[From Bill Powers (960715.1400 MDT)]
Last post before concentrating on going to the CSG meeting.
RE: threading needles.
I called the Hadley School for the Blind in Evanston, Illinois, and had
an interesting conversation with their resource person, Linda Perry, who
has been blind from birth. I report what she said with permission. She
said that she actually managed to thread a needle without an aid, once.
Normally she uses a wire loop that comes with needle packets, but she
broke it and had to try doing it by hand. She said she bunched up the
thread near that place where the thread goes through, and using her
fingernail pushed it until she managed to pick up the thread on the
other side. But later when she tried to do it again, she couldn't. Very
frustrating.
Linda spoke of needle-threading machines that blind people often use --
a big thing, the size of a Scotch-tape dispenser. But she didn't like it
because it was hard to use. She mentioned self-threading needles, but
the problem there was that the thread (I said " ... slips up through the
slot in the end?") "comes back out the way it went in." Of course small
thread is hard to handle in any case. The problem is feeling what it's
doing.
I told her about the internet conversation and she said that she'd like
to get in on it, but she's not on the internet yet. We had a long talk
about the best way to do it. She has a piezoelectric braille reader on
which she can read text at 300 words per minute! She's been reading
Braille since she was 5 years old. Unfortunately, her sister and others
keep after her to get a Windows communication program, which she finds
very silly (as you can imagine -- full-color graphics and icons for a
blind person!). She wants a plain Dos text program, and I told her to
stick to her guns. The Windows program has a little braille reader that
tells her where the cursor is in X and Y, but every time she gets a new
program someone has to tell her where everything is on the screen and
she has to memorize it. She also has a voice reader but she hates the
voice.
We were talking about the difference between controlling things visually
and by feel. She said, "You sighted people are so VISUAL!" The world
without sight is nothing like the visual world.
Oh, we also talked about walking around a house with the lights off. She
pointed out that a blind person is always picking up cues, recalibrating
the mental map [my words: maps don't mean much to a blind person] of the
house at frequent intervals. And she said that of course if someone
moves a chair, you fall over it. The main means of navigation is by
touch and sound. In real time.
I just remembered how my mother used to thread needles with one hand,
without looking. She took the head of the needle and the thread between
thumb and forefinger, and squeezed them together somehow. As a result,
some of the thread bulged through the eye of the needle, and she picked
up the bulge by picking at it with the fingernail of another finger. I
never did understand how she did it, but it was obviously all
kinesthetic and tactile; no vision involved.
I am still convinced that there is some kind of model-based control
involved at some level of behavioral organization. But it doesn't work
exactly the way Hans' model works.
ยทยทยท
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Best to all,
Bill P.