“You know,” May said, “Ione told me about a famous study from the 1960s. I think you’d find it interesting.”
He described the experiment in which two kittens were raised in the dark except for short periods during the day when they were placed in connected baskets and the lights were turned on. One kitten was allowed to put its paws through holes in the basket so it could reach the ground and move both baskets along. The other kitten had no holes in its basket and could only watch. Visually, their experiences were identical. At the end of the experiment, the active kitten had normal vision. The passive kitten was functionally blind.
“That’s remarkable,” Bashin said.
“It makes sense to me,” May said. “I think exploration is everything. I think that’s why I never grew up feeling like I couldn’t see.”
In late September, May squeezed into Fine’s rental car for the hundred-mile drive from his home to the neuroimaging center at Stanford University. When they arrived, they joined another postdoctoral researcher, Alex Wade, professor Brian Wandell, and graduate student Alyssa Brewer. Together, these scientists would use a colossal magnet to journey deep into May’s brain.
After exchanging pleasantries, Fine and her colleagues scurried to collect bite bars, stimulus equipment, swipe cards, and computer disks. And bawdy jokes. The jokes were part of the deal. May would be expected to remain in the scanner for long stretches, often with nothing to do. Reading him off-color jokes during downtimes was the least Fine could do to help him pass the time.
Wandell showed May to the scanning room, where he was read a lengthy disclaimer, asked if there were any bullets in his body (metal interferes with the machine’s magnetic fields), and told to remove his personal belongings. He was surprised to learn that he needn’t do anything inside the scanner except lie still, stay awake, and look at the images shown to him, which would be projected onto a mirror angled over his eye.
May peered at the scanner, a massive white rectangle that reached nearly to the ceiling and seemed to occupy most of the room. A patient would lie on a connected conveyor table that would slide him inside the machine through a narrow round bore at the scanner’s front end. Operators sat in a nearby control room. May had heard tales of scanner claustrophobia and panic.
“Can I touch it?” he asked Wandell.
“Sure, go ahead.”
May ran his hands over the bore’s opening, the attached projector, and the conveyor table. To the scientists, he appeared to exhale after this tactile exploration. To them, it appeared that touch had switched on his vision.
May lay down on the table and prepared for his trip inside. He was given headphones, through which he would hear instructions. A projector, a screen, and a mirror were clamped across his neck, making him look like an invading alien from a 1950s science fiction movie. Though he wasn’t told it at the time, the screen was nicknamed “the guillotine.” When he was finally ready to go, the scientists moved to the observation area.
“Wait a minute!” Fine called out. “Where are my dirty jokes?”
Brewer ran in clutching several pages of randy puns, limericks, and blonde jokes. Fine inspected the lot.
“No, no, no!” she said. “These are too funny! He’ll laugh too hard and move his head. Run back and find some that are only moderately funny. And hurry!”
The conveyor table began to move, and in a moment May was inside the scanner. Metal banged and magnets whirred—WAKACHUCK! WAKACHUCK! WAKACHUCK!—as Fine first showed May a series of movies showing stationary and moving dots. Next, she showed him a series of human faces—one per second for 20 seconds—followed by twenty seconds of blank screen. Then, she projected a panoply of images of everyday objects. After a lunch break, she showed him several different motion stimuli. All the while, the scientists watched May’s brain for changes in oxidization and recorded the results.
Two hours later, the scientists thanked May for his time and for the opportunity to do such pioneering work. They told him it would be several days before they finished the first look at the data. Fine drove May back to Davis and said she would call him with the results. He stopped for a moment before leaving her car.
“Can I ask a final question?” May said.
“Of course,” replied Fine.
“Do you have any leftover jokes I can take with me?”
The fMRI specialists went to work on May’s scans. The results were unmistakable. The areas of his brain responsible for motion lit up like a pinball machine in response to motion stimuli—they were as robust as those areas in the brain of a normally sighted person. But the areas of May’s brain responsible for processing faces showed no response to faces. The areas responsible for recognizing objects showed no response to objects. The areas responsible for perceiving simple form did respond—weakly—but they seemed strangely disorganized in a way the scientists had never seen before. Fine took a deep breath and got ready to call May with the news.
The phone rang in May’s office. Though he’d handled dozens of business calls that day, he had a feeling this one might be Dr. Fine. He was right.
Her voice sounded subdued as she reported the brain scan results. The bottom line was this: May didn’t seem to possess the neural structure necessary for normal vision—it just wasn’t there anymore. That meant he was unlikely ever to see in the automatic way of the normally sighted. Fine’s best guess was that May’s vision would remain a process of heavy cognitive lifting, assembling clues, figuring things out, and managing the constant overflow of information and its resultant fatigue.
May went numb. He wanted to speak but his mouth didn’t move. He looked out his window, still holding the telephone to his ear. The world outside looked flat to him.
