Robert Ornstein

When this operation had been performed on children who had been born blind and who had remained so for their first decade, everyone expected that these children would be able to see normally because now not only were their retinas and brains in tact but the lenses were also restored to their normal functioning.

But what happened was this: the new eye signals that were now clearly focused on the retina annoyed the children; they perceived them as painful and dazzling. None of these children could use the new visual information. They couldn't learn to see, to process visual patterns, or to recognize anything. Instead of the operation giving them new life it almost killed them. All became depressed and some committed suicide.

The unfinished brain, developing after birth, wires up differently in different worlds, and this is why individuals in different cultures have such difficulty understanding each other: even their visual systems are not exactly the same. People who grow up in forests lack the depth perception that the rest of us have; those who don't inhabit the "carpentered" modern world of straight edges and lines have a different way of seeing things than those who do.

-Robert Ornstein, Roots of the Self