JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today, we're talking about hidden truths.

ROBERT: Some of the truths that we gather, by the way, are hidden in letters sent to Dr. Oliver Sacks in New York City. And he occasionally lets us, in essence, read through his mail. He gets people sending him stories and problems all the time, and this thing you're about to hear, which is part of a live show we did called In the Dark, this one comes from Royce Hall in Los Angeles, is essentially mined from Oliver's mailbox, it's about—well, we'll just let you hear what it's about.

JOHN HULL: Hello, WNYC?

ROBERT: I want to introduce you to someone.

PAT WALTERS: Hello, John?

JOHN HULL: Hello, this is John Hull.

PAT: Hi John. This is Pat Walters. We have been emailing.

ROBERT: I had our producer Pat Walters get John Hull into a studio.

JOHN HULL: Oh, Pat! I for some reason imagined you as a woman called Patricia. [laughs]

ROBERT: Yeah, this happens to Pat all the time. So so many of his blind dates end just suddenly. Anyway, John Hull is a theory—theology professor in England and he is blind. But he hasn't always been blind.

JOHN HULL: No. No, I was born with a condition, an inherited condition, and I developed cataract when I was a boy of 13.

ROBERT: And then things got cloudy in ...?

JOHN HULL: Exactly. A milky whiteness.

ROBERT: But it happened slowly. At first, his life really wasn't bad at all. He lived a pretty normal existence. He went to college, he got married, he had kids. But eventually, cataracts developed and they got worse. It was gradual, but over the years his world kept getting darker and then darker and darker, until when he was 35 his world went totally dark.

JOHN HULL: When I lost my sight, I suffered a lot from boredom.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JOHN HULL: You know, I just didn't know what to think about. I mean, when you're sighted you've always got something to think about. You know, the waves are rising and falling on the beach. The girls are walking past. There's always something. But when you're blind, what do you think about? What fills your mind? That was a problem for me at first.

ROBERT: But one night at a party with his wife Marilyn, something happened that got him thinking.

JOHN HULL: I was at a party, and an old friend came up to me and said, "John, there's something I think you should know." I said, "What is it?" He said, "I think you should know that Marilyn is looking particularly beautiful tonight."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN HULL: Now I felt, how dare this man put his eyes on my wife and have the cheek to come and tell me that he thinks she's beautiful, huh? He went on to say, "In a way, John, you're fortunate. To you, she will always be as beautiful as the day you married her." Now I told Marilyn that story after the party was over. She said, "Some of my female friends are telling me the same thing. One of them said the other day, you know Marilyn, in a way you are—you are fortunate. John will never see those little gray hairs."

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JOHN HULL: "Those little wrinkles." and then I thought, Robert, what is it like to be a beautiful woman and not to be able to display yourself to the man you love, huh?

ROBERT: Huh.

JOHN HULL: No point in getting new clothes, no point in going to the hairdresser. Okay there's perfume, but half the time the bastard doesn't notice.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN HULL: You see what I mean? Our worlds were becoming so profoundly different. I had to say to myself—and this is the crux of my experience—how am I to live with this woman? Am I to live in nostalgic memory every time I'm with her? And I said no, I will not live in nostalgia. I will live with this woman as a living sighted woman, I as a living blind man. We will live together in the present moment. We will accept each other as we are, across the abyss which divides us.

JAD: But how exactly does he do that?

ROBERT: Well, he didn't want to picture his wife as she used to be, you know, 20 years ago. So he made a willful and conscious decision to stop picturing her all together.

JOHN HULL: That was how I faced the future as a blind man.

ROBERT: He decided that he would live without pictures at all. So any time a picture would pop into his head, he would consciously push it away. And this became his routine.

JOHN HULL: When I meet a new person, I don't any longer wonder what they look like. I don't know what my house looks like.

ROBERT: You don't picture corridors, rooms, windows?

