Crashing Through (25 page)

May cannot readily distinguish between the first (normal) face and the second face, in which the eyes and mouth have been inverted. The second image is typically disturbing to normally sighted people but is not for May. (Note that when the images are flipped upside down, the second face becomes more normal looking and less disturbing. That’s because we are used to seeing faces right side up and are exquisitely sensitive to any disturbance in faces when they are right-side up. But we have much less experience with upside down faces, so we don’t have anything close to that kind of sensitivity when they are upside down. In fact, we hardly notice very obvious distortions. Monkey species that spend a lot of time hanging upside down don’t have the same sort of specialization for right-side-up faces that we do. It is likely they wouldn’t find the second face above disturbing from either orientation.)

Fine studied May’s body language. He looked spent. She remembered her commitment to watching for signs of depression.

“Are you okay, Mike?” she asked. “How do you feel?”

“I’m frustrated. I really want to do well on faces. I want to understand them. But I’m just guessing here.”

Fine next tested May’s ability to perceive motion. In test after test, he performed flawlessly, detecting and describing the motion automatically and without conscious effort. His results were the equal of the normally sighted. It was, with respect to seeing motion, as if he’d never been blind. He sat high in his chair with pride. The results startled Fine. One of them fascinated her.

She had shown May a collection of lighted dots set against a dark background such as the one below:

When she asked if the dots had meaning to him, he answered that they did not. Then she put the dots into motion. Immediately, May responded.

“That’s a person walking,” he said.

He was correct. Fine had shown him a “point-light walker,” a person who had been filmed in the dark with just a few small lights attached to critical joints in the body.

She showed him another point-light walker.

“That’s a woman walking,” he said.

He was correct. Fine showed him several more. Often, he was able to identify the gender of the point-light walker.

“That’s really impressive,” Fine said. “That’s quite a complicated and subtle bit of visual processing, Mike.”

“Well, I’m very good at motion,” he replied. “And in the name of scientific accuracy, I must acknowledge that I do my share of watching women.”

The next test was to measure color perception. As with motion, May performed automatically and superbly. MacLeod, an expert in the study of color vision, judged that May’s color vision might be even better than his own. May was rolling.

Fine suspected that the next set of tests, designed to measure depth perception, might prove more difficult. May had struggled with depth when trying to identify common objects.

On one of the first tests—for occlusion—May did well. He could judge which object was behind another object based on how one blocked the view of the other. After that, however, his performance collapsed. When asked which of three spheres bulged out (two were concave), he could not answer—this was the equivalent of not being able to perceive the moguls at Kirkwood. He struggled with perspective and other important pictorial cues to depth—cues that were essential to seeing the world in three dimensions.

Then Fine showed him this and asked him to identify it:

May studied the image.

“It’s a square with lines,” he said.

Those five words seemed the answer to Fine’s variation of Molyneaux’s question. She had asked whether the newly sighted man could distinguish a square from a cube. It appeared that May could not, even after six months of vision. All he saw was a square in two dimensions with extra lines.

For no particular reason, Fine pressed a button on the computer that put the shape in motion, rotating it in and out, in and out.

May shot up in his chair.

“That’s a cube!” he said.

Fine couldn’t believe what she was witnessing. Up to this point, she’d believed May to be virtually unable to see in three dimensions. Somehow, motion had produced in him the sensation of depth.

“That is absolutely incredible,” she said. “That was just the coolest moment I think a scientist could ever hope to experience. I don’t think I’m ever going to forget this, Mike. And I think it’s really important.”

That night, May and MacLeod went to dinner at the San Diego condo where Fine and Boynton lived. Before May arrived, Fine told Boynton about the day’s fascinating test results, and about how frustrated her subject seemed when trying to perceive faces. Fine worried—she was a laboratory scientist and had no experience in helping people deal with stressful situations. Living in such a confusing visual world had to be frightening. She wished she knew how to help.

Fine served wine and cheese when May arrived. The conversation surfed from baseball to graduate students to local politics.

