about
blindness as a rich culture all its own.


ANDREW LELAND'S RESOURCE LIST


Andrew Leland | Penguin Press, 2023 | Book

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND: A MEMOIR AT THE END OF SIGHT


Georgina Kleege | Oxford University Press, 2018 | Book

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: WHAT BLINDNESS BRINGS TO ART

Kleege is one of the most important and influential blind intellectuals in the
US and all of her books are crucial documents for understanding the complexity
and richness of the blind experience. More Than Meets the Eye, her most recent
book, provocatively and persuasively argues for the inclusion of blind people in
culture’s most visual domains, from TV to art museums.

Rodney Evans | IMBD, 2019 | Watch

VISION PORTRAITS

Evans is a filmmaker with Retinitis Pigmentosa and his 2019 documentary weaves
together his own experience of gradually losing sight with his encounters with
three blind artists, documenting their adjustment to blindness. It's a beautiful
demonstration of the ways that disability can nourish creativity.

Jorge Luis Borges | Penguin Books, 2000 | Book

BLINDNESS FROM SELECTED NON-FICTIONS: VOLUME 3"

Some people carry a copy of the US Constitution around in their pockets
everywhere they go; I carry Borges on blindness around in my head. The
Argentinian author of mind-bending essays, poems, and short stories (many of
which — The Garden of Forking Paths; The Aleph— are classics of Spanish
literature) went blind in his forties, in the middle of his writing career. He
continued working, dictating to amanuenses, including his mother. This lecture,
delivered late in his life, describes blindness in terms that lend it a feeling
of gravitas, and a Borgesian feeling of infinite possibility. "Blindness has not
been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way," Borges
said. "It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living."

Alice Wong | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020 | Book

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST-PERSON STORIES FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Disability is a surprisingly rich subject, intersecting with race, gender,
class, politics, art, pop culture, food and on and on. No one captures this
wild, beautiful diversity of disability better than Alice Wong, a writer, editor
and activist based in Northern California. Through her podcast Disability
Visibility — and this anthology of the same name — I’ve encountered so many
brilliant disabled thinkers who have again and again transformed the way I think
about bodies, minds, access and ability.


LEARN MORE

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight
Andrew Leland | Penguin Press (2023)


Explore Bookshare's free library of content for people with dyslexia, blindness,
cerebral palsy and other reading barriers.
visit


GET THE BEST OF TED

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RELATED TOPICS

 * health
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 * inclusion

TRANSCRIPT (1 LANGUAGE)