JOHN HULL: It's funny how much the visual memories are attached to those words. Even as you say "corridor," I can see it going away in front of me with its perspectives disappearing.

ROBERT: Yes.

JOHN HULL: And yet when I'm walking along a corridor, I don't have that picture.

ROBERT: Wow!

JOHN HULL: When I'm standing in front of a window, I don't have that picture.

ROBERT: When you are talking to your kids ...

JOHN HULL: Yeah?

ROBERT: Do you see them? Or what's going on?

JOHN HULL: I don't see them. I hear them. I feel them. But I have no idea, frankly, what they look like. See, it's more profound than that, Robert. I have to try to remember what you mean by "look like." I've not only lost the contents of that concept, I've lost the concept.

ROBERT: And he says he's lost it by choice.

JAD: Which is strange. So he says he chooses not to see his wife or his kids.

ROBERT: Yeah, because he says, "You know, all in all what I'm doing here is I'm just honoring the truth. And the truth is I can't really know what my wife looks like. I could put my hand on her face and try to feel my way across, but any image that I conjure up wouldn't be real, really. Wouldn't have all the details. In effect, it would be a lie. And when it comes to my wife, I can't bear the idea of a lie." So ...

JAD: I just can't imagine, though, not wanting to imagine your wife's face.

ROBERT: Well, other blind people obviously do this differently. And in fact when John wrote a book about this stuff, he heard from a bunch of other blind people who said, you know, this makes very little sense. In fact, it's just ridiculous.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

ROBERT: So meet Zoltan Torey.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Z-O-L-T-A-N. It's a Hungarian name. Zoltan Torey. And I'm a clinical psychologist.

ROBERT: And like John, Zoltan was not born blind. He had an accident. He was working in a factory.

ZOLTAN TOREY: It was a battery factory.

ROBERT: And he was getting this huge drum of acid down from a shelf.

ZOLTAN TOREY: And it had a plug which was—the screw was worn away on that plug, and it—when I was undoing it, it just flew open and the whole damned 44 gallons poured out into—more or less into my face.

ROBERT: Oh my heavens!

ROBERT: And the acid burned his face and then it went into his throat. And it burned his vocal cords, and of course it went into his eyes.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Almost immediately, the acid began to eat itself into the cornea.

ROBERT: Within minutes ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: This ghastly, charcoal-gray fog was so thick that I couldn't find my way anywhere.

ROBERT: Once Zoltan was out of the hospital and learning to live as a blind person, he says ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: I was advised to concentrate on touch and on hearing and all the other senses and forget about sight. But this was not acceptable to me.

ROBERT: Because for Zoltan, images were essential. For one thing, his dad had been a filmmaker.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Head of motion picture studios.

ROBERT: And when Zoltan was a boy, his dad would give him movie scripts.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Movie scripts to read and to visualize and to memorize.

ROBERT: And to him, looking at scripts and imagining them in his head, that was his form of play. So when Zoltan lost his sight he thought, "Well, I'm gonna do now what I used to do then with the scripts. I may not be able to see the world anymore, but I can certainly imagine the world."

ZOLTAN TOREY: And I decided to repopulate the world with images and reconstruct reality for myself.

ROBERT: So now when Zoltan walks into a room and he puts his hand on a couch or chairs or a table ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: I see the furniture correctly in the manner in which you would see it from the corner of your eye.

ROBERT: He paints pictures of everything that he touches, everything that he hears, even smells in a room help him visualize the room.

ZOLTAN TOREY: The smell of the place would tell me about cleanliness or the use of the place. The echo would give me an estimation of windows and open spaces and alcoves. I really live with a kind of continuously-produced film strip.

ROBERT: And Zoltan says, "I am now so good at this kind of thing, so good at recreating the world in my Technicolor head," that he believes that what he sees up here is actually and literally and verifiably in the world, and he says he would risk his life and does risk his life daily on this proposition.

JAD: He would risk his life on it?

ROBERT: That's what he said.

JAD: What does that mean?

