From “To See and Not See” in An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

“But could it be that simple? Was not experience necessary to see? Did one have to learn to see?”

“For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience categorization, memory, reconnection. “

“Still, perceptual-cognitive processes, while physiological, are also personal – it is not a world that one perceives but one’s own world – and they lead to, are linked to, a perceptual self, with a will, an orientation, and a style of its own.”

“In the newly sighted, learning to see demands a radical change in neurological functioning and, with it, a radical change in psychological functioning, in self, in identity.”

“At the beginning, there was certainly amazement, wonder, and sometimes joy. There was also, of course, great courage. It was an adventure, an excursion into a new world, the like of which is given to few. But then came the problems, the conflicts, of seeing but not seeing, not being able to make a visual world, and at the same time being forced to give up his own.”

“There was light, there was movement, there was color, all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur.”