Oliver Sacks, currently working on a book about music and the brain -- "The feeling of music will stimulate action in a person with Parkinson's as nothing else can" -- describes a congenitally blind man restored to sightedness by surgery.
The results were surprising, says Sacks. To make sense of the visual world, you must learn to see. Though the man's sight was restored, his brain wasn't. Prior to the surgery, he'd crossed the world fluently as a blind man using other senses; now he was a disabled man. His equilibriumm was destroyed, and no congenitally blind person has had their sight restored without terrible difficulty.
The moral, says John Hockenberry as he comes back to the stage: "It's not about one sense or another, but integration. To think there's an absolute normal is the greatest impediment to the design principles that Human 2.0 is about."
