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Given that I am currently living in England, I had not seen any pictures or read much information about David Paterson, the new governor of New York State, replacing Eliot Spitzer. Today I realized that he is not only the first African-American governor of New York, but he is also legally blind. So what do we know about memory in the blind?
It turns out that blind individuals have excellent auditory memories. They encode auditory information more effectively than sighted individuals. They also are better serial list learners. They don't show primacy or recency effects but instead are able to create longer chunks or strings of associations among words (Raz et al., 2007). Some researchers believe that the fact that they do not use their visual cortex for visual input frees a good percentage of it for processing language and other auditory cues. As far as dreaming at night, which would typically draw on memory fragments from the previous waking hours (the "day's residue"), congenitally blind individuals who have never had access to sight are unlikely to have visual imagery in their dreams, but instead will hear sounds and experience other physical sensations. Individuals who became blind after the age of 5 or 6 sometimes are able to see images in their dreams. It does appear that blind individuals, congenital and non-congenital, do have rapid eye movements. I would imagine that David Paterson who is legally blind and retains some lingering sight would be able to have some forms of visual imagery in his dreams. Of course, the greatest vision he is going to need at the present time will be the moral and ethical foresight to rebuild the sense of trust and integrity that the citizens in New York deserve to feel about their governor.
Let me wrap up this post by asking for input from any readers of this blog who might be blind or legally blind. Share with other readers your own personal experience of how memory feels to you. What are the mental images in your head when you recall experiences in your life? If you were asked to convey them in a form that you could express to others, how would portray them? What media might you use to give your memories to the larger world?
