Daredevil Message Board

[jumonji]

I realize this might just be the most pretentious topic title in the history of this message board. That's what happens when half your friends have a Ph D attached to their names (and they force you to read their dissertations).

Anyway... As someone who enjoys both superheroics and pondering the psychology of human perception (heck, I even wrote an essay on sensory compensation and cross-modal plasticity for my neurobiology class in college), it’s no small wonder that I like DD as much as I do. And I totally like how Brubaker is writing his senses right now. One of the things I really like is that he gets the "otherness" of DD's world really well. DD's "view" of the world does, after all, deviate pretty drastically from normal human perception. For better or worse (and, yes, I know some people have this idea that DD is better than everybody else at everything, but I doubt Matt Murdock could get a steady job as a movie reviewer...).

One thing that occurred to me recently, though, is that, even from the very beginning, the use of DD's radar sense has rarely, if ever, been described as actually seeing. The information gained from this sense might be described as "seeing," sensing, feeling, or something like that, but writers have generally been pretty good at understanding that, psychologically, the experience of this sense must, in many ways, differ from the subjective experience of seeing (in the usual sense of the word).

What people may not realize, is that this comes very close to what we know from real life studies into the nature of sensory substitution. Just to clarify, "sensory substitution" refers to replacing input from one (usually faulty) modality with input from another. Research into this area began as early as the late 60's, and has revealed some pretty interesting things about human perception. These studies have usually involved hooking up a camera to some device which analyzes the incoming signal and translates it into either an auditory or tactile stimulus. This stimulus is then received by a test subject who is given a certain number of hours of training in how to use the device and make sense of it.

The most surprising thing about most of these studies is that this phenomenon actually works. In one of the most famous experiments, using a visual-tactile system, subjects were able to, within a matter of hours, determine the shapes and distances of objects in view of the camera with incredible accuracy. After just a short while, the subjects were not even aware of the secondary stimulus (such as pressure points on the chest, for instance), but instantly became aware of the object they were being shown. Depth perception, shape recognition and a general sense of space could all be restored through non-visual means.

So, if this actually works, why aren't more blind people (the population which has traditionally been targeted for these kinds of devices) using the technology? Until recently, part of the answer was the size of the equipment people would have to carry around. But the more important reason, and one which continues to be a factor, is the fact that the experience itself is lacking. While this kind of technology can generate a form of synthetic vision, and actually does activate regions of the visual cortex associated with imagery (the "seeing in the mind's eye" phenomenon), it doesn't actually feel like seeing. It also doesn't generate the same kind of emotional response. The subjective perceptions and emotions generated by a particular sense are examples of what psychologists call qualia, and this dimension is lacking in sensory substitution.

So why bother posting this little mini-essay here? Well, like I said, this is an area I've always been interested in, since long before I even knew about DD, and it also serves to explain how it's possible to see and not to see at the same time. While it's futile (and ultimately incredibly geeky) to try to marry the real world with that of the Marvel Universe, not to mention trying to analyze the perceptions of a fictional character, it does provide something of a real-world analogy to how DD is able to reliably and accurately perceive his surroundings (with some limitations), while still essentially identifying as blind. To him, knowing what's right in from of him would probably not feel the same as actually seeing it. It would also make him psychologically blind to the realm of visual beauty. Even though his radar sense is a fictional sense, it is still a different sense from regular vision and would probably be subject to the real-world psychological limitations of sensory substitution.

To try to tie all this back into the context of the comics, I've noticed that this is pretty much how DD has always been written (it certainly explains his strong emotional response to the gift given to him by the Beyonder), although I have no idea if the writers have actually put any real thought into it. Perhaps this is something that strikes us all as a pretty natural consequence of removing one sense and replacing it with something else. One way Brubaker reminds us of this fact, to take a more recent example, is when Matt is in Europe and tells the reader: "According to guidebooks, Sintra was one of the most beautiful spots in Portugal. I wouldn't know."

Well, sorry about the geek fest people. I just figured I'd share what little I know about this particular area, and how it provides one way of looking at the radar sense.
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The Other Murdock Papers

[Neilan]

Wow. Thanks for the info, especially the parts I understood. I think it's a tribute to the DD creators, especially Stan Lee, that even though they more than likely had no knowlege of these experiments, they still tended to "get it right", for the most part, ignoring when they had Matt distinguish color by temperature.
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It's never too late to have a happy childhood!

[jumonji]

[Darediva]

Very interesting post, Christine. I've been gone for the better part of a week, and just getting back to checking message boards after selling braille t-shirts at the Texas convention of the NFB in San Antonio. After spending the weekend immersed in blindness-related topics, this post is very thought provoking.

I agree with you about that line from "Parts of a Hole". I think it sums up a good part of Matt's perception of the world at large, even as it does not contradict the theory of his radar sense.
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Alice




Those who throw dirt merely lose ground.