English

00:00
(Audio description) A white man with glasses sits at a marble table next to a
plate of sliced pears.
00:05
Hi, I'm Andrew Leland. I'm blind. And this is a TED Talk about blindness, which
is confusing for me and for you because just by watching me right now, you can
probably tell I'm not blind.
00:15
For example, I can tell that on this plate right here, there are five slices of
pear arranged in a smiley face. Or that that --
00:23
(AD) A framed photo hangs on the wall behind him.
00:25
AL: Is a photograph of a very sad hippo. So you might be wondering, if I can see
all that, why am I talking about blindness?
00:32
OK, so I'm going blind. I don't know exactly when. As a teenager, I was
diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, which is a degenerative retinal
condition. In my teens and early 20s, I only noticed it at night. Then in my
early 30s, my peripheral vision started to deteriorate. Right now I have central
vision, but I'm seeing the world through a pretty narrow porthole. So even
though I can see these pears and that hippo, I'm legally blind. I have severe
tunnel vision, but it doesn't look like a tunnel because your brain adapts
really quickly to whatever you see. Like if the frame of the movie you're
watching starts to shrink to a much smaller size, at first you'll be annoyed.
"This sucks," you might say to yourself, "I don't like watching this movie on
this tiny screen." Then your complaints will soften and disappear, and your
brain will adapt to the new normal. Like the first time you watch a movie on
your cell phone, it will be annoyingly small at first, and then you just get
used to it.
01:25
So every time I lose another chunk of vision, at first I feel super extra blind,
sometimes scared or claustrophobic. My world is shrinking. But then a week will
go by, I get used to it, I don't feel so blind anymore.
01:39
This experience of super gradual vision loss has given me time to think about
what blindness is, which might seem like an obvious question. Blindness is the
absence of sight, but it's actually more complicated than that.
01:51
Trying to define blindness can start to feel paradoxical. There's a paradox
that's useful in thinking about blindness. It's called the paradox of the heap.
Let's say you have a heap of something, like sand or marbles or goji berries.
Now imagine I take a single little goji berry off of the heap. Is it still a
heap? OK, what if I remove a second tiny little goji berry from the heap?
Obviously that is still a heap also. But, the ancient Greek philosopher
wondered, at what point is it no longer a heap? How many goji berries do I have
to remove? Is it still a heap when there's only ten left? Five? Vision works
this way too. How much vision do I need to lose before I can legitimately call
myself blind? I saw this photo online the other day.
02:35
(AD) In the photo, a Black woman holds a white cane and looks at a cell phone.
02:39
AL: The image circulated with a caption, "If you can see what's wrong, say 'I
see it.'" Can you see what's wrong with this photo? The answer that the people
sharing the photo had is that the woman can't be blind. If she is, why is she
looking at her phone? Blind people don't look at things. The caption wants you
to remember: blind people don’t see. And if she can see, what's she doing with
that long white cane that signals to the world that she's blind? Maybe she's
trying to get sympathy that she doesn't deserve or trying to trick us somehow.
03:09
So how blind you have to be to be blind? How much vision do you have to remove
from the heap of sight before it becomes blindness?
03:17
People love binaries, especially people on the internet, which is a place that's
not always very friendly to ambiguity. This photo was shared more than 33,000
times, and I think it went viral exactly because of its ambiguity. It
illuminates a weird, paradoxical truth about blindness. Blind people can see. I
don't mean this in the way that people mean it when they talk about Daniel Kish.
Kish makes clicking sounds with his mouth that he uses to navigate his
environment the way a bat uses sonar. Brain scans show that when Kish navigates
his environment this way, using his DIY sonar, his visual cortex lights up.
That's amazing. But the point I'm making is much simpler. On the one hand,
blindness is a binary. You're either blind or you're not. But on the other hand,
blindness is a spectrum. There are different degrees of blindness and different
styles. Some people have the inverse of what I've got. They only see through
their peripheral vision with nothing in the center. Other blind people see the
world as though their glasses have been smeared with Vaseline or their head's
been wrapped several times in saran wrap or like they're looking through a
thick, broken fishbowl. Only very few blind people see nothing at all, total
darkness.
04:24
As I lose my sight, I experienced this degeneration the way you might expect: as
a loss. In the meantime, I feel privileged to still be able to see things like
sunsets or tree frogs or celebrity breakfasts on Instagram. There's another
paradox lurking around here. If blindness is a spectrum, could it also include
somebody who's not actually blind? The paradox works the other way. How much
sight do you have to add before someone's no longer blind? At a certain point,
we do have to agree that someone's not blind, even if they don't see very well.
I do think it's important to reserve blindness for people who don't have the
luxury of correcting their vision, who need assistive technology to do things
like read print or walk around. On the other hand, separating out blindness like
this can lead people to view the blind as strange or mysterious or off-putting.
And that can lead to fear and sometimes damaging misconceptions and stereotypes,
like the idea that blind people are psychic, which some people actually believe,
or that they have super hearing.
05:22
(AD) Words appear: Superpowers for the blind. The brain rewires itself to boost
the remaining senses.
05:27
AL: Or more destructively, that they can't go to a normal school or hold a
normal job or travel on their own.
05:33
So the next time you see a blind person do something that you think only a
sighted person should do, like making eye contact with you or watching a movie,
or standing at a bus stop checking their phone, remember, it might be possible
to see even if you're blind.
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Andrew Leland: Blindness isn't a tragic binary -- it's a rich spectrum | TED
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