Feb
5
NPR: Blind Man 'Sees'
It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind. A former long-time executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., Stewart has a hereditary disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects the rods and cones in his eyes. In his 20s, his vision narrowed. By the time he hit 80, he was almost totally blind. But then he discovered that sometimes blindness comes with a bonus. One day while listening to a book on tape — 1776 by David McCullough — he heard how American sailors helped George Washington sneak cannons and horses across the Hudson River to escape the British. As Stewart mused about those sailors, very strangely, one of them appeared in his head — not a dreamy fantasy, but a vivid, highly detailed, very real-like hallucination.[via]