Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. This is episode three of a podcast called Stories that Change Our Lives. Stories that go far beyond the story itself to something or someone that has changed our life forever. Today's story is about animals. How does a person who's blind know what an animal looks like if he can't go up and feel it?
Sighted children, far younger than I was when I started thinking about this, had a great advantage. There are lots of books out there with pictures of animals of every kind and what they're called and information about them. And when that child sees an animal in real life, well, he or she can see what it looks like. Yes, that's one of those things that sight does. It allows you to see things from very far away.
Meanwhile, a blind child only sees what he can feel. Well, if you use your other senses, you can hear things, too, and you might even be able to describe the noise, but you don't know what the creature making it looks like. So this is a story about how I, at a very young age, learned what animals like. I can't say look like, because that's not the way I observed them, but in order to figure out what I think of them, back then, at least, it ultimately depended on someone describing them for me. How does a person who has visual concepts explain what an animal looks like to a person who is blind, who has never seen and therefore has no visual concepts?
It's not an easy thing to do. And yet my parents took it on, and this is how it happened.