The Amazing Capabilities of Touch

Blind from the age of 4, Netherlands-born Geerat Vermeij came with his family to the United states at an early age and studied in both residential and regular schools before attending Princeton University. During his senior year he applied to graduate schools to pursue evolutionary biology with a specialty in mollusks.

Most told him that his blindness would make such study impossible. Edgar Boell at Yale finally granted an interview. He took Vermeij to the museum, introduced him to the curator, and gave him a shell. Vermeij relates what happened.

“Here’s something. Do you know what it is?” Boell asked as he handed me a specimen. My fingers and mind raced. Widely separated ribs parallel to outer lip; large aperture; low spire; glossy; ribs reflected backward. “It’s a Harpa,” I replied tentatively. “It must be a Harpa major.” Right so far.

“How about this one?” inquired Boell, as another fine shell changed hands. Smooth, sleek, channeled suture, narrow opening; could be any olive. “It’s an olive. I’m pretty sure it’s Oliva sayana, the common one found from Florida, but they all look alike.”

Both men were momentarily speechless. They had planned this little exercise all along to call my bluff. Now that I had passed, Boell had undergone an instant metamorphosis. Beaming with enthusiasm and warmth, he promised me his full support.

Vermeij graduated with a Ph.D. and became professor of geology at the University of California, Davis, and editor of the scientific journal Evolution. Through his exquisite sense of touch he focuses on the physical characteristics of shells and necessarily ignores extraneous visual details. Ironically, this has enabled him to surpass many of hi sighted colleagues.

Braille, the system of raised dots that allows blind people to read with their fingers, provides another example of the remarkable capabilities of touch. The braille alphabet consists of raised dots in a 2 X 3 matrix. There are characters for each letter of the alphabet and for numbers, punctuation marks, and common speech sounds and words.

Until Louis Braille introduced his system to students at the Paris School for the Young Blind in 1824, the only reading materials available to blind people were a few books that embossed the shapes of conventional letters onto the page. They were rarely read because each letter had to be laboriously scanned to determine its complete shape.

Although the dots eliminated this problem, many sighted educators thought it absurd to teach the blind such a different and difficult, system. Nonetheless, blind students loved it and, in 1854, the system was officially recognized in France. Those who have learned the system can read at a rate of about 100 words per minute. This speed is particularly impressive given that the touch of raised dots must be transformed into vast amounts of information that go well beyond simply sensations on the skin.