ROBERT: Well, he has a house. It's a multi-storey house. And there's some tiles on the roof that periodically need replacing. And, you know, to him it doesn't matter whether he fixes it nighttime or daytime because he's blind, so he'll—he'll go up on the roof, and he has this idea that just by touch in the middle of the night and careful feeling and remembering, he can do what he has to do.

ZOLTAN TOREY: I thought, "Hell, why shouldn't I try to do this?" First I repaired the guttering, and then large sections of the roof.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. You're—you're blind though, right? You're totally blind.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Totally.

ROBERT: So then ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: Totally, totally blind.

ROBERT: Well then, what are you doing on a roof is my question?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Well, this is what my neighbors asked. They thought I was crazy, you know?

ROBERT: All right, so now here we have two very different ways of being blind. You got one guy who fills his mind with pictures, vivid, vivid, vivid pictures, and the other guy says, "I won't do that. I think the only way to live in the world honestly is to choose—it's a kind of double blindness, really." Not only are you dark on the outside, you go dark on the inside as well. So we wondered, wouldn't it be, like, more than cool to get these two guys together to duke it out, not to mention how politically incorrect that would be. So we decided to put them together by phone. So even though one of them works and lives in the United Kingdom and the other in Australia, we worked through the very radical time differences and we brought them together.

JOHN HULL: Can you hear me?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes, I can hear you.

JOHN HULL: We've done it. Hooray!

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes, hooray.

ROBERT: Wow. Okay.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Good, good, good, good.

ROBERT: So here's what I'd like to do. Zoltan, can you just describe, since you're sitting there with your wife, what you know about her face?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Well, this is not a problem at all. I've known her for, what, 40-50 years now? And just through the touch, it is very, very easy to reconstruct her mouth and her turned-up nose and smile and her curly hair and ears. It's like a living image.

JOHN HULL: But tell me, when was the last time you actually saw her face with your eyes?

ZOLTAN TOREY: I never saw her face with my eyes.

JOHN HULL: Never?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Never. No, I met her only about five, six years after I lost my sight.

JOHN HULL: I see.

ZOLTAN TOREY: But this doesn't matter, John. This doesn't matter at all. The reconstruction is so vivid for me, I actually see it.

JOHN HULL: Well, I'm just lost for words. I—Zoltan tell me, are you totally blind?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes.

JOHN HULL: No light sensation?

ZOLTAN TOREY: None whatsoever.

JOHN HULL: Your wife's eyes, what color are they?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Brown.

JOHN HULL: Is that ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: Slightly flecked with little yellow spots in it. And they are also large, expressive.

JOHN HULL: She tells you her eyes are expressive.

ZOLTAN TOREY: No, no, no, no, no, John. There's more to it than that. I have years and years and years worth of experience, and other people's responses get all factored into the construction of a complex image.

JOHN HULL: But you cannot actually literally see her, you can only imagine that you can see her, so why does it matter?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Because emotionally, we do not react and cannot react properly to things that we cannot visualize. The whole human organism is constructed to react to pictures.

JAD: Yeah, I think he has—he has a point when he says that.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well, because I can't—if I think about it, I can't actually imagine having a feeling without a picture first.

ROBERT: Well, I can help you out. "I'm cold," I say. You don't have to see, like, icicles coming off my nose, you know that cold—you know what it means without—or this is a hard table. You don't need to see me hit it with a mallet.

JAD: No, I—that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about relationships. Like, don't you actually, in order to have a relationship with somebody, don't you have to first imagine them as a being in the world with a form that you can then attach your feelings to?

ROBERT: Well, only very vaguely. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there who listen to Radiolab if you do and heard it for a while, and you had a vague sense of who was talking and what they looked like, but it wasn't important. It didn't ...