“Are you saying I won’t see normally for now, or I won’t see normally ever?” May asked.
“However hard you work at vision, Mike, I don’t think you’ll ever see fluently, the way normal people do. It will always be incredibly hard work.”
May thanked Fine for the results, and for the kindness and effort shown to him by her and the other vision scientists. He agreed to return for more testing but hardly heard his own words. A moment later they said good-bye.
In the kitchen, as May poured himself a glass of water, Jennifer asked about his day. He told her that he’d received the test results from Fine and that she’d said they weren’t good, that his brain wasn’t wired for normal vision and likely never would be.
Jennifer took his hand. He didn’t feel it.
“They have to be wrong,” he said.
“Mike, it’s okay—”
“They must have made a mistake,” he said. “If I give it another year or two it will all sort itself out.”
The next day, May called Fine at her office. He asked if she was certain about the results—was she sure it was his brain and not his eye that was the problem? She told him that she was.
A day later he called back. This time he asked if the “forever” part of the prognosis applied to perceiving faces.
“Your case is totally unique, Mike,” she said. “But I think it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever recognize faces normally.”
The next day, he called again and asked if his poor depth perception and object recognition were forever, too. Fine confirmed that they were.
May called his close friends Bashin and Jerry Kuns, two of the most sober thinkers he knew. He described the brain scan results and waited for them to reassure him that the scientists had made a mistake. Instead, they listened quietly and then, each in his own way, told May that it sounded like Fine had got things exactly right, that it all seemed to fit with the case histories, with modern brain science, and with this hard truth: that nearly eight months had passed and May had shown almost no improvement in his vision, despite being the one person they knew in the world who could improve at anything.
That night, lying awake in bed, May stared at the ceiling heating vent he’d seen the first morning of his new vision. It appeared to be just a se
ries of lines.
“Ione’s right,” he thought. “This is forever.”
For a lifetime, May had lived ready to crash through. Now he seemed to move in slow motion, as if the oxygen around him had gummed. He hardly spoke to Jennifer, placed no more calls to Fine or to his friends. When he looked out the window during work breaks, he let the jumbled clues be what they wanted to be.
Late one evening, about a week after receiving his test results, May went to the bathroom and reached for his nightly cyclosporine pill. He could not read the writing on the bottle—it was just another color in the pink blob of his hand. He did not remove the cap. Instead, he stared at the bottle and asked himself, “Why am I still doing this?” He knew that he need only drop the remaining pills in the toilet and push the handle; his cornea would be rejected soon enough and he could go back to the full and rich life he’d known and loved. He stood for a minute looking at the colors on top of his hand. Finally, slowly, he shook out a pill, placed it in his mouth, and swallowed. It took a long time before he put the rest of the pills back into the medicine cabinet.
For the next week, May lay awake deep into each night. His style was to see the best in things, but no matter which way he considered his situation he could not think of a reason to keep taking those pills.
By making the journey into new vision he had stayed true to his principles: speak to your curiosity; have adventures; be willing to fall down and get lost; there’s always a way. He could always look at himself in the mirror and know that, at the moment he’d been offered this one-in-a-million journey into vision, he’d remained loyal to those principles, he’d leaped aboard, he’d been himself. And he had done what fewer than twenty people known to history had done: he had seen what this vision stuff was all about.
But that’s not all he’d done. He’d also answered questions—about life and about himself—that few people get the chance to answer. He had wondered if his decision to pursue vision meant that he wasn’t as content in his blindness as he’d always believed himself to be—if he wasn’t who he thought he was. He had wondered if, by becoming sighted, he would become ordinary, if the world would still recognize him. And he had wondered if the blind community would still accept him.
Now he had those answers. Vision had not changed how he felt about himself or about his blindness. Now he could say from experience that life without vision was great because he’d lived life as a sighted man, too. He did not feel ordinary for gaining vision; in fact, he felt himself to be exactly who he’d always felt himself to be. And the blind community, far from rejecting him, had embraced him; they’d understood him and his journey.
And he had one more answer. He had always believed that knowing and loving someone had nothing to do with seeing that person. He had told people he didn’t need vision in order to see his wife and kids. Now that he saw them, he knew he’d been right.
So he had his answers. Now he was being told that his strange vision would never improve. That meant he would never drive. That meant he would never read. That meant he was in for a lifetime of heavy lifting, hard work, overflow, and fatigue, that his visual world would always be a confusing world.
And, on top of it all, he had to continue risking his life for this vision. He had to continue inviting cancer in order to see.
One night, about two weeks after talking to Dr. Fine, May again stood over the toilet with the bottle of cyclosporine in his hand. He had taken his journey. He had been himself. He could always tell his sons that he had tried.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
May stared at the bottle of pills in his hand. Slowly, he lifted his head and found his reflection in the mirror. A tall man looked back at him. It did not feel to May like he was invading the man’s personal space. He could tell because the man did not move away from him; he just kept looking back at May and waiting.
