Molyneux question on auditory perception
In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question:
Could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see?
A scientific study [1] actually answered this question by conducting an experiment on the congenitally blind who have just been given the ability to see. They reported that such subjects could not distinguish a cube from a sphere by sight alone after their sight was restored, but they could rapidly learn to distinguish these shapes.
I ask a related question here:
Could someone who was born deaf (congenitally), and able to distinguish a snare drum from a cymbal by touch alone, be able to immediately distinguish and name these musical instruments by their sound alone (without seeing or feeling them) if given the ability to hear?
I think the latest study published in Nature Medicine [2] is rightly positioned to answer this question. I hope they investigate this very interesting question.
References:
[1] Held, R., Ostrovsky, Y., de Gelder, B., Gandhi, T., Ganesh, S., Mathur, U. and Sinha, P., 2011. The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt. Nature neuroscience, 14(5), pp.551-553.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2795
[2] Qi, J., Zhang, L., Lu, L. et al. AAV gene therapy for autosomal recessive deafness 9: a single-arm trial. Nature Medicine (2025).
Comments
Post a Comment