@@uuniin3622 he doesn't understand the concept of glow either but that's not the point, he will still find it interesting that the light can travel through
@@F0nkyNinja You can't have first hand experience of light itself interacting with your surroundings without sight. Touch and smell only let you perceive the effects of it's temperature on your surroundings.
@@Leongon Yeah but things like a wall or a coffee mug he has first hand experience of. He can smell the mortar, or feel how smooth the cup is. Reflective surfaces are very smooth to touch.
Hi Tommy - You asked, "Do you see the window AND the thing on the other side? Or do you not see the window?" Here's my attempt at an answer. If you're in a quiet room and the air conditioner is running, you can hear it easily. But if someone starts talking to you, your ears can technically hear both, but your brain ignores the fan sound and focuses on the person's voice, essentially making the fan 'disappear'. Now, if you consciously focus your attention back to the fan sound you'll be able to hear it again. Looking at or through a window is almost exactly the same in that if we focus on the window it's easy to see and the object behind it kind of gets ignored by our brain, but if we look THROUGH the window, it seems to disappear completely!
I wanted to say i hope he reads this but... if only, idk i just really hope someone points this out or maybe his device reads it so he can understand the concept
@OskarnikPL light bouncing off is reflection. Technically everything is reflective except for a true black body, which I don't think can actually exist.
@@filippians413 He is probably better at listening and memorizing words and sentences/information because he wasn't sharing it with the visual aspects of his mind. So he was taking all information that was audible as a young man more than likely. Kind of how we remember everything we see and if we saw it again we'd instantly remember it. He would instantly remember by sounds or feelings. So all of his memories are attached to a much less complicated process. That's my theory. Or he's just smart
Seeing through glass is like feeling an object in water. You are aware the water is there, but it doesn't affect how you feel the object. Translucent is like feeling something with gloves on, you loose a lot of detail but you get the jist
It just genuinely warms your heart to see how something "ordinary" like light bulbs and windows and water can bring so much amazement and joy to a person. It just really reminds you that all of life is a gift and that everything, no matter how insignificant it may seem, is important and special and mind-blowing to someone who hasn't had the opportunity to experience it.
Taryn Dipman I’m not blind, but from a photographer’s point of view water is more fascinating than to a regular person who might just pass reflections by without a second thought, whereas a photographer would compose a photo you might not have even thought could exist. Photography of reflective surfaces is my favorite because you never know what shot you will end up getting. If you get lucky you might for example get light reflecting off of the surface of a boat during sunset which you would normally ignore completely.
@@danthepyroman1 It has a layer of metal, and depends on having one side with little to no light sources. It's not tinted windows. And it totally exists.
I almost feel like he would very happy and excited and thrilled for maybe a year or two, then he would become just as accustomed to it as we are... Not feeling anything great about it. I feel he would be much happier just staying the way he is, there is so much for him to learn and wonder, so many things other people can tell about it, and so many things that keep him very curious and fascinated about the world around hm. I think that's true happiness, I think he's better off like this, he's been his whole life like this as I believe.
YoungD3mon314 that doesn't sound quite right. Idk of anyone borne blind having their sight returned but there are plenty of people who haven't been able to hear their entire lives who now, through science and medicine, can. Are those people always depressed?
80% of seeing is memory. I would imagine his first week of seeing would be extremely exhausting for him. The following 10 - 15 years would be spent learning how to see. By that i mean, yes, the visual information would travel through his eyes to his brain, but his brain wouldnt be able to interpret the information its given. It would be like listening to a new language for the first time, just gibberish.
All the armchair scientists are coming out if the woodwork... As a doctorate student in clinical psychology I'm well aware of the difficulties that would be associated with this man suddenly gaining the ability to see (although some of the ways in which they are described here are inaccurate). I was simply stating that, in a perfect world, it would be very nice to see how this man would appreciate gaining sight, something most of us take for granted. Nothing scientific about my comment.
Ben, I thought that the blanket and speaker was an excellent way to describe the difference between transparent and translucent to someone without sight! Makes total sense!
It's not basic and boring if you are the curious type, as you're drawn to want to understand how things work and you get fascinated at how light interacts with the real world before blasting into your eyes to show you shapes, shadows, reflections, textures. :O
@@Leongon yes it does get boring. We see light all day every day and even the most curious aren't thinking about the science behind what they see the whole time and take it for granted.
What's really crazy are iridescent or pearlesecent objects, like peacock feathers, certain insect shells, or certain gemstones. Those change color based on the exact angle you look at them from and have crazy, almost three dimensional looks to their color patterns. They can look multiple colors at once without at being a mix of those colors (IE, they can look blue and yellow at once without actually mixing together to make green).
PhantomZtryker he hasn't seen any of the stuff in this either but he's amazed bc he's heard abt the concepts ykno haha like i think he understands the basic idea of colors so this might be cool too :)
What's even crazier is how that works. The surface of iridescent objects has little "fingers" on it, which themselves have even smaller "fingers" on their edges. These tiny "fingers" are actually smaller than a wavelength of light, so they separate light into different wavelengths and only reflect certain ones at certain angles. That's why they look different from different angles. It's, sadly, something that a blind person could never experience or have described to them in any way really, because it's so purely a visual phenomenon.
That's because we don't think about it, it's so familiar to us that we have been desensitized to it, but to him it's so foreign and abstract and is why it blows his mind.
The best analogy I can think of for transparency is like if you stick your hand into a pool and grab a pair of goggles. You can feel the water, and the goggles at the same time. You can focus on either feeling more than the other, but you can still faintly feel the other and you're still touching both. Hopefully that makes some sort of sense :)
Ages to learn to be able to use the eyes? Looking back this reply doesn't make sense. The original comment was just to get the man some eyes. Pessimism in response to a wholesome, well meaning comment kinda puts a downer on stuff ngl. But yeah, no depressive feelings :)
Good points. Wish they had talked about that. "Oh yeah, and by the way, spoons reflect everything upside down." It seems such a random thing to say if you're not used to it. Like... why spoons? Are they evil?
yep anything that is concave (curved away from you) will reflect an image upside down becuase due to the curve the bottom part is facing up and the top part is facing down so the image will become completely flipped
I love the newer videos where Ben is also shown. You can see their friendship and how they interact and make videos together. That i think gives the newer videos much more quality and makes them much more enjoyable. I espacially love the videos with the 3D printed objects.
I can't explain how much I want technology to completely advance in Tommy's lifespan to give him sight. Like I really want to see him react to what all these things actually look like. I would love to see him just be happy and see everything that people love seeing, like tourist sights. Granted, most tech is used on video games and entertainment, but a guy can really hope.
@@adomaster123 really tho. there's a shitload of tech in stem cell research. those could potentially literally be used to regrow eyes. i wish human experimentation wasn't so restricted.
