Researchers have finally found an empirical answer, PhysOrg reports, to a centuries-old conceptual puzzler known as Molyneux’s question. If a person who’s been blind since birth suddenly gains the ability to see, will the blind person be able to recognize shapes without touching them first?:
Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience.
So-called “nativists” countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch.
If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued.
…“The beauty of Molyneux’s question is that it also relates to how representations are formed in the brain,” said Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT in Boston and the main architect of the study.
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So in 2003, Sinha set up a program in India in cooperation with the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi.
Among the many patients he treated, he found five — four boys and one girl, aged eight to 17 — who met the criteria for surgery that would almost instantly take them from total blindness to fully seeing.
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The answer to Molyneux’s question, then, appears to be “no”: the data blind people gather tactically that allows them to identify a cup and a vase, and to tell them apart, is not accessible through vision.
At least not at first.
“From a neuro-scientific point of view, the most interesting finding is the rapidity with which this inability was compensated,” said Richard Held, an emeritus professor at MIT and lead author of the study.
“Within about a week, it’s done — and that is very fast. We were surprised,”