Re: Substituting gedankenexperimente for reality...? (fwd)

From: Lloyd G. Rasmussen (lras@loc.gov)
Date: Wed Nov 01 1995 - 05:36:15 PST


On Mon, 30 Oct 1995 22:10:32 -0800,
Bill Gerrey <bilge@skivs.ski.org > wrote:

>
>Anyone who wants to hear first-hand experience of Smith-Kettlewell research -- successes as well as limitations -- can call me:
>

Good morning. I appreciate your comments on this list about "been
there, done that." Too many people haven't done much except thought
experiments, and then they wonder why nobody listens.

The messages you send out often have very long lines. Apparently some
mail readers wrap the long lines to fit the screen, but the one I'm
using, Minuet, does not. I have to save your messages into a file and
load them into WP or LIST or Talking Directory to read them. It would
be nice if you could hold down the line lengths to 78 or so.

Last year I heard about NIH experiments to determine whether the
visual cortex, when deprived of visual stimuli, reassigns itself to
other functions. I didn't just want to laugh this result off, so when
I heard about further experiments early in 1995, I participated. From
what I was able to learn about the methodology and assumptions, it
looks like this really happens. The researchers are in the National
Institute on Neurological Diseases and Stroke, not the N E I. Their
interest is in whether stroke patients have any capacity for
re-programming of their brains to take on the functions of a damaged
area. Does the existence of this re-programming phenomenon mean that
blind people are intrinsically more intelligent because we have more
brain cells that can be devoted to the task? I doubt it. But the
conclusion I draw is that it takes months, not weeks, to develop a new
skill, whether one is learning cane travel or Braille for the first
time, or learning to see for the first time. Probably some
combination of structured training and unstructured experience is
necessary, and in any case it will be disruptive to the person's life
for a year or so.

Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service f/t Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress 202-707-0535
            lras@loc.gov



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