For a lifetime, May had defined himself by one principle above all others: there’s always a way. It had pushed him up a 175-foot ham radio tower as a teenager, made him a world champion skier, delivered him to a mud hut village in Ghana, launched his businesses. It was what he did. It was who he was.
But it had never asked of him the impossible. He could be forgiven now for letting go of vision because now he knew that vision was impossible. There wasn’t a way.
May looked at the figure in the mirror. He found the dark patches he knew to be the man’s eyes. He’d heard since boyhood that eyes could speak, but he’d never understood what that meant. This time, the two dark patches spoke. And when they spoke they said this: There’s always a way.
May unscrewed the cap on his medicine bottle.
It struck him as crazy to try to find a way when something was impossible. He remembered Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet some small part of him yearned to see what this man in the mirror would look like—if he’d look different somehow—after May had tried to find a way to do what couldn’t be done.
He shook a pill into his hand, put it in his mouth, and gulped some water.
In between business meetings and conference calls and bedtime stories, May began to think through the problem of how a man missing the vision parts of his brain could teach himself to see.
Nearly a week passed without a breakthrough. Then he devised a plan. He would concentrate harder on the visual data streaming into his eye. For eight months he had waited for the rest of his vision to catch up with the parts that worked beautifully—motion and color. That kind of waiting around must have meant he hadn’t tried hard enough. If he brought to vision the kind of onslaught of effort that he brought to his business, maybe then he could improve, maybe the other parts of his brain might kick in and help do the work of vision. If it took fourteen-hour work days in order to see, then that’s what he was prepared to commit.
May began to pay very close attention to visual scenes, trying to block out the rest of the world so that the images before him had no choice but to disrobe and reveal their meanings. The results were disastrous. Objects melded together even more severely. Faces turned even more generic. He nearly fell down the stairs in a hotel after dedicating his full attention to looking for stairs.
“This really is impossible,” he told himself.
He devised a new plan, which also failed. As did the next. In each case, he tried to figure out a better way to analyze the visual data before it became a confusion to him. In each case, he never got there in time.
Then he began to think differently. For eight months he’d been asking, “How do I get better at vision?” Maybe the better question was, “What am I good at already?”
He’d barely finished asking when a stream of answers poured into his head.
“I’m good at touch,” he thought. “I’m good at sound and echo. I’m good with my other senses. I’m good with a dog and a cane.”
What if, May thought, he went the other way around with vision? What if, instead of focusing first on the visual and then using his good senses to fill in the blanks, he used his good senses first—the things he’d excelled at when he was blind—then used vision to fill in the rest? “What if,” May wondered, “I try to see by being blind again?”
The idea sounded crazy. How could a person learn to see by being blind? And yet he couldn’t shake the notion. He began to form a plan.
He would go out into the world and tell his vision to back off, to play the supporting role while his other senses attacked the scene first. It’s not that he would close his eyes; rather, he would first pay attention to his hands, ears, dog, and cane. He did not announce this plan to anyone. It still seemed crazy to him.
On the way to a business meeting, he got an early chance to test his new idea in the airport lounge. Rather than walk into the room and try to figure out the avalanche of visual impressions that were sure to assault his eye, he would move about the room, touching things and listening for echoes first. Only then would he contemplate how the visual data matched t
hese more certain impressions.
He entered the lounge. As always, shapes and colors leaped onto his eye. He ordered his vision to stand down and wait but it would not wait, it was all around him before he could move to touch or hear anything. “Wait!” he told his eye, but suddenly vision would not be told to wait, it would not stand down, it all flooded in because vision was meant to be first, it was biblical. By the time he ordered his bottled water, May was more exhausted than ever.
“Keep trying,” he told himself. “Keep doing what you’re good at.”
He tried next in the hotel conference room where his meeting was to be held. On entering the room, he swept his cane across the carpet, chairs, table, and walls. He moved his hand over telephones, pens, and notepads. He stroked the wires that connected the telephone and listened to his voice as it echoed off objects. And he tried to do all of this without thinking about the visual data streaming into his eye. He just let his other senses happen, and quickly he began to see the area not just as a box of shapes and colors but as a room, a conference room; it made sense to him, and he felt his adrenaline race because he hadn’t strained much to see any of it, he’d just let himself see it the way he had when he was blind, and now he could see it visually, too.
Over the next few weeks, May continued to practice cooling his vision while moving his other senses to the forefront of information delivery. He started to see things faster and more accurately. Some days he stumbled in these efforts. Some days he stumbled to the pavement. He kept practicing. Seeing the world kept getting easier. He wasn’t automatic, and he wasn’t close to normally sighted. But he was better. He was thrillingly better. And, as he told Jennifer one night, he’d done it in the most unlikely of ways—he’d helped himself to see by being blind again.
“You sound like a little boy,” she told him.
Crashing Through Page 27
