Rotateller Rotary Club of Owego, NY
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 Gary Williams, Editor

VISITOR:

Annette Gibson

Welcome back to Dick Kelly

BIRTHDAYS:

I got my annual hug from Carolyn for our shared birthday (and I will remember to bring in my birthday check next week).

MUSIC:

Carl and Carolyn led us in, “You’re a Grand Old Flag”.

Congratulations to Bill Moon who retired 20 years ago!

WATERMAN:

Harry announced that there will be a Father’s Day breakfast on Hiawatha Island.

YOUTH SERVICES COMMITTEE:

Will meet tomorrow morning at 7:30.

STRAWBERRY FESTIVAL THIS SATURDAY. WE WILL BE IN FRONT OF TIOGA TRAVEL.

INDUCTION:

Orv inducted four members into the Club, making this a special day.

• Dave Sedelmeyer, who works at Lockheed Martin and was sponsored by Maria Fronek
• Carol Cavataio, is a former member and secretary. She and her husband, Paul, own the Owego and Endicott Agway stores.
• Janelle Malia, is a Physical Therapist and Massage Therapist and was sponsored by Carolyn Wright.
• Greg Poffenbarger is a subcontract administrator at Lockheed Martin and was sponsored by Steve Lounsberry.

PROGRAM:

Laura, appropriately, introduced Suzanne to tell us about her year. Besides having wonderful students, the Club – starting with Laura – deserves to be complimented for being wonderful and involved hosts. The girls had great involvement this year!

Suzanne started by reading an essay which she wrote for English about her year. She kept it together better than I did. Besides not being able to imagine being 18, she did a wonderful job of expressing what the experience and fears were like. What a roller-coaster in one year. Her slide show was great and the year has been all that she wanted it to be. These experiences have been a wonderful way for her to grow and to get to know herself better. When Suzanne goes home – after her trip – she will go to Amsterdam to study sociology and psychology.

50/50 Fred

I have attached another book review I have written for a journal. While this has obvious appeal for the optometrists, it is a fascinating story for almost any reader.

Crashing Through

By Robert Kurson

Crashing Through is a true story about Mike May who regains sight after a successful corneal transplant after being blind (light perception in one eye) for 40 years. Much of the book reads like a page-turner. He was a very successful blind person with a full life including having set the world speed skiing record for blind skiers at 65 mph. He was also very good at echolocation and used this, a cane, and a dog to go almost everywhere.

The surgery, which has only been performed less than 40 times, involves first transplanting corneal epithelial stem cells from one donor cornea at the limbus and then undergoing a corneal transplant months later from a second donor if the stem cells take. Having lost his vision at age 3, Mike May did not remember vision other than a faint memory of red. He did not feel deprived and used “imagination, reality, and the power of other’s passions to understand much of visual beauty”.

Little is made of it in the book, but it appears that May might have synesthesia, which is particularly interesting in someone who is blind and is not conscious of remembering visual images. “May told her that he saw numbers in colors – that sevens were green, fives were blue, and so on – and that he could add numbers with ferocious speed because they separated into numbers in his mind.”

When May found out about the possibility of having the surgery (there had been a few unsuccessful attempts in his youth) it took him a long time to decide. He did not feel that he was missing anything, but was also one to “crash through” to the next opportunity and challenge. One reason that he hesitated is that “By all accounts, vision was among the most dramatic and fundamental aspects of a sighted person’s life, basic to one’s self-conception.”

The book goes from becoming a page-turner story to providing page-turning insights after May has the surgery. There is a section at the end which tells about the perceptual aspects and scientific aspects. Visual information processing and visual development play leading roles, but as I read about his experiences, I kept thinking of how we all seem to be on a continuum. Much of what he describes sounds like the experiences of people with ADD, sensory integration disorder, or autism “because he sensed that he could not pay attention to feelings and to this new world at the same time, that if he were to think, the images would disappear, that the images required more than just his eye for their existence, they required all of him, and he knew that he didn’t want those images to go away, even if it meant postponing the explosions of joy he could feel bubbling underneath.” “’It is unrelenting,’ he thought to himself. ‘It’s thrilling, but I’m exhausted.’”

Similar to what Daniel Tamment tells us is his experience as someone who is an autistic savant in Born on a Blue Day, May has difficulty with faces. “When the women spoke their heads bobbed, their lips flapped, their hands gestured. This bedlam at once amused and distracted him, and try as he might he could not keep track of what they were saying so long as their faces ran spastic like that, and he wondered, even as he continued to smile pleasantly at their stories, how they could keep track themselves of even a word that came from such facial commotion.” “It is really hard work. It seems like I have to process every little thing consciously to understand what I’m seeing. Everything is interesting to me, but sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything in peace.” “I think that the best way I can describe it is that, for me, trying to see feels like trying to speak in a foreign language.”

After the surgery, May needed to learn to see. One eye had been removed. Some aspects of vision like color and motion seemed to work automatically, but for most aspects of vision, “the touch seemed to electrify the visual image and make it easier to understand.” “For him, context and expectation were everything; they literally produced better vision.”

His form vision and visual acuity were very poor and remained so. Letters and reading were particularly difficult. “May got the next three letters right. But by the time he’d come to the last letter, Y, he could not remember the first three, forcing him to start again.” How many children do we know who seem to operate this way? Even for those who work with children all the time, it can still be difficult to understand what they are experiencing and their frustrations. Marilyn Jager Adams has some important statements about this in her book, Learning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. “If it takes more than a moment to resolve the visual identities of successive letters in a word, then the stimulation of the visual recognition unit for the first will have dissipated by the time that the second has been turned on. Unless the units are active at the same time, there is no way for the system to learn about the important conjoint occurrence of their letters.” And “An extremely important role of the interletter associations is that they help us to encode the proper order of the letters we see. Although the visual system is quite fast and accurate at processing item information (such as the identities of the individual letters of a word), it is both slow and sloppy about processing their spatial location.”

This is another example of how a limited definition of vision is inadequate and inaccurate. “Recent advances in the ability to measure specific kinds of brain activity confirm that knowledge and vision are highly related. It is now thought that more than a third of the human brain is involved with vision, an indication of the magnitude of the task.”

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