JAD: I think it was important. I don't think they had this -- this image. I sort of hope they didn't, in a way. But—but I think you—I mean, you have to have some picture. I mean why is it, that quintessential experience when you listen to the radio and then suddenly you see the person on the radio and you're like, [gasp], you know? Like, that's—that's a classic experience. And I think it's because in that moment you realize you had been picturing somebody, and you have to picture that person in order to relate to them.

ROBERT: You have to?

JAD: Yeah, you can't relate to a blank.

ROBERT: Well, John would say that you're being a little narrow-minded, and that is exactly what he said to Zoltan.

JOHN HULL: Zoltan, you are trying to impose a visual totalitarianism upon the human brain.

ZOLTAN TOREY: No, no, no, no, John, It isn't I. We are visual creatures.

JOHN HULL: Blind people are not visual creatures.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Oh, come on. Come on, John. You said that you lost the visual world. Actually, I think that you just let it go. Now, I ...

JOHN HULL: I didn't just let it go, I extinguished it for the sake of a greater reality.

JAD: What is the greater reality, though?

ROBERT: John, he's gotten onto the truth.

JAD: Oh, come on, though. That's not—that's like accountants' version of truth. That's not a real truth.

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: If a truth is blank, then why would it be a greater reality than the opposite? A fantasy or whatever, a lie perhaps, but at least it allows you to be in the world with other people.

ROBERT: Oh, a lie. So you find a lie is a useful standard for how ...?

JAD: No. I just mean you want to live in the world, and you want to connect and be—okay.

ROBERT: I ...

JAD: Supposing he does it how he says he does ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Like, how do you even do that? How do you connect with something or someone that is absent, that is intentionally held as a blank? How do you do it?

ROBERT: Well, you know, that is actually a hard question. I couldn't quite figure it out for myself. So—so I asked him.

JOHN HULL: It's quite a difficult thing to describe. When our little boy Joshua, when he was about a year, 12 months old, 15 months maybe, my wife and I were at home and we had a visitor. Marilyn said to me—that's my wife, she said to me, "Tell me darling, what does Joshua look like?" I had to say, "Darling, you know he doesn't look like anything to me." She said, "Yes, yes. But what does Joshua mean to you?" And I said, "Well, Joshua to me is that giggling, thrilling, jumping, kicking bundle of boyhood that I throw over my shoulder. Joshua's those little feet that kick me in the chest. He's that beautiful, warm face that I lay my hand on when he's asleep."’

ROBERT: And that works for some people. And that is how John does it. That is John's way.

JAD: You know, seriously, every time I hear that story, I—all the memories of sitting on stage just come flooding back to me.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: It's so funny.

ROBERT: It was very, very fun to do and we ...

JAD: We're gonna do it again, actually.

ROBERT: Yes, we are touring with a new show, it's called Apocalyptical and it's—it's about—well, I don't want to—it's gonna be a lot of fun.

JAD: Yeah, you shouldn't give it away, it's gonna be—the name kind of, I think, says something about what's gonna happen on that stage.

ROBERT: And if you're in Ohio and you're living in Columbus or Cleveland, or you're in—in Toronto, Ontario ...

JAD: I've never been to Toronto, so that's gonna be fun.

ROBERT: Ann Arbor or Detroit or Milwaukee, or ...

JAD: Chicago ...

ROBERT: Yeah, the windy city.

JAD: My hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.

ROBERT: Atlanta Georgia, New York—my hometown—or Boston or Hartford or Denver.

JAD: Or Dallas or Austin or Houston or Oakland or Cupertino ...

ROBERT: We've been meaning to go to Austin, so yes. Cuper—even little Cupertino, and big fat Los Angeles, Portland ...

JAD: And Seattle.

ROBERT: Seattle. All those places if you live near or around or will be passing through those towns in October and November of this year you might want to come and visit us, because that would be very lovely.

JAD: Yeah. So the place to go if you’re interested is Radiolab.org/live. All the dates are listed there with links to tickets. Radiolab.org/live.

ROBERT: We'll be right back.

JAD: [laughs] In stereo.

 

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