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Imagine for a moment you were born without the capability to read these words, that you had no sight due to the cataracts that formed over your eyes at birth. As you progress through life you accept the range of senses provided to you. You study braille, making the written word accessible, providing a tool to gain scholarly knowledge and wide experience.

Now imagine, after fifty years of complete darkness, an operation is performed to remove those obstacles to your sight; Suddenly all the colours of the spectrum intensely flood your eyeballs, awash in a visual bombardment.

"When the bandages were removed, Virgil could see, but he had no idea what he was seeing. Light, movement and colour were all mixed up and meaningless".

"A cat was particularly puzzling, as he could see parts clearly—a paw, the nose, the tail—but the cat as a whole was only a blur, as were human faces." We can only imagine the visual insanity for Virgil gained from the staring at this animal, smooth fur, it's eyes ever staring, its tail gracefully flicking from side to side.

It really is fascinating to share this moment of intense experience with the man, a favourite line is "A few days after his operation, Virgil said that ‘trees didn’t look like anything on earth,’ but a month later he finally put a tree together and realized that the trunk and leaves formed a complete unit." A skyscraper was consider so strange as he puzzled over how it could even manage to stand.

You can read more from the sources of Answers In Genesis, or with less commentary from the Oliver Sacks excert: To See and Not See from An Anthropologist on Mars.

Enjoy your sight.