Tópico: É preciso aprender a enxergar?

[Marcelo Terra]

Em um tópico de um usuário recentemente supenso indefinidamente, ele clama por uma evidência da qual não apresentou evidência confiável: uma pessoa cega de nascença teria enxergado ao sair do corpo durante uma experiência de quase morte. Eu objetei que uma pessoa cega de nascença à qual pudesse de repente adquirir imagens seria incapaz de interpretá-las pois não teria formado as conexões relacionadas à associação de um determinado símbolo, a representação de algo no cérebro, à determinado padrão de estímulos luminosos, visão. Não parecem haver muitas referências a casos de cegos de nascença, ou que tenham perdido a visão muito novos, que tenham voltado a enxergar, o que encontrei foi através da história de um filme com Val Kilmer que era uma adaptção, um tanto livre, de um caso narrado pelo Dr. Oliver Sacks, cuja descrição apóia a minha alegação. Pesquisando encontrei um site do qual transcrevo uma citação abaixo que cita alguns, poucos, outros casos relacionados. Alguém teria conhecimento de alguma informação sobre essa necessidade de "aprendizado" da visão?

http://www.oliversacks.com/marsex.htm

But could it be that simple? Was not experience necessary to see? Did one not have to learn to see? I was not well acquainted with the literature on the subject, though I had read with fascination the great case history published in the Quarterly Journal of Psychology in 1963 by the psychologist Richard Gregory (with Jean G. Wallace), and I knew that such cases, hypothetical or real, had rivited the attention of philosophers and psychologists for hundreds of years.
The seventeenth-century philosopher William Molyneux, whose wife was blind, posed the following question to his friend John Locke: "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and tought by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere [be] made to see: [could he now] by his sight, before he touched them...distinguish and tell which was the globe and which the cube?" Locke considers this in his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding and decides that the answer is no. In 1709, examining the problem in more detail, and the whole relation between sight and touch, in A New Theory of Vision, George Berkeley concluded that there was no necessary connection between a tactile world and a sight world--that a connection between them could be established only on the basis of experience.
Barely twenty years elapsed before these considerations were put to the test--when, in 1728, William Cheselden, an English surgeon, removed the cataracts from the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy born blind. Despite his high intelligence and youth, the boy encountered profound difficulties with the simplest visual perceptions. He had no idea of distance. He had no idea of space or size. And he was bizarrely confused by drawings and paintings, by the idea of a two-dimensional representation of reality. As Berkeley had anticipated, he was able to make sense of what he saw only gradually and insofar as he was able to connect visual experiences with tactile ones. It had been similar with many other patients in the two hundred and fifty years since Cheselden's operation: nearly all had experienced the most profound, Lockean confusion and bewilderment.

[LIAN]

Cheguei a ler um livro de Sacks que fala de casos relacionados à visão. Um deles é de um menino que perdeu a capacidade visual após passar anos com uma venda nos olhos. Os neurônios possuem grande plasticidade, na infância e adolescência principalmente. Mas até nessas fases existem inúmeras limitações, como visto no exemplo do garoto operado de catarata. Em cegueira ao nascimento, nem se fala.

[Südenbauer]

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