Part II; listening to Braille

 

Part II

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some
tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in
felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a
cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the
code so that it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation
symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
rows and two columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
"knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of written
communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant
rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
and spiritual savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote,
Braille built a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings
to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal."

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also
as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and
malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933
book, "The Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth,
who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality."
At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense.
These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between
words like "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In
the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual
cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When
test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed
intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual
input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as the
visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's
plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently
better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the
visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature
Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones
on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the
authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual
regions of their brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development
that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print
literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report
released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras
studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat,
had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization.
Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program
with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains,
the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri,
an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of
the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these
regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that
those brain patterns weren't the cause of their illiteracy, as had been
hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences
for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a
professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students
who didn't use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited
by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional
story about a character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":

"He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed
sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep."

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary
scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think
differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said -
the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of
many audio-only readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are
crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper
like dice onto a table." The beginnings and endings of sentences seem
arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of
breathless energy. The authors concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect
the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a
literate society."

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for
reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind
people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s,
when Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would
no longer be "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he
put it - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture
seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative
has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in
developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few
alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an
assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this
described as "one of the advantages of being poor."

Continued in Part III