Blinded By Sight

Hello from Atlanta!
I'm here until Wednesday visiting my cousins and today I went to visit this new exhibit that just opened on August 31st called "Dialog in the Dark". The premise of the exhibit is to demonstrate how much people rely on sight and how when sight is taken away, your other senses are maximized. Each person on the tour is fit with their own cane, yes, as in canes that most blind people use to navigate the world every day.
In the beginning, there is an audio clip that describes how little attention is paid to the world using 4 of the 5 senses. These 4 senses work in the world regardless of whether or not it is light out or not. Chocolate will taste like chocolate even in the dark, and a rose will smell like a rose in the dark. But sight... sight is the only sense that loses it's power when the lights go out. And when you think about, ever since man discovered fire he has been working to obliterate darkness and all the presumed dangers that go with it.
As the audio clip ends, the lights begin to dim and eventually the room is a pit of darkness and I couldn't even see my own hand in front of my face. Our tour guide walks in and guides us into the next room which is a forest. I feel a breeze, I hear the birds, and I cross a bridge I felt the water from a waterfall. The entire tour lasts us an hour and through each room we walked through, I learned how to "see" things with my hands, ears, and nose. The one that seemed most interesting was when we went through a supermarket because most foods I recognized by seeing them, took me nearly twice as long to recognize by feeling (this was the second room I think during the tour). The other was when we had to simulate walking across the street, which btw, is A LOT harder than it seems doing without sight.
Before the end of the tour was "Dialog in the Dark" where we sat in the dark, in a cafe and asked questions. Our tour guide, Darren, was actually blind. He was born 3 months premature and lost most of his eye sight from too much exposure to oxygen when he was placed in a incubator following his birth. Up until the age of 7, he could still read most things if they were in large print. But he had about 14 eye surgeries between the ages of 7 and 8, pretty much eliminating what little eyesight he had left.
The most interesting point Darren made, I thought, about being blind was that blindness itself is not the disability, but rather the fear of the unknown. And when you think about it, that's exactly what it's about. Most people who are blind can still live perfectly normal lives, but to those of us who can see, it's the thought that we don't know what's going on around us that's scary. It was an eye-opening (no pun intended) experience for me and if anyone visits Atlanta in the near future, please look into visiting this exhibit.

http://www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com/