A few words about adaptation

I’ve found it useful to break adaptation down in a couple of different ways. More broadly we can say that adaptation to blindness can be categorized as follows:

• Physical adaptation – What we do “in the world” to adapt to our environments
• Cognitive adaptation – How we think and perceive around the idea of adaptation
• Emotional adaptation – How we feel about blindness, adaptation and the circumstances that comprise them

Each of these types of adaptation will overlap in some way or another. For instance, the physical and cognitive aspects of adaptation intersect in navigation with a cane. The physical use of the can must be coupled with the learned skill in order for it to become an effective aid. Likewise, if there is great anxiety in leaving your home, using a cane becomes problematic. These three spheres of adaptation could be said to represent the will, the skill and the means to ,. There is an point to be made here. Those of us who are totally blind, or nearly so, serve as living examples of the idea of need as motivator by developing adaptive skills that often surpass our own. Or, as Fred Williamson’s character says in “From Dusk Till Dawn” when he’s talking about “Nam”: “You'll take it 'cause ya got no choice.” This is adaptation born of need.

For the blind, as well as those others of us who are sensory deprived, adaptation can also be broken down roughly according to our senses:

• Sight – Let’s face it, for many of us sight is still our primary sense, if not in terms of everyday use and efficacy, in the way we think.
• Hearing – Usually taken for granted and not naturally attended to in the same way that eyesight is. There is some exciting anecdotal evidence that suggest that some blind people use a form of echolocation in their day-to-day activities.
• Touch – Not merely what you can feel with your fingers. What does the ground feel like under your feet?
• Smell – How close am I standing to that dumpster?
• Taste – Well, I’m at a loss here. I can only recommend that you refrain from putting very many things in your mouth that your sense of smell hasn’t already informed you are edible.
• Vestibular – Technically, it’s about the orientation of the head based on information gained from the inner ear. More broadly and practically, it can tell you about your general orientation in space and how you are moving through space, i.e., which way is up, which way is down and accelleration. Vertigo which can occur with a constriction or fragmentation of visual field is the disruption of this sense. Along with other mechanisms (For instance, structures in the brain that direct movement of the eyes to targeted sounds), the vestibular sense automatically coordinates the movement of the eyes and the movement of the eyes can affect whether or not hearing is “turned on.”
• Kinesthetic – Where is my right hand in relation to my nose? Put simply, the kinesthetic sense tells us, with surprising accuracy, where one part of the body is in relation to another.

Our examination of these aspects of adaptation will be, at least partly, anecdotal – my experience and, hopefully, yours as the site grows. There will also be a strong emphasis on the examination of research here. This research will include the psychophysical, computer models of human perception and cognition, case study and some looks at how the senses might interact, or even interfere, with one another. It’s my hope that this combination of experience and research will prove useful to those of you who have come looking for a reminder or a new spin on blind adaptation.