#newjust now
Anonymous Coward
Guest
If a person blind from birth reports seeing during a near-death experience, and the things she saw turn out to be true, that would be hard to explain as the brain replaying stored images. That was the question Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper set out to test in the mid-1990s. Their study is often summarised as proof that the blind see. Read in full, it is more careful than that.
Blind people, including some blind from birth, report clear visual impressions during NDEs and out-of-body experiences, and some of what they report seeing can be independently confirmed. Ring and Cooper called this "mindsight" and proposed that it reflects a form of "transcendental awareness" rather than ordinary vision.
The study is Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, "Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision", Journal of Near-Death Studies 16(2) (1997), 101 to 147, expanded into the book Mindsight (1999). They interviewed 31 blind respondents: 21 who reported NDEs and 10 who reported OBEs only. Fourteen had been blind from birth.
The case that made the study famous is Vicki Umipeg. Born at 22 weeks, she was given too much oxygen in an incubator, which destroyed her optic nerves. She told an earlier interviewer, Greg Wilson, that she had never seen anything: "No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever." In early 1973, aged 22, she was thrown from a van in Seattle and taken to Harborview Hospital with a skull fracture and other injuries. She said she found herself on the ceiling of the emergency room, watching a male doctor and a woman working on her and overhearing them worry that she might be deaf as well as blind. She recognised her body by features such as a distinctive wedding ring:
I knew it was me. ... I was pretty thin then. I was quite tall and thin at that point. And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even know that it was mine initially.
Vicki Umipeg, in Ring and Cooper, Journal of Near-Death Studies 16(2), 1997
The congenitally blind are the cleanest test of the idea that NDE imagery is assembled from visual memory, because they have none. If Vicki saw, the visual system cannot be the whole story. Her account is also emotionally powerful, and it is often retold as though it had been verified.
It is not a verified case, and Ring and Cooper say so. In their section on corroboration they write that for cases "such as those of Vicki and Brad" the events "took place so long ago that it is no longer possible to know precisely who the witnesses were or where to locate them", so that much of their evidence "is dependent on their own truthfulness and the reliability of their memories". As they put it, "sincerity is not evidence".
The two cases they could check are less dramatic:
Nancy's case is the study's strongest, and it has limits. She had only just lost her sight, so she had a full visual memory to draw on. Leon said he called out her name and came within a few feet of her as she was wheeled past, so she could have heard them. And her report is of a scene she could have reconstructed from sound and expectation.
The deeper problem is that "seeing" is reported in words. People blind from birth learn and use visual language, and several of Ring and Cooper's respondents were unsure what seeing even meant. One told them, "I don't know what you mean by 'seeing.'" A vivid sense of space and form, built from touch, hearing and language, may be described as sight without being sight.
The study documents something real and interesting: blind people commonly report vision-like experiences in these states. It does not show that those experiences carried information they could not have obtained otherwise. Its famous case is uncorroborated by the authors' own account, and its best-checked case is modest. Rating: Weak.
No account needed. You'll post as Anonymous Coward, and that ID stays the same for you on this thread.