What can we learn from blindness?
In martial arts and in some forms of contemporary dance, training in the dark, with eyes closed or blindfolded has is used to build sensitivity and advanced sensory perception. Last year I attended a Movement 12 “Live Lunch” talk between dancer and visual artist Miriam King and Keith Turner a local blind man. This was fascinating to me not only as a bodymind explorer but also as someone who due to a degenerative eye condition may well result in blindness one day. What was striking to me is how he had discovered the hard way many of the phenomenon that are known in esoteric body arts and expressed them matter-of-factly.
Keith started by saying how he “saw” 360 degrees around him with his other senses and asked if the sighted audience did too. This seemed to confuse people as perception (and our language of it) is so dominated by vision for most people this “sight” was hard to imagine. Keith described how he had particularly developed his hearing and how improvement of senses other than sight doesn’t happen “magically” but takes hard work. It would seem that vision makes us lazy about refining the other senses and without the necessity that being blind brings, conscious practices are needed.
Keith described how objects create a sound “shadow” and he could tell if he was running in an alley or enclosed space due to the sound of his foot-steps. This human
echo-location – similar to sonar – is well documented
and pretty amazing. He also described the feeling of “compression” of being in a enclosed space that would be familiar to students of master somatic teacher
Paul Linden. This “felt sense” of subtle unconscious sensory stimulus – often visual, but in this case auditory – can seem like ESP. I also suspect based in my own experience and the reports of Keith and many others, that there may be a “feeling” sense at work beyond the heat receptors of the skin, at least at ranges to within a few metres in trained people that blends with this unconscious input. He also mentioned how he could tell if people were looking at him when talking – this can be explained simply by sound but again I suspect contains another component (Keith for example had some sense of this even on the radio). Most people have had the experience of feeling like they are being watched, and researcher
Rupert Sheldrake lists large numbers of replicated, double-blind (pun intended) studies which show a small but significant result in favour of the direct sensing of attention. For any martial artist who has studied “ki”, or those who have spent much time around animals who have this ability down, this is hardly news. I would recommend Paul Linden for a modern rational approach to working with attention and intention within the martial and healing arts.
One thing that is clear to me is that sight grabs the attention more than the other senses. This is why people close their eyes to appreciate really good music or any delicious sensation. They also tend to tilt their heads back – think of the “Stevie Wonder/Orgasm Tilt.” Keith explained this by acoustics, but then why do people do it with other senses too? I’m not sure. It was also noted by an audience member that sighted people do tend to use their hearing a lot but unconsciously – such as the annoying pedestrians who cross the road without looking after their ears have unconsciously checked for cars and shortly before I have to swerve my cycle to avoid their untrained asses. This is also why it is hard to sleep with your eyes open. A weird related phenomenon I came across in psychology is blindsight – where people can’t see consciously but can unconsciously. If you ask people with this how many fingers you’re holding up or what colour something is for example, they will not be able to tell you, they will however be able to “guess” correctly.
Coincidentally there’s also an interesting but controversial recent
film about a plague that turns most of the world blind. It reminds me of a question I used to pose to children at the beginning of the “blind trail” classes I used to lead in outdoor education – in which a dozen kids were blind folded and played various sensory games – find your own shoe just by smell being a favourite. I’d ask, “What would the world be like if everyone was blind?” – over the years answers ranged from the profound, “more religious as you could hear the silence of God better” to the creative “movies made of smells” to the ridiculous “It would be well bad as everyone would be dressed out of fashion and that. Another winner blind-game was “kamikaze running” which involved charging full speed at a wall. In every case but one in hundreds of trials the kids stopped or slowed right down way short of the wall due to fear (I caught the exception!). This “fear of the unknown” as Keith put it is also something I’ve experienced doing sword training in pitch black dojos. It seems quite a primal fear to me and I can imagine it having evolutionary benefit to our ancestors, aside from just the not being used to it factor.
A very clear example of how judgements lead to anger (
see Non-Violent Communication) was Keith saying how trees in his way didn’t annoy him while cars parked on the pavement did. As someone noted most of what he talked about was the same stuff we all experience just through a different medium. He also mentioned how consumerism was sight driven – how he didn’t want all the stuff he couldn’t see. If everyone was blind however I imagine perfume and silk would be even more overpriced.
So, to preempt my normal “So what?” postscript, I’d like to note have benefited tremendously from a dozen years of improving my non-visual sense through the movement arts. I am more intuitive, healthier, happier, have a better sex life, can manage my emotion better, etc, which I put in large part down to this. The main benefit for me however is intangible – that from being “embodied” I simply feel more alive! I asked Keith how to develop my hearing as I’ve been manly concentrating on touch and his beautiful response was, “Let your ears breathe.”
Amazingly Keith concluded that “while sight is an amazing thing” he would “have to think twice” if offered his sight back as he had gained so much from not having it. Others I’m sure would strongly disagree and this area can get quite political. While I’m certainly not looking forward to loosing my vision, if it does happen it will bring some cool opportunities and adventures and I intend to be the baddest tango dancing blind samurai businessman outside of a Kurosawa movie crossed with Scent of a Woman :-)….. I mean -)
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Sensory So What: You are most likely underdeveloped in your non visual senses and it is highly beneficial to develop them.
