Last Friday I had the opportunity of being blind for a whole day as a TOK assignment. I have many things to point out of this experience, but the most important one was disappointment. I was excited the whole week with being blind, but by the end of the day I was disappointed and thoughtful. At the beginning of the day I had to ask a friend of mine to guide me to the class, and every step I took was a little bit more of fear I had.
I didn’t know if I could actually trust my friend, I was scared of hitting against a wall or falling into something. Another point that may have affected my experience was that I couldn’t actually see while people were talking, so I wasn’t able to concentrate during classes, and wasn’t able to understand when others were talking to me.
While I was been guided to lunch by my friends, many people tried to push me, make me fall, touch me, and that was really disappointing, because it made me feel excluded and different from others. While I was eating many people would scream my name, and make fun of me, but I wasn’t really caring about what they were saying.
By the last classes I was exhausted, with a tremendous headache, and with a horrible feeling while asking myself “why am I doing this again?” But then I saw that there are good points about this experience, I learned to see the world from a different point of view, maybe I was not ready to give up.
When I finally took off the object from my eyes, I felt like I was finally free, I’ve never felt a feeling like that before. My eyes were hurting while I was fighting to open them, I couldn’t see clearly, my headache got worse, but at least I was free. I don’t regret it, I don’t regret anything I did that day, I learned that you don’t need to see things; you can also hear them, touch them, and feel them. It was a great experience and I hope I get to repeat it someday.
Do we have the right interpretation of our senses?
In my opinion we don’t have the right interpretation, because we are not using them properly. If we actually knew how to use them, we would know and understand them.
How do we know?
I know that we don’t have the right interpretation because we only use a small percent of our brains. There are so many things to discover about them, and this may affect how we see the world, every single living thing interprets the world in a different way.
How does the loss of a sense impact your learning?
It impacted my learning because I could not see what my teachers were trying to teach me, I’m the type of student that needs to see things to understand it. So it was really difficult to concentrate while others were talking and the teachers were trying to teach.
Was it frustrating?
It was really frustrating, not being able to see things around you made me feel sad and disappointed, my eyes were itching and my head was hurting.
To what extent does our senses gave us knowledge of the world as it really is?
Human’s senses are different from other animals, but we still don’t see the world, as we should. There are many things we can’t know about the world because our senses are no letting us understand the world as it really is.
How, and to what extent, might expectations, assumptions and beliefs affect sense perception?
Humans believe in what they can prove, so if they cant see something they wont believe on it, for example if there are other colors, but we cant see them, we wont believe they actually exist. In my opinion it affects sense of perception because we assume that there aren’t new color or senses, but there are, just that we are too blind to actually see them.
