A New Eye on the World

One day in 1945 a man named Kuda Bux climbed onto his bicycle and pedaled into New York City traffic.He rode blithely through busy Times square and came to rest without mishap. To those watching him, it was an astonishing feat. Blindfolded throughout the trip, Bux had still been able to see where he was going.

This was perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of a talent that made Bux famous in the 1930’s and 40’s. But he was by no means the only person who was able to see without using his eyes.

The 17^th century Irish scientist Robert Boyle recounted the case of a man who could identify colours through touch. The first Europeans to reach Samoa in the 18^th century reported that blind islanders were able to describe their appearance.

In 1893, doctors in Brooklyn, New York, described how bling Mollie Fancher read standard printed books with her fingertips. And in Italy at about the same time, a neurologist, dr. Cesare Lombroso, treated a fourteen-year-old blind girl who could “see” with her left earlobe and the tip of her nose. When Lombroso attempted to prod her nose with a pencil, the girl jerked away and cried, “Are you trying to blind me?”

Cases such as these intrigued French scientist Jules Romains. After years of experimentation, in 1920 Romains published a long treatise on the phenomenon entitled Eyeless Sight. Romains noted that some subjects “saw” without any contact with objects they described; others “saw” with their fingertips, cheeks, even their stomachs.

Although the book by Romains attracted little response from the medical profession, further instances of what he called “paroptic vision” occasionally made headlines. In 1960 fourteen-year-old Margaret Foos of Ellerson, Virginia, underwent elaborate tests conducted by experts. Securely blindfolded, Margaret read randomly selected passages of print, identified colours and objects, and even played a game of checkers.

Scientific attention focused on the phenomenon only after 1963, when Russian medical researchers reported on the case of Rosa Kuleshova. In several rigidly controlled experiments, during which she was blindfolded, Rosa had read newsprint and sheet music with her fingertips and her elbow.

The Kuleshova experiments awakened the interest of Dr. Richard P. Youtz, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and he decided to pursue the subject. After several tests of his own, Youtz concluded that Kuleshova and others like her were abnormally sensitive to the amount of heat absorbed by different colours.

According to Dr. Youtz, sightless reading is possible because black print absorbs more heat and is warmer than the surroundings white page, which reflects heat very efficiently.

While this may account for people “seeing” with their fingertips or elbows, it does not explain how people such as Kuda Bux or Margaret Foos could see objects without coming in contact with them. This type of eyeless sight remains a fully documented but so far an inexplicable mystery.