What is Brain Blindness when the Brain stops Seeing, even when the eyes have vision

For us to see clearly, many different systems need to be operating in concert. It’s about more than just the eyes. The best way to understand this is to look at the extraordinary case of a man who lost his sight… and then was given the chance to get it back. The extraordinary case of brain blindness.

Mike May

Mike May “I lost my sight when I was three-and-a-half years old as the result of a chemical explosion, Oddly, it didn’t seem like it was a big deal. I guess as a three-and-a-half year old, my world according to vision was not as well-established as it would be for somebody who lost their vision later in life.

After over 40 years of blindness, Mike May had pioneering stem-cell treatment that would repair the physical damage that the explosion caused to his eyes. Cameras were there to witness the moment when, for the first time, the bandages came off.

Mike May “Dr Goodman does the cornea transplant. He peels back the bandages. He gets them all the way off, and there is this whoosh of light and bombarding images onto my eye.”

Brain Blindness despite Successful Eye Surgery

In surgical terms, the operation was a total success. But to Mike, it wasn’t. There was something wrong.

Mike May “All of a sudden, you turn on this flood of visual information. It’s overwhelming. My brain is just going, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ So, that’s how the world proceeded - one image at a time. Seeing cars as they whizzed by… and then I would see a sign ahead of us and it looked like we were going to smack right into it. In fact, it’s the sign over the freeway and we’re not going to run into it, we are going under it. That was only the first hour.”

It was going to get worse when Mike got home.

Mike May “You put four blonde boys together, all roughly the same height… I looked at them, I couldn’t tell you which two were mine.”

Mike’s new eyes were functioning perfectly and they were sending signals to the brain just like yours or mine do, but he couldn’t see his sons in any meaningful way.

Mike May “I had no face recognition whatsoever. None.”

When he’d been totally blind, Mike was a paralympic skier. But his first sighted attempt at skiing was a complete failure.

Mike May “When I skied for the first time, because of my depth perception difficulty, I had no time to figure out the difference between four dark things on the white snow - a person, a tree, a shadow or a hole.”

Guide Dog Needed

Ten years on, Mike still needs his guide dog to get around. He can detect light and motin and identify colours, but he struggles to gauge how far away things are. Mike still can’t read the expressions of his sons’ faces. He still can’t read words on a page. He is still suffering from brain blindness.

What Mike’s story gives us is a glimpse of all the elements that have to be in place for the brain to construct a visual reality.

Many regions of the brain are involved in vision. They specialise in different aspects, such as motion, edges, colours, face recognition. Somehow the brain weaves all of this together, unifies it to form what we experience as an image.

In Mike’s case, decades of blindness caused these regions of his brain to be taken over for other tasks, like hearing and touch. They just weren’t available for him to use, even when he was given a pair of new eyes.

If you have found this article on brain blindness as fascinating as I have, then checkout the “What is Reality” post. It will provide you with some real food for thought and you may never think of mental illness in the same way again.

I like to extend my knowledge of all medical conditions, especially neurological matters. So, I consulted Science Daily who consider structural brain changes from blindness.

You may also like this book: It may take a Brain Surgeon to identify your Blind Spots from Amazon