Orlando is really freaking hot..

So I'm at home now in Orlando for the next two months on vacation before I start work in mid-July. I have nothing to do except eat and sleep. Which makes it hard to come up with things to blog about. Today I went outside during the day for the first time since I got here and it was REALLY freaking hot. I had forgotten how hot Florida can be.

I have been spending my days reading the various magazines that are lying around the house, which mainly include magazines like People and Esquire. I'll probably go to the library soon to get books that are more substantive. But I did come across an interesting article in Esquire which was about a 40-year-old man, Mike May, who has been blind since he was 3 but had an operation to restore his sight. Only about 500 such operations had been performed in the world, and only about half of those had ever been successful. What I found most fascinating about the article was that it said that most people who have been blind all their life and then have their sight restored become severely depressed afterwards. And not just for a short time, but chronically depressed and there are several reasons for this.

One reason is that the newly sighted can learn to detect color and motion immediately but can't percieve height, distance, depth, or 3-d shapes. In fact, after doing tests on May, neurologists found that the part of the brain responsible for these faculties had essentially died from nonuse, while the part of the brain dedicated to color and motion detection was still functioning and could learn to distinguish colors and motion. The dead part of the brain responsible for spatial reasoning also is used to determine gender and facial expressions, which means that after a blind person has his sight restored, he can never completely learn how to comprehend facial expressions or accurately determine gender. And he will also continue to see everything in only 2 dimensions instead of 3. One can see how this would have a debilitating effect on the quality of life for a formerly blind person.

Here is another interesting paragraph in the article:
Some patients lost confidence. Once able to move assuredly about the world, they now saw danger in speeding automobiles and swooping birds. Others seemed shaken by how different objects seemed than they had presumed them to be. Vision also delivered ugly images. One man was distressed by the sight of another blind man walking in the street. Professor Richard Gregory told how his subject, S.B., had become disturbed by the sight of chipped paint. While blind, he had conceived the world as perfect, as a sort of heaven. The sight of imperfection in the form of chipped paint shattered that conception for him.

Anyway, I won't summarize the entire article in this blog entry. The rest of the article is really interesting too and well-written, so I would suggest checking it out if you can. It's in the June 2005 issue of Esquire. I always imagined that if I were blind, I would give anything to see again and then be grateful everyday of my life afterward for having my vision restored. But it turns out that it has quite the opposite effect for most people.