Reddit reviews Crashing Through: The Extraordinary True Story of the Man Who Dared to See

Read the book Crashing Through by Robert Kurson. It is about skier Mike May, who was totally blinded at age 3, and had sight restored to one of his eyes when he was in his 40s.

Apparently this has only happened a handful of times, and often the mind has an incredibly hard time learning to 'see' things we take for granted. Mike had trouble telling faces apart, detecting emotions, telling men apart from women, the dog apart from a rug, etc. Even though his restored eye, physically, had 20/20 vision, his mind had no experience making sense of some of the things he was seeing for the first time. Colors, however, he grasped almost instantly.

Pretty fascinating story.


*Edit: For people who stopped reading at "Read the book..." it's actually written a lot like a movie. It's not a case study or anything, it's a page turner. Think really really good reddit post.


Crashing Through (amazon link)

I'm not at all surprised by that. If you're born blind or are blinded very, very early in life while your brain still has a lot of plasticity, it can repurpose the bits that would normally go to processing vision into alternative senses instead. Plus if you can't remember any other way of being then you don't know what you're missing, and you don't have to define a new "normal", which is very hard, psychologically.

Interestingly, for these same people who have been blind for the vast majority of their lives, if they ever (re)gain vision they still don't have an easy time of it. If those brain bits that would have been processing vision were repurposed, they basically have zero depth perception. And I mean worse than "you have no depth perception because you need two eyes and only have one". I'm talking like can't recognize that a curb or step is a level up based on shadows, that kind of lack of depth perception. Apparently these people inevitably become depressed with how dirty the world looks. There's a very interesting memoir on this subject called Crashing Through.

Crashing Through?

I encourage people with an interest in vision and 3D to read a great book called Crashing Through. It's a (short) true story about a man who lost his vision at a young age, but when he was an adult was able to receive a modern treatment to restore his vision (I believe it was with stem cells, but I don't recall). A large portion of the book goes into detail about how human vision works and it's actually way more complicated than people think.

The part that I find relevant to 3D films is basically how 3D films rely on binocular vision in order to generate the 3D effect. But it turns out that binocular vision is only responsible for the 3D-ness of an object if it's close to our face... like within a couple feet. Anything beyond that and the difference between the two images is not significant enough for us to gain any information from having a second eye.

So, what does cause 3D-ness for farther objects? Two things. One is parallax, which is how much the image of the object changes when either it moves or when we move our head. This movement is drastically greater than the distance between our eyes, and requires the use of our brain to remember images from several seconds ago and compare the differences. The other huge one, however, is experience. You see a car or a bench or a baseball, and you know how big those things are. And our brain then builds a 3D model based off of those assumptions. This is why regular 2D films still work so great for us, because sometimes the camera or the people move (giving parallax), but mostly because we just have experience with the every day world. It's also why trying to tell how big or small things like celestial objects are or fake objects like mecharobots are is so difficult.

The really fascinating part from the book (sorry it took so long to get back to it) is that while the man regained his vision, he had never developed the part of the brain that could figure out how big or small things were from parallax and from past experiences. So he would be walking down the sidewalk, and see a bench, and not be able to tell if it was near or far and would trip over it, or he would jump out of the way of cars that weren't near him.

This is the reason I never watch films in 3D, because it's not actually 3D: it's some sort of hyper 3D. Just look at these cameras (that one on the right especially). That's not how far apart human eyes are. Most 3D cameras you'll notice have exaggerated the binocular aspect of this. So, why does it not look super weird to us to see 3D films? My personal theory is because it's only ever used in films where we're already suspending our disbelief, so our eyes accept the gimmick any way. But the important thing is that it's exactly that: a gimmick.

So, yes, I agree that people should have the choice to see it in either format, I strongly discourage people from seeing it in 3D if you're at all looking for more inevitability. It's a gimmick, that's actually less real than 2D for most of the film.

That being said, I hear I missed out on not seeing Doctor Strange in 3D because those effects were supposedly super neat in 3D. i.e. the gimmick was worth it (I mean, nobody was watching it for realism anyway, right?)

also, the book "crashing through" is about a man who got blinded at age 3; then got one of his eyes back in his 30's.

http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Through-Extraordinary-Story-Dared/dp/0812973682/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2