Esref Armagan is a painter. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He is totally blind. From birth. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?
Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?
Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods. One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other is stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision as an infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain detects no light now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were formally educated, and like them, he spent his early years playing in the streets. But Armagan's blindness isolated him, and to pass the time, he turned to drawing. At first he just scratched in the dirt. But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper. At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on canvas with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.
“He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things”
His paintings are disarmingly realistic. And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades," says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I have never seen a performance like his." Kennedy's first opportunity to meet and test Armagan in person was during a visit to New York last May, for a forum organised by a group called Art Education for the Blind. Armagan, who is something of a celebrity in Turkey, has become used to touring with his canvases to the Czech Republic, China, Italy and the Netherlands. What made this visit different was the interest shown by scientists - both Kennedy and a team from Boston.
Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.700
View his paintings at: http://www.anatolia.com/anatolia/Gallery/armagan/paints.asp
BUT BE WARNED: THERE IS A NASTY FLASHING ADD ON THE SITE. I SUGGEST YOU DO NOT CLICK IT
1 comment:
I copied this link to a few friends via old fashioned e.mail. It is extraordinary and I would like to write a few comments on this from the perspective of mind being not a by product of the brain but instead an intimate relation. Unlike brain, mind is not material and also unlike brain its function is to cognise or know things. Being non material the physical eyeballs are not entirely indispensible in the act of cognizing form. Stories such as this one offer very suggestive evidence for the type of mind which I have described but which, lacking material form, is rather difficult for current scientific thinking to locate!
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