“Anyway, Mike,” Fine said during a brief lull, “how’s it going? How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “But I’m curious about something, Ione. Why do you keep asking if I’m okay?”

“Umm…uh…umm…”

Fine could not find the words. She looked to Boynton for an assist. None was forthcoming.

“Well,” she said finally, “it seems like there’s a high incidence of depression in other sight-recovery subjects. We just want to make sure you’re okay. We don’t want to push you on this stuff.”

May smiled. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I thrive on pushing. Push away.”

Fine said that she’d been telling Boynton and MacLeod about the results of the face testing.

“Did she tell you I stunk?” May asked.

They confirmed that she had.

“It’s really a mystery to me,” May said.

“Do you know that perhaps one in a hundred people in the general population—maybe even more—can’t recognize faces?” Boynton asked. “They can’t even recognize the faces of people they know and love intimately.”

“What do you mean? Why not?” May asked.

“It’s a condition called prosopagnosia, or ‘face blindness.’ It’s thought to relate to a problem in the part of the brain that does a lot of face processing. You don’t hear much about it because often people are embarrassed to talk about it, and others don’t even know they have it.”

“How can a person not know they have it?”

“Because those people have always used other clues to recognize people, like a person’s walk, hair color, clothes, that kind of thing.”

“That’s what I use. Do you think I have this condition?”

“You do have prosopagnosia, but it seems to be part of a more general difficulty in understanding the visual world. In most people with prosopagnosia, their problems are limited to faces. Yours seem to go way beyond faces.”

The conversation turned to the subject of facial beauty. What was it, May wondered, that made a person’s face beautiful? He’d forever heard about the mysterious allure of the eyes, the drama of high cheekbones, the power of a strong chin. But what did all that mean?

He couldn’t understand those things even when he got close enough to see them.

Fine, MacLeod, and Boynton told him that researchers believed that attractiveness in faces seemed to be based on two factors.

The first was symmetry—people seem to prefer faces that are as closely matched as possible on the left and right sides. There might be evolutionary value in choosing such a person, since symmetry provides evidence that the person has good genes and that everything went right during early development.

The second was averageness—people seem to like faces that are the average of their gender. If one were to average the features on, say, one thousand female faces, the result would be a slightly pixieish woman that nearly everyone in the culture would find pleasantly attractive (though few would find gorgeous). It would work the same for male faces.

“But isn’t beauty a cultural thing?” May asked. “There was a time when men preferred a Rubenesque woman. Now they prefer a thinner build. Maybe it’s just the culture of the time.”

“Ah, but the waist-to-hip ratio stays constant,” Fine countered. “You can have a society that likes thin women or plump women, but men seem consistent in their preference for a .67 waist-to-hip ratio, or thereabouts. Essentially, that means the woman’s fertile.”

“What’s your ratio, Ione?” Boynton asked.

“A lady never reveals her ratio,” Fine said. “But I will tell you that when I was in graduate school and heard about this waist-to-hip thing, I ran right home from class and measured. And I was right there at .67. I was very proud of myself.”

They talked long past dinner. May savored the conversation. And he liked these people. In their tone, in their laughter, and in their ease, he could hear that they wanted more than just to study him. He could hear that they wanted the best for him.

May was scheduled to fly home the next morning. Fine brought him to her lab for a few quick tests before his flight. In her office, she became annoyed by the swirling and bouncing patterns of the screen saver on her monitor.

“That is incredibly distracting!” she said, sliding her chair toward the screen and turning it off.

“That’s how vision feels to me all the time,” May said.

Fine’s last tests were on visual illusions. May’s reaction to one of them struck her as particularly illuminating. She showed him these two tables:

To normally sighted observers, the tabletops appear to have entirely different dimensions. To May, they appeared identical. May was correct—the tables are made from identical rectangles. He did not perceive the illusion.

May could hear Fine writing notes. Occasionally, she would murmur something to herself. He could sense her putting together the strange nature of his case, connecting the results and sorting the ambiguities to form an explanation, and maybe even a prognosis. Yet he did not want to push her for answers. “She’ll tell me when she’s ready,” he thought.