Shedding light on a longstanding puzzle
More than 300 years ago, scientist William Molyneux posed the following puzzle: Imagine a person blind from birth who suddenly is able to see. Immediately after gaining sight, would he be able to visually distinguish between objects that he could previously identify by touch?“Ever since then, this has been one of the foremost questions in the philosophy of mind,” says Pawan Sinha, professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). However, the question remained only a thought experiment for centuries, as there was no good way to test it — until now. In a study of blind patients in India whose sight was restored in late childhood or adolescence, Sinha and his colleagues found that the patients were not immediately able to make the connection between what they saw and what they felt. However, they acquired that skill within days after surgery. The findings, which appear in the...