Understanding Vision As “Memory”

A baby comes into the world as a blank slate. He opens his eyes, and the eyes do their job, but there is no "vision" because the memory bank is empty The infant has not yet learned to identify the millions of codes sent to the brain by the eyes. We all know that a baby doesn't focus his eyes for several months after birth. Why should he? His eyes are sending messages not yet understandable to the brain because it has no knowledge of these codes. The day will come, however, when the bottle that has been poked into the infant's mouth repeatedly for weeks will register in memory.

"Yesterday when I saw 'OFFOOF,' I got something to eat." Today the eye sends the message "OFFOOF," and the child remembers that this code means "bottle" or "nourishment." He finally "sees" or recognizes (which literally means "to know again") the bottle.

Seeing, therefore, is memory. People must learn how to see. They must learn all the specialized codes for every object in their environment. Seeing for adults is routine; they give it no thought. For infants, it is a learning process that continues for years.

Children who lose all vision before about age seven cannot visualize or conceptualize things described to them. Their visual memories have too little information to work with. If, however, they lose all vision after about age seven, their visual memory is large enough to support visualization and to understand descriptions of things they have never seen.

When disease destroys visual ability and reading becomes difficult and infrequent, people forget the code for words they have not seen in a long time. After about a year, they forget seldom-used words like "enhance" and "numb," to list only two examples. Different people lose different words. Reading ability may regress to the first or second-grade level if one remains unable to read for about five years.

It can be painful to watch such people try to read. Anyone working in vision rehabilitation has helped patients regain reading ability who have not read for more than a year. They read along just fine until they come to a seldom-used word, and then they stop. They sit there staring at the word, embarrassed because they can't identify it. It may be a word they use in everyday speech, but they don't recognize it on paper, because they have forgotten the code for the word.

If this happens to you, spell the word aloud. This simple procedure is usually sufficient to recognize the word. Before reading further, look at the word again. Begin rebuilding the memory of how that word looks. Memorize the code!