Ebilbacon88 unfortunately if you did not see as a child in early developmental stages you literally can't comprehend objects or sight really. You just see blurry colors and don't understand everything. The synapses didn't connect when you were young. There were experiments on cats where they were raised inside and the walls only had vertical lines, and when they were older they had a very hard time understanding horizontal lines and their neurons didn't fire nearly as much when exposed to horizontal lines
so crazy that things we take for granted can blow Tommy's mind. I've never even thought about how cool it was that we can see the transparent object and see whats beyond it at the same time. These are thoughts I typically have when Im high, Tommy. not stone cold sober and watching a blind guy on youtube lolz
I smiled through the entire video at his awe of everything. One of my fave videos of Tommy Edison's so far. I just discovered him last month and listen to his videos every chance I get! So uplifting and it makes you realize how fortunate we can be. I know that if I lost my eyeight I don't know what I'd do! It would be a learning curve that's for sure and learning to do normal things differently but learn new things too, like change jobs completely for one, having to take the bus or carpool, TV or shows or movies with descriptive audio, TV shows and movies are my escapisms and also need to fall asleep on them to quiet my invasive brain, mind and thoughts, listen to more podcasts, switch from books to audiobooks, miss my eyesight and the beauties this world offers. Oh and I have a little fear of not knowing or seeing what I eat, so I'd be afraid to accidently eat bugs, my long hair that may have fallen in my food, random tiny pieces of things around the house lol... I know I'd clean more I guess haha
MultiK all skin is at least slighty translucent. A Word for what is happening is «subsurface scattering». Most things do this, except for metals and maybe some rock material?
Adding on to this, skin is usually most translucent around the underside of people’s wrists! Veins are also visible on the underside of the elbow, which is part of the reason blood is drawn from that location, I think. I’d say you can only see about 5mm down though; it’s not like you can see straight through to someone’s heart.
@@belleociraptor3826 That would actually be kind of cool! :O XD (If you could see through someone's body like it is fog, the top would be transparent but as you get deeper it just becomes a dark void.
@@undyingdefect , what? More melanin would make a person's skin darker and thus less reflective. If you're driving at night and a very black and very white person are standing in the road, you'll be much more able to see the white person.
Hey. I have this really urging question. What is beautiful for you? I mean, what does it mean to you the idea of beutiful? Could you please describe it to sighted people? I really want to now if the idea of beutiful has meaning to you only by descriptions of sighted people or if you just have your own conception. Please, I´d really appreciate if you just made a video about what do you understand by beautiful, examples, anecdotes... everything. Btw, one of the reasons for me to ask this is that I study philosophy and so I really want to find out about that subject from the perspective of someone that has never seen anything. Thanks.
Something that invokes a pleasing response. Various songs, physical art, food, aromas have been beautiful to me. And a lot of visual experiences too. Sight is just a sense from which to 'see' beauty.
I definately agree with what you say. People do consider things, other than visual ones, beautiful. However, my question arises from the doubt about the primacy of sight in that regard. Maybe we consider sounds, aromas, tastes an so forth because we make inferences from what we see as beautiful. It´s a possibility but I wouldn´t like it to be the case. That´s why I ask.
Yeah, I saw it but that´s not really what I was asking about. The attractiveness or appeal of people is not really a matter of beauty, or at least not in the strict sense. There´s way too biology, nurture, interpersonal interactions & social influences in the middle to arrive at the fact that someone is attractive and that fact is entirely different from the fact of finding something beautiful because this latter doesn´t regard exclusively to people.
A thing I would say is the tactile version of transparent would be room-temperature water. You can tell it's there, but you really don't take note of it unless you really focus on it.
To answer to your question: "When you look through a window, do you only see what's on the other side, or do you also see the window ?" Actually a window is almost never 100% transparent. It can have dust on it, it can have a little bit of tint, and according to the light conditions and the angle you look at it, it will have reflexion. So you can see all of this things that hint there is a window, as well as you see through it. It's kind of translucent but with much less alteration of the picture.
JérémY GrecTé Not 100% because it isn't possible for it to be invisible if it has atoms and stuff. Glass is slightly green and you can see that in very thick glass or if you look at the edge of a pane of glass.
you can have glass doors clear enough that people will smash their faces against it. my old house had one. not only a few people did that, but also the dog. it was hilarious, if really dangerous. if that door shattered that huge shards that would form wouldn't be a joke. i know of people who died like that.
You can make things that are 100% transparent at the visible light spectrum. Nothing made of normal matter could be invisible to all wavelengths, but nothing is preventing normal matter from being invisible to a specific range of light.
He sees definitely and that they then makes it amazing is that he sees through us which makes it more amazing you don’t need ice because you’re sometimes not able to fix the world and he doesn’t fix the world but he definitely fixes our life makes us appreciate The best teams colors to start with the way he explained Transparency
really what you see are the imperfections in a window. So maybe it's like feeling a wall, but knowing even though it's a little bumpy it's still a flat wall underneath? which is still a bad example.
Core Blaster it's more like hearing two things at once. In this example it's like one speaker is playing music louder but you can still hear the other one.
This will really melt you brain, EVERYTHING is reflective, that's how we see color. Some light is adsorbed, others is reflected, and that reflected light is what we perceive as the color of something.
mlekoduszek impossible maybe a decade ago but the way technology is progressing, it’s not impossible in his lifetime. It might not be perfect, it even may be very bad vision, but any vision is something
I really hope that wouldn't lead to like a heart attack or something out of shock. I cant imagine living majority of my life without sight and then suddenly having it
mlekoduszek maybe they cant fix his eyes, but they could invent a machine that will record surroundings and send the information to the brain, same way they have machines that send electromagnetic pulses to the muscles that can make them move same way the brain does
At this moment, I want nothing more than for there to be a way for Tommy to be able to see things. I want to see him experience a world he currently can't even properly comprehend. I want him to see something as simple as a window and think "Oh, that's how that works." Things we don't even think about would be just almost magical to him. Someday, I am positive that there will be a way for this to be possible. I just hope it happens soon.
SalaComMander unfortunately if you are born unable to see, and in early developmental stages you are blind, then if your sight is restored you literally can't comprehend or discern objects or motion or general sight. You just see blurry colors and don't understand. The synapses didn't connect when you were young. There were experiments on cats where they were raised inside and the walls and everything around them only had vertical lines, and when they were older they had a very hard time understanding horizontal lines and their neurons didn't fire nearly as much when exposed to horizontal lines
Unfortunately as others have stated it probably wouldn't work; at least not in the way that you might hope, but that's okay because the world already is magical to him, even just hearing people to try to explain what to us are common aspects of vision that we take for granted blow this guy's mind and I think that it must be quite cool for him to think about; just like how there are animals out there who can see colours in the spectrum that humans cannot and that we could never even comprehend or imagine how they might look.
still watching the vid, so please forgive me if you address this, but you can think of transparency, translucency, and reflectiveness in terms of sound. Transparency is like a screen door; a physical barrier but sound can get through unimpeded for the most part. translucency is like hearing sounds through a wall. it's muffled, but sometimes you can make out what the sound is. reflectiveness is like an echo. Think of putting your face 3 inches from a wall and then yelling into it. you'll hear your voice bounce off the walls and into your ears. Now, just replace sound with light and it's a very similar experience. I love the videos, Tommy! You always brighten my day.
Tommy really makes me think about things in another perspective and appreciate smaller details that I don't pay attention too, I guess you can say they get lost and forgotten about in all the things that I do see everyday and he really makes me smile and brings out the kid in me. I really like you Tommy, thank you for brightening my day.
I can not explain how much this has helped me understand just how many little details there are in the experience I have vs a born blind person. You blew my mind sir, thank you.
Seeing through glass (transparent) is like hearing sounds through a piece of fabric. If the glass is "smoked" in color (translucent) seeing through it is like hearing sounds through a thin pillow. The image is as "muffled" to us as the sound is to you. For a reflective analogy I would recommend taking a tour of a radio station. Go in the booth, where there is acoustic foams designed to absorb all reflected sounds. Being in the near complete absence of sound reflections is the best way I can think of to illustrate the point.
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The Tommy Edison Experience You should have Tommy react to Auditory Illusions. I think he'd find them fascinating since it's impossible for him to understand visual ones
*My usual question..* when you're trying to recall something, do you look up and to the left/right? Or if you're remembering something you heard, do you look to the side? Body language experts say we do it subconsciously. THANKS, Tommy.. you're awesome!
adam mac His eye muscles might not be strong enough to involuntarily move around. That's why he doesn't open his eyes; his eyelid muscles aren't developed much.
bobby Yea exactly why I'm curious if Tommy does it. It's not 100% accurate though and can depend on the person's dominate hand/brain hemisphere. I'm left-handed so I typically do the opposite.
allycookie2009 It could be people who become blind after birth who do that. Tommy's body has absolutely no need to move his eyes or eyelids around in any capacity, so I doubt they move around much at all. But hey - I'm no expert nor am I blind, so don't quote me on that.
It’s amazing how knowledgeable this man is about the world he doesn’t see. He knows so much about seeing yet he’s never experienced it. It makes me think “what sense have I never experienced but might be able to understand?”
Hey Tommy great video! you might find it interesting that some meat is translucent before being cooked, like chicken and some fish but when you cook it it changes and often you can tell its cooked because it will be completely opaque.
May god bless this mans soul. I do not know how express how much this man has inspired me in just 9 minutes and 45 seconds, with him having such an amazing mind, spirit, and personality. He is such a happy soul, despite him having this disability, he is so intreuged by a subject, that at the same time is his hardship. I dont know what i would do in this guys position. I honestly think i would loose every last ounce of hope i may have had left. Just witnessing this, makes me so much more greatful of the things i take for granted every single day. Please everyone, take this into consideration. With that said, God bless all of you wonderful people, and may you have an amazing day😊
I feel like transparent would be like trying to feel something through another material. Like if you put a napkin over a chess piece, you can feel both the napkin and the chess piece. The more transparent something is, the thinner the material covering the other object in the analogy. The brighter the the object, the bumpier or sharper or more contoured the object being covered is. A thick blanket would be “translucent”, where a cup would be “opaque”
Really very surprising. You live in the same world as I do but your perception is so much different. So interesting to investigate the differences like this. Great video
I thought of a way to describe transparency in a way that Tommy might understand. Imagine that you have a bowl of water with some object in it. Like a metal ball bearing. If you were to reach your hand through the water you could feel the ball bearing but you could also feel the water on your skin. It's sort of the same with windows. You can see the window and it's easy to tell that there is a window there, and you can also see everything on the other side of the window.
This reminded me of how I would explain things to my grandfather. He lost his sight at a very young age so he only knew what certain things and generally how people and some animals looked like. He was a master carpenter, too. I love watching these videos where you discuss these types of visual concepts. Again my grandfather had sight for a short time so he knew what it was but I never knew what it would be like for someone else. The mugs look really nice!
Tommy, appreciate the experiences you put yourself through! From a writers point of view, it helps me really get into the mind of a character that might be somewhat, or completely blind. You give a first-hand account of what you feel and experience. So thanks!
This is such a wholesome, wonderful channel, and I'm really glad that it's doing well. I would love these videos even if they didn't challenge the way I view the world around me, but that fresh perspective makes them invaluable. Thank you.
Actually anything visible to humans is reflecting visible light. We see objects because light from a lightsource bounces off of the object and enters the eye, so if it didnt reflect light there would be no photons hitting your retina and it would be either completely black (it would absorb all the light and reflect none (google 'ventablack')) or it would be completely transparent (meaning it would let all the light pass through, and be clearer than any glass you can imagine). Pretty much anything you can think of reflects light in a diffuse and a specular way, albeit in different proportions. What you guys were talking about were specular reflections. Optics is such an interesting and mindblowing topic, I don't blame you for "not getting it", Tommy. Sometimes us sighted people don't get it either :P
Very true, since they are both waves. Although an important distinction is that the sound we hear is a lot longer in wavelength, so it is much more difficult to map out a detailed "picture" with sound, than it is with light. Bats do it with sound higher in frequency than you can hear. Sound, with its long wavelength on the order of a yard, tends to diffract, diffuse and interfere, so it is not an easy wave to use for keeping track of an exact path from source to receiver. Imagine a 10'x10' grid of speakers on a wall, 100 of them, each playing a different tone. When standing ten yards away, could you tell which speaker is playing which tone? Not easily. Because the sound doesn't travel straight out from the speaker, and the sound interferes with the neighboring speaker. With light by contrast, it has a shorter wavelength, less than a millionth the wavelength of a typical sound in air, it has a lot more directionality to it. If you replace that grid of speakers, with a grid of colored tiles, everyone with working color vision can tell you the color of the tile in row 6 column 2. Still diffracts, diffuses, and interferes, but it is a lot easier to preserve light in a common direction, and make sources of light that focus on emitting it in only one direction. Our eyes are also tuned to distinguish the frequencies of light, better than our ears can distinguish frequencies of sound. Our eyes can identify individual colors, whereas our ears compound multiple tones to sound like one sound, and don't instinctively differentiate them. Long wavelengths are good for communication. Short wavelengths are good for directional detail.
J-sUn the wall muffling analogy wasn't great, because like he said certain wavelengths would be more affected. It should've been explained in terms of two sound signals interfering.
I love how you are the type of person who isn’t sad about something you can’t change and happily live with it. You treat it like your ability, I really respect you.
This video is wonderful. Incidentally, Tommy do you know that milk is opaque? It's an opaque white liquid - if you pour it into a transparent glass, you won't be able to see through the other side! I've always found that strange
I have breast implants so if I put a flashlight under it lights up my whole boob and all the crazy veins inside. Way cool, it’s more detail than what I can see in my hand so I find it to be more fun to see how it all looks lol
Looking through a transparent material is like listening to a song on a record player with that little hiss on top of the music. You can hear the hiss and it's separate from the music but you can tune it out and concentrate on the music.
It is so interesting to see someones reaction to something they have never see, and only read or been told about, what a great video . It has truly opened my mind, thank you.
I can come up with some analogies for transparent, opaque, and translucent using the sense of feel/touch. Let's say you're using your hand and fingers to read something in Braille on a plastic card. Let's say the card is sitting on a table, you walk up to it, you touch it, you read it. That's like someone looking at something through the air, 100% transparent. It doesn't interfere with your ability to see at all. Now let's say you put a very thin rubber glove on your hand and try to read the braille on the card. You can still feel and read the words, but maybe it's a little bit harder and you can probably feel the glove itself. That's what we experience when something looks transparent. Depending on how transparent the thing is (analogy: how thin the glove is), we can see through it with varying amounts of ease and we can also see the thing itself to a varying degree. Those two factors are usually opposite to each other, so the more you can see the thing, the less you can see through it (the more you can feel the glove, the harder it is to feel through it). This leads directly into "translucent" in that once the glove gets to a certain thickness, you can't really feel the Braille anymore. With a very thick glove when you pick up the card, you can still feel that you're holding something, but the fine details of the braille itself can't be felt through the glove. In the same way, looking through something translucent, you might be able to see that there's something on the other side, but you can't see any of the details. Opaque would be like you put a big stone slab over the card on the table. You feel the stone slab, but there's no way you could feel through the slab to have any idea what's on the other side. In the same way we can't see through something that's opaque, and would have no idea what (if anything) is on the other side of that object. The most important thing to note is that these three properties are a pretty smooth gradient. Even with glass, you can move in very small steps from a piece of very translucent glass to a piece of entirely opaque glass, in the same way that you could move from a very thin rubber glove, to a thick one, to a huge chunk of rubber encasing your whole hand. Reflection is a bit of a different thing, and I can't really think of how it would work with this same analogy. If you pressed me, I might be able to come up with something good using sound.
Actually reflection is fairly easy the sonic version of specular reflection would be echo and the diffuse reflection equivalent is reverb since in the former the reflected sound is clearly identifiable as the original sound (May be distorted if the reflecting hard surface is say smooth and curved but you can still make out most of the original sound). With reverb the reflected sound is scattered to the point that it's more of a general sense of noise to our ears than anything that we could clearly pick up the details of the original sound in.
An easy comparison for transparemcy, I think. You can easily hear someone from the other side of a thin door or wall like you can see someone through a window. However, you're also aware that the wall/door/window is there because the sound/light doesn't fully penetrate through. Let me know if it helps :)
Your hand is also translucent. You cannot see through it, but if you shine a very bright light directly at it like a flashlight, your fingers will glow red! ;-)
What an amazing Channel. This just appeared on my recommended (not this video specifically but this channel's videos) and I know for sure that I'm not the only one who has come here because of it. That's a shame that the channel is no longer uploading videos.
To be correct: EVERYTHING is reflective. Some things more, like a polished door knob, some things less, like black cloth in a cinema. If things weren't reflective in any way, we wouldn't be able to see them. This is because our eyes pick up the light that comes from a source that then bounces off the surface of the object we're looking at. If no light bounces off then there's literally nothing to see.
Only things I can think of that truly aren't reflective at all are black holes and vantablack. Anything painted in vantablack literally looks two dimentional. Other than that, everything else has at least some slight reflective properties
That depends on your definition of reflective. Yes, they are technically reflective, but diffuse objects are not considered to be classically reflective, because reflective generally implies the reflection of distinguisible information.
@@xero2715 Can you see ? Yes? So it's reflective with a wavelength in the spectrum visible to humans. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it. ...or there's no lightsource around... But that's not what we're talking about.
This guy is awesome! Just his attitude and demeanor. I’m a grown man, but having an inquisitive nature it’s so neat hearing his perspective. His honesty and TRANSPARENCY is top notch!
I am going to keep asking this question until Tommy answers it haha. How do blind people solve long math problems in school? I know there is braille to read, but how would you represent complicated figures often used in advanced math? I am very curious
They are sometimes extremely good at math. Math has very little to do with sight. Adding 2+2, but in braille, is very simple to do in the your head. A blind kid in my class could figure out what weekday a certain date was. Even if it was 100 years in the past. Or the third monday in february 2112. I used my phone to control and he was always right and it was only hard for him if I went beyond 100 years. Hard as in it would take him ten seconds and not an instant.
@@momatotsosrorudodi I think he's more talking about symbols such as integral or capital sigma, or like how they'd figure out polynomial division if they couldn't write down what they had so far. I don't think he's doubting their ability to do maths (especially since he said "long maths problems"), just wondering how they go about doing things that use symbols that aren't in the alphabet or how they keep track of large or multiple numbers.
@@jonathanodude6660 There are braille math symbols. Math is a language. The symbols simply translate the same concepts. The plus sign doesn't have to look like this(+). It could look like this (.:.) and 2.:.2 would equal 4. If they learned math(it's a language you can get fluent in) then they would probably be good at describing their own thought process on paper with their equivalent math symbols that would make sense when 'translated' into our symbols.
Mats Rudi well + is a simple symbol that has a definite meaning. Sigma is a Greek symbol that can mean sum as a capital, but then how do you write the starting point and limit? And then after that you have to have the actual equation that you're summing up. If they can't write things down, how do you feel how many times you've summed? And then lowercase sigma means standard deviation but it can also mean an angle, electrical conductivity, the Boltzmann constant, surface charge density or surface tension. Is the symbol for all of these different? Or is there a difference between the Greek letter sigma and the maths version of sigma? If so do they have to understand multiple languages of braille or can they just imagine what it would be in their mind? Or is every sigma the same just like in English? And if it is how do they tell the difference between them when it appears multiple times in a single equation? If it's just context like we use then sure but they can't exactly write in braille so how do they keep track of their thoughts? Do they just have to remember everything or do they make a picture of the equation in their mind and imagine writing the working down? Also how do they tell the difference between capital and lower case letters such as when you're doing a probability assessment where you'd write something like p(X)=x? How much would they need to remember considering they have to remember not only how their language works, but the meaning of all these symbols that use the same format as their language but a completely different meaning? I searched it up just then and they actually do have to remember not only English braille, but nemeth braille and international Greek braille in order to do maths. But that still leaves the question of how the hell do you write braille to show how far you are in computing ∫tan^2(x)dx if you can't write down your steps?
@@jonathanodude6660 They have special paper that they can press braille into by hand. It's thin plastic(the ones I have seen are translucent like a shower wall) A4 sized 'paper' notes. Whatever language they use it's not limited in anyway and they should be able to express calculus(but with modified symbols). I'm not sure how the symbols look like in braille though. They can also do math on a computer with a braille keyboard. They can type in their process in word and their keyboard allows them to read the lines.
Its weird to think that he hasnt ever seen a human. He can make a guess based on what he feels but theres no way for him to know. I cant wait until we find some way to let blind people see and watch their reactions. Sight really is amazing
I should really go to bed but this guys channel is so relaxing, he's so excited by these little things we pass off as normal every day. Really makes you appreciate the little things, I want to buy this guy a beer
This was my favorite video so far♥️♥️I love your excitement with the little things that we take for granted every day. You just seem super cool. Thanks so much for making this channel!
This seems like it should be very easy to explain to a blind person by using sound as an analogy (muffler is translucent for sound, echoes are refection, sound proofing is opaque, etc) so the can conceptualise how it works.
Even if we had the tech to fix his eyes, his brain missed the developmental part of growing up so he would have no idea how to process the data going to his brain.
Not sure how I ended up here but I'm glad I did. There's something about just watching and listening to Tommy that makes me want to be a better person. . .
Tell him about how a bright flashlight can shine through your hand and make it glow red
Or your ear! (Although I would have said orange, not red.)
You can also see your bones
He doesn't even know what red is he'd be like "uhmm... ok cool I guess"
Except he doesn't understand the concept of "red"
@@uuniin3622 he doesn't understand the concept of glow either but that's not the point, he will still find it interesting that the light can travel through
His knowledge of something that he has no first hand experience of is amazing.
he has first hand experience of it through touch and smell.
@@F0nkyNinja You can't have first hand experience of light itself interacting with your surroundings without sight. Touch and smell only let you perceive the effects of it's temperature on your surroundings.
@@Leongon Yeah but things like a wall or a coffee mug he has first hand experience of. He can smell the mortar, or feel how smooth the cup is. Reflective surfaces are very smooth to touch.
@@F0nkyNinja first hand experience in feeling textures, not light interaction with textures. Do you have something against reality?
@@Leongon What?
Hi Tommy - You asked, "Do you see the window AND the thing on the other side? Or do you not see the window?"
Here's my attempt at an answer. If you're in a quiet room and the air conditioner is running, you can hear it easily. But if someone starts talking to you, your ears can technically hear both, but your brain ignores the fan sound and focuses on the person's voice, essentially making the fan 'disappear'. Now, if you consciously focus your attention back to the fan sound you'll be able to hear it again. Looking at or through a window is almost exactly the same in that if we focus on the window it's easy to see and the object behind it kind of gets ignored by our brain, but if we look THROUGH the window, it seems to disappear completely!
I wanted to say i hope he reads this but... if only, idk i just really hope someone points this out or maybe his device reads it so he can understand the concept
truthsmiles excellent explanation!
But he can’t read this
Icehawk06 Sure, but he can hear his screen reading software read it to him.
@@Ice_fnt there are apps that read things for him
Can we just appreciate how accurate Ben's comparison of sound being muffled to light being blurred is?
Yuujin yeas
That was brilliant!
yeas
Perfect analogy 👌
I was waiting for him to compare reflective as being like an echo
Peoples eyes are also reflective. You can see yourself in someone else’s eyes!! I was hoping he’d tell you that
The moon is also reflective
Look up the etymology of the word pupil, it means a little child. You see a little version of yourself in someone's eye, like a little child.
Oh, yeah, I never would have thought of that!
me too. I was waiting for him to try to figure that out.
@OskarnikPL light bouncing off is reflection.
Technically everything is reflective except for a true black body, which I don't think can actually exist.
A bubble can be:
1 transparent
2 translucent
&
3 reflective
you can see both the bubble, what's behind the bubble and the reflection in the bubble
Bubbles are weird in general: they warp light in ways that I would guess to be very difficult for a blind person to understand
Also opaque
And iridescent
And it has a cool rainbow effect 🌈🛀🧼
This guy is so intelligent.
I think he became even smarter to compensate for his blindness.
thanks!
@@filippians413 He is probably better at listening and memorizing words and sentences/information because he wasn't sharing it with the visual aspects of his mind. So he was taking all information that was audible as a young man more than likely. Kind of how we remember everything we see and if we saw it again we'd instantly remember it. He would instantly remember by sounds or feelings. So all of his memories are attached to a much less complicated process. That's my theory. Or he's just smart
@@jacobsegroves7456 Ya bro. No vision but high IQ for sure.
Ryan Corrigan because he cant do a lot of shits so he studies/learns a lot of things
Seeing through glass is like feeling an object in water. You are aware the water is there, but it doesn't affect how you feel the object. Translucent is like feeling something with gloves on, you loose a lot of detail but you get the jist
i get the jizz. UwU please give me the jizz.
@@momon1413 oh dear
@@momon1413 So, how do I apply to give you my jist?
@@momon1413 oh no, its a degenerate
@@momon1413 did you even read your own comments.
It just genuinely warms your heart to see how something "ordinary" like light bulbs and windows and water can bring so much amazement and joy to a person. It just really reminds you that all of life is a gift and that everything, no matter how insignificant it may seem, is important and special and mind-blowing to someone who hasn't had the opportunity to experience it.
Taryn Dipman I’m not blind, but from a photographer’s point of view water is more fascinating than to a regular person who might just pass reflections by without a second thought, whereas a photographer would compose a photo you might not have even thought could exist. Photography of reflective surfaces is my favorite because you never know what shot you will end up getting. If you get lucky you might for example get light reflecting off of the surface of a boat during sunset which you would normally ignore completely.
“Depends who’s in it”. That was so low-key smooth.
Do you really want to blow his mind?
One-way mirror!
He's not ready lmao
They dont exist
@@danthepyroman1 Hint: Interrogation rooms.
@@Leongon physics mate. Their just tinted not one-way
@@danthepyroman1 It has a layer of metal, and depends on having one side with little to no light sources. It's not tinted windows. And it totally exists.
I desperately want for this man to gain the ability to see. He would experience such wonder in things that we all take for granted every day
I almost feel like he would very happy and excited and thrilled for maybe a year or two, then he would become just as accustomed to it as we are... Not feeling anything great about it. I feel he would be much happier just staying the way he is, there is so much for him to learn and wonder, so many things other people can tell about it, and so many things that keep him very curious and fascinated about the world around hm. I think that's true happiness, I think he's better off like this, he's been his whole life like this as I believe.
@@ArnoldSig How in the world would you know what true happiness is for him?
YoungD3mon314 that doesn't sound quite right. Idk of anyone borne blind having their sight returned but there are plenty of people who haven't been able to hear their entire lives who now, through science and medicine, can. Are those people always depressed?
80% of seeing is memory. I would imagine his first week of seeing would be extremely exhausting for him. The following 10 - 15 years would be spent learning how to see. By that i mean, yes, the visual information would travel through his eyes to his brain, but his brain wouldnt be able to interpret the information its given. It would be like listening to a new language for the first time, just gibberish.
All the armchair scientists are coming out if the woodwork... As a doctorate student in clinical psychology I'm well aware of the difficulties that would be associated with this man suddenly gaining the ability to see (although some of the ways in which they are described here are inaccurate). I was simply stating that, in a perfect world, it would be very nice to see how this man would appreciate gaining sight, something most of us take for granted. Nothing scientific about my comment.
Ben, I thought that the blanket and speaker was an excellent way to describe the difference between transparent and translucent to someone without sight! Makes total sense!
thogg11 well I came up with the same example even for a few things that were not explained to him
Me too, LOL. They're fairly obvious analogies. I would use the analogy of a screen door for transparency.
Yes!!
I was thinking like that, but with touch. Like touching bare skin, then through a thick fabric
Thanks!
For us it's something so basic and boring but to a blind person it's mind shattering.
It's not basic and boring if you are the curious type, as you're drawn to want to understand how things work and you get fascinated at how light interacts with the real world before blasting into your eyes to show you shapes, shadows, reflections, textures. :O
Physicists spent years studying this. I’m sure they didn’t think it was boring.
Shattering.. Glass.. Transpa- i'm sorry.
That's what I like most about weed. Makes you see everything in a different light. Turns some of the most basic things so fascinating
@@Leongon yes it does get boring. We see light all day every day and even the most curious aren't thinking about the science behind what they see the whole time and take it for granted.
This video made me feel very good and very grateful. Bless this guy and his videographer
What's really crazy are iridescent or pearlesecent objects, like peacock feathers, certain insect shells, or certain gemstones. Those change color based on the exact angle you look at them from and have crazy, almost three dimensional looks to their color patterns. They can look multiple colors at once without at being a mix of those colors (IE, they can look blue and yellow at once without actually mixing together to make green).
Jabberwockxeno no stop. It will overload Tommy's brain and he might have a existential crisis if Ben reads this to him
Yeah but since he hasn't seen colors that would make no sense to him.
PhantomZtryker he hasn't seen any of the stuff in this either but he's amazed bc he's heard abt the concepts ykno haha like i think he understands the basic idea of colors so this might be cool too :)
Iridescent colors are a visual fruit-salad. All the flavors are distinct, yet can be experienced at once.
What's even crazier is how that works. The surface of iridescent objects has little "fingers" on it, which themselves have even smaller "fingers" on their edges. These tiny "fingers" are actually smaller than a wavelength of light, so they separate light into different wavelengths and only reflect certain ones at certain angles. That's why they look different from different angles.
It's, sadly, something that a blind person could never experience or have described to them in any way really, because it's so purely a visual phenomenon.
Wow, I was trying to think of examples for each of these and tommy knew more off the top of his head than I did
Same actually, I'm ashamed, lmao.
That's because we don't think about it, it's so familiar to us that we have been desensitized to it, but to him it's so foreign and abstract and is why it blows his mind.
lol!
When a blind person know more about objects we see every day than the average person lol
That is because he has an entirely different and unique experience with those objects than us.
I love how happy he gets over just being described these objects. Makes me have more appreciation for my sight :)
The best analogy I can think of for transparency is like if you stick your hand into a pool and grab a pair of goggles. You can feel the water, and the goggles at the same time. You can focus on either feeling more than the other, but you can still faintly feel the other and you're still touching both.
Hopefully that makes some sort of sense :)
Not a bad description
Lauraphoid Thanks! I tried lol
JustMelTheWriter yeah ur eyes are basically a camera lens you can focus on certain things and the rest will be blurry but only one thing at a time
That's cool, well done
And you expect him to read this?
His personality warms my heart
We need to get Tommy some eyes man. Dude deserves to see the world. Every blind person does!
It will take ages for him to learn how to be able to use it.
Ah yes, best give up on all medical advancement because it may take too long 👌🏽
@@mustnz998 I didn't say that. Just that it will take ages for him to learn. No depressive feelings there. ;)
Ages to learn to be able to use the eyes? Looking back this reply doesn't make sense. The original comment was just to get the man some eyes. Pessimism in response to a wholesome, well meaning comment kinda puts a downer on stuff ngl. But yeah, no depressive feelings :)
@@mustnz998 That feeling when I say something a week ago, then when I get a reply question why did I have to say what I said in the first place.
Probably the coolest thing about reflections in spoons is that the reflection is upside down!
The coolest thing about sight is the image is upside down.
Your brain learns to flip it automatically when you're very young.
Good points. Wish they had talked about that.
"Oh yeah, and by the way, spoons reflect everything upside down." It seems such a random thing to say if you're not used to it. Like... why spoons? Are they evil?
Ignore the heathen Zongtron - they're trying to deceive you.
Spoons are the implement of the devil!
How do you know?
yep anything that is concave (curved away from you) will reflect an image upside down becuase due to the curve the bottom part is facing up and the top part is facing down so the image will become completely flipped
Strangely enough, i'd never heard the term "jewel case" before. I always just call it a CD case :)
No they're right, it's jewel case. The slimline type thinner than a regular cd case to save shelf space
Same, I was confused why he'd be talking about a jewelry case while showing a picture of a CD case. 😂
@@jimbojimson tbf he is blind..
I heard juul case
Same
I love the newer videos where Ben is also shown. You can see their friendship and how they interact and make videos together. That i think gives the newer videos much more quality and makes them much more enjoyable. I espacially love the videos with the 3D printed objects.
"I feel like I get opaque... 'cos it's my world!"
I can't explain how much I want technology to completely advance in Tommy's lifespan to give him sight.
Like I really want to see him react to what all these things actually look like. I would love to see him just be happy and see everything that people love seeing, like tourist sights.
Granted, most tech is used on video games and entertainment, but a guy can really hope.
I’m a year late too but same
most likely impossible, even if he could all of a sudden see, his brain wouldn't be able to process the information from his eyes
“Most tech is used on video games and entertainment”
That’s not true.
@@adomaster123 really tho. there's a shitload of tech in stem cell research. those could potentially literally be used to regrow eyes. i wish human experimentation wasn't so restricted.
Ebilbacon88 unfortunately if you did not see as a child in early developmental stages you literally can't comprehend objects or sight really. You just see blurry colors and don't understand everything. The synapses didn't connect when you were young.
There were experiments on cats where they were raised inside and the walls only had vertical lines, and when they were older they had a very hard time understanding horizontal lines and their neurons didn't fire nearly as much when exposed to horizontal lines
so crazy that things we take for granted can blow Tommy's mind. I've never even thought about how cool it was that we can see the transparent object and see whats beyond it at the same time. These are thoughts I typically have when Im high, Tommy. not stone cold sober and watching a blind guy on youtube lolz
this comment made my day lol
Comical Mommy I am also high 420 blaze it yeah jk that 420 blaze it was a joke 😂
I smiled through the entire video at his awe of everything. One of my fave videos of Tommy Edison's so far. I just discovered him last month and listen to his videos every chance I get! So uplifting and it makes you realize how fortunate we can be. I know that if I lost my eyeight I don't know what I'd do! It would be a learning curve that's for sure and learning to do normal things differently but learn new things too, like change jobs completely for one, having to take the bus or carpool, TV or shows or movies with descriptive audio, TV shows and movies are my escapisms and also need to fall asleep on them to quiet my invasive brain, mind and thoughts, listen to more podcasts, switch from books to audiobooks, miss my eyesight and the beauties this world offers. Oh and I have a little fear of not knowing or seeing what I eat, so I'd be afraid to accidently eat bugs, my long hair that may have fallen in my food, random tiny pieces of things around the house lol... I know I'd clean more I guess haha
Skin can also be translucent, for pale people anyway. You can see their veins.
MultiK all skin is at least slighty translucent. A Word for what is happening is «subsurface scattering». Most things do this, except for metals and maybe some rock material?
Skin can also be reflective, especially in people with more melanin in their skin.
Adding on to this, skin is usually most translucent around the underside of people’s wrists! Veins are also visible on the underside of the elbow, which is part of the reason blood is drawn from that location, I think. I’d say you can only see about 5mm down though; it’s not like you can see straight through to someone’s heart.
@@belleociraptor3826 That would actually be kind of cool! :O XD (If you could see through someone's body like it is fog, the top would be transparent but as you get deeper it just becomes a dark void.
@@undyingdefect , what? More melanin would make a person's skin darker and thus less reflective. If you're driving at night and a very black and very white person are standing in the road, you'll be much more able to see the white person.
Hey. I have this really urging question. What is beautiful for you? I mean, what does it mean to you the idea of beutiful? Could you please describe it to sighted people? I really want to now if the idea of beutiful has meaning to you only by descriptions of sighted people or if you just have your own conception. Please, I´d really appreciate if you just made a video about what do you understand by beautiful, examples, anecdotes... everything. Btw, one of the reasons for me to ask this is that I study philosophy and so I really want to find out about that subject from the perspective of someone that has never seen anything. Thanks.
Blazer1408 Commenting on this to hopefully put it higher, thats by far the most interesting question in this comment section imo
Something that invokes a pleasing response. Various songs, physical art, food, aromas have been beautiful to me. And a lot of visual experiences too. Sight is just a sense from which to 'see' beauty.
I definately agree with what you say. People do consider things, other than visual ones, beautiful. However, my question arises from the doubt about the primacy of sight in that regard. Maybe we consider sounds, aromas, tastes an so forth because we make inferences from what we see as beautiful. It´s a possibility but I wouldn´t like it to be the case. That´s why I ask.
he already made a video talking about beauty. specifically about attractive people.
Yeah, I saw it but that´s not really what I was asking about. The attractiveness or appeal of people is not really a matter of beauty, or at least not in the strict sense. There´s way too biology, nurture, interpersonal interactions & social influences in the middle to arrive at the fact that someone is attractive and that fact is entirely different from the fact of finding something beautiful because this latter doesn´t regard exclusively to people.
Imagine being so happy about being explained what everyone else here takes for granted!
A thing I would say is the tactile version of transparent would be room-temperature water. You can tell it's there, but you really don't take note of it unless you really focus on it.
Wouldn't room temperature water feel colder since more heat is transferred from your skin to the water than with room temperature air?
@@AndyHage yes, it would need to be near body temperature. Or rather, the same temperature as your hands.
To answer to your question: "When you look through a window, do you only see what's on the other side, or do you also see the window ?"
Actually a window is almost never 100% transparent. It can have dust on it, it can have a little bit of tint, and according to the light conditions and the angle you look at it, it will have reflexion. So you can see all of this things that hint there is a window, as well as you see through it. It's kind of translucent but with much less alteration of the picture.
In laboratory conditions were everything is clean and controlled, you could get a 100% transparent windows that you cannot see.
JérémY GrecTé Not 100% because it isn't possible for it to be invisible if it has atoms and stuff.
Glass is slightly green and you can see that in very thick glass or if you look at the edge of a pane of glass.
you can have glass doors clear enough that people will smash their faces against it.
my old house had one. not only a few people did that, but also the dog. it was hilarious, if really dangerous. if that door shattered that huge shards that would form wouldn't be a joke. i know of people who died like that.
You can make things that are 100% transparent at the visible light spectrum. Nothing made of normal matter could be invisible to all wavelengths, but nothing is preventing normal matter from being invisible to a specific range of light.
I wanted to answer that but you did a fantastic job already.
I wish he could gain his sight. He would be so amazed with everyday objects
I really want Tommy to see
With the progress of nanotechnology, that may someday happen. I would love to see his reaction to his first sight.
He sees definitely and that they then makes it amazing is that he sees through us which makes it more amazing you don’t need ice because you’re sometimes not able to fix the world and he doesn’t fix the world but he definitely fixes our life makes us appreciate The best teams colors to start with the way he explained Transparency
You can see the window and the objects on the other side, just how you can wear gloves and feel objects through it. Right?
really what you see are the imperfections in a window. So maybe it's like feeling a wall, but knowing even though it's a little bumpy it's still a flat wall underneath? which is still a bad example.
Core Blaster it's more like hearing two things at once. In this example it's like one speaker is playing music louder but you can still hear the other one.
This will really melt you brain, EVERYTHING is reflective, that's how we see color. Some light is adsorbed, others is reflected, and that reflected light is what we perceive as the color of something.
Nice copied comment
Well i learned something new from this copied comment thanks
@@imprincesswolfy2565 copied from where?
@@imprincesswolfy2565 from where
@@imprincesswolfy2565 yeah where?
I really hope this guy gets see the world in his life.
mlekoduszek impossible maybe a decade ago but the way technology is progressing, it’s not impossible in his lifetime. It might not be perfect, it even may be very bad vision, but any vision is something
I really hope that wouldn't lead to like a heart attack or something out of shock. I cant imagine living majority of my life without sight and then suddenly having it
mlekoduszek maybe they cant fix his eyes, but they could invent a machine that will record surroundings and send the information to the brain, same way they have machines that send electromagnetic pulses to the muscles that can make them move same way the brain does
At this moment, I want nothing more than for there to be a way for Tommy to be able to see things. I want to see him experience a world he currently can't even properly comprehend. I want him to see something as simple as a window and think "Oh, that's how that works." Things we don't even think about would be just almost magical to him.
Someday, I am positive that there will be a way for this to be possible. I just hope it happens soon.
SalaComMander unfortunately if you are born unable to see, and in early developmental stages you are blind, then if your sight is restored you literally can't comprehend or discern objects or motion or general sight. You just see blurry colors and don't understand. The synapses didn't connect when you were young.
There were experiments on cats where they were raised inside and the walls and everything around them only had vertical lines, and when they were older they had a very hard time understanding horizontal lines and their neurons didn't fire nearly as much when exposed to horizontal lines
@@mantis2048
What the fuck dude. That's some depressing shit...I thought there was hope
Well scientists have been able to make a bionic eye that is better than the human eye
Unfortunately as others have stated it probably wouldn't work; at least not in the way that you might hope, but that's okay because the world already is magical to him, even just hearing people to try to explain what to us are common aspects of vision that we take for granted blow this guy's mind and I think that it must be quite cool for him to think about; just like how there are animals out there who can see colours in the spectrum that humans cannot and that we could never even comprehend or imagine how they might look.
another way to blow his mind, Tell him about how when you look at your reflection in the spoon you see yourself upside down
still watching the vid, so please forgive me if you address this, but you can think of transparency, translucency, and reflectiveness in terms of sound. Transparency is like a screen door; a physical barrier but sound can get through unimpeded for the most part. translucency is like hearing sounds through a wall. it's muffled, but sometimes you can make out what the sound is. reflectiveness is like an echo. Think of putting your face 3 inches from a wall and then yelling into it. you'll hear your voice bounce off the walls and into your ears. Now, just replace sound with light and it's a very similar experience. I love the videos, Tommy! You always brighten my day.
Matthew Clise Very good explanation, they went through that in the video.
Top comment?
that's why you should finish the video first so you won't have to type so much lol
Matthew Clise +
Thank you captain obvious. This was already explained in the video haha.
The power of this mans brain to just understand what these things are not ever seeing anything ever is actually amazing
Tommy really makes me think about things in another perspective and appreciate smaller details that I don't pay attention too, I guess you can say they get lost and forgotten about in all the things that I do see everyday and he really makes me smile and brings out the kid in me. I really like you Tommy, thank you for brightening my day.
I can not explain how much this has helped me understand just how many little details there are in the experience I have vs a born blind person. You blew my mind sir, thank you.
Seeing through glass (transparent) is like hearing sounds through a piece of fabric. If the glass is "smoked" in color (translucent) seeing through it is like hearing sounds through a thin pillow. The image is as "muffled" to us as the sound is to you.
For a reflective analogy I would recommend taking a tour of a radio station. Go in the booth, where there is acoustic foams designed to absorb all reflected sounds. Being in the near complete absence of sound reflections is the best way I can think of to illustrate the point.
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Every time you upload I am always entertained! Love your videos!
The Tommy Edison Experience You should have Tommy react to Auditory Illusions. I think he'd find them fascinating since it's impossible for him to understand visual ones
Human skin is also translucent.
Brotlov Um what
You know when you put a flashlight against your skin, like on your fingers, and the light goes through?
*My usual question..* when you're trying to recall something, do you look up and to the left/right? Or if you're remembering something you heard, do you look to the side? Body language experts say we do it subconsciously. THANKS, Tommy.. you're awesome!
adam mac His eye muscles might not be strong enough to involuntarily move around. That's why he doesn't open his eyes; his eyelid muscles aren't developed much.
yes when people lie a lot of us look up and to the right, at least that's what I read somewhere.
bobby Yea exactly why I'm curious if Tommy does it. It's not 100% accurate though and can depend on the person's dominate hand/brain hemisphere. I'm left-handed so I typically do the opposite.
I've noticed that a lot of blind people, for whatever reason, constantly dart their eyes every which way.
allycookie2009 It could be people who become blind after birth who do that. Tommy's body has absolutely no need to move his eyes or eyelids around in any capacity, so I doubt they move around much at all. But hey - I'm no expert nor am I blind, so don't quote me on that.
It’s amazing how knowledgeable this man is about the world he doesn’t see. He knows so much about seeing yet he’s never experienced it. It makes me think “what sense have I never experienced but might be able to understand?”
Hey Tommy great video! you might find it interesting that some meat is translucent before being cooked, like chicken and some fish but when you cook it it changes and often you can tell its cooked because it will be completely opaque.
May god bless this mans soul. I do not know how express how much this man has inspired me in just 9 minutes and 45 seconds, with him having such an amazing mind, spirit, and personality. He is such a happy soul, despite him having this disability, he is so intreuged by a subject, that at the same time is his hardship. I dont know what i would do in this guys position. I honestly think i would loose every last ounce of hope i may have had left. Just witnessing this, makes me so much more greatful of the things i take for granted every single day. Please everyone, take this into consideration. With that said, God bless all of you wonderful people, and may you have an amazing day😊
I feel like transparent would be like trying to feel something through another material. Like if you put a napkin over a chess piece, you can feel both the napkin and the chess piece. The more transparent something is, the thinner the material covering the other object in the analogy. The brighter the the object, the bumpier or sharper or more contoured the object being covered is. A thick blanket would be “translucent”, where a cup would be “opaque”
Really very surprising. You live in the same world as I do but your perception is so much different.
So interesting to investigate the differences like this.
Great video
I thought of a way to describe transparency in a way that Tommy might understand. Imagine that you have a bowl of water with some object in it. Like a metal ball bearing. If you were to reach your hand through the water you could feel the ball bearing but you could also feel the water on your skin. It's sort of the same with windows. You can see the window and it's easy to tell that there is a window there, and you can also see everything on the other side of the window.
This reminded me of how I would explain things to my grandfather. He lost his sight at a very young age so he only knew what certain things and generally how people and some animals looked like. He was a master carpenter, too. I love watching these videos where you discuss these types of visual concepts. Again my grandfather had sight for a short time so he knew what it was but I never knew what it would be like for someone else. The mugs look really nice!
Tommy, appreciate the experiences you put yourself through! From a writers point of view, it helps me really get into the mind of a character that might be somewhat, or completely blind. You give a first-hand account of what you feel and experience. So thanks!
This is such a wholesome, wonderful channel, and I'm really glad that it's doing well.
I would love these videos even if they didn't challenge the way I view the world around me, but that fresh perspective makes them invaluable.
Thank you.
I want this guy to be granted the gift of vision
Actually anything visible to humans is reflecting visible light. We see objects because light from a lightsource bounces off of the object and enters the eye, so if it didnt reflect light there would be no photons hitting your retina and it would be either completely black (it would absorb all the light and reflect none (google 'ventablack')) or it would be completely transparent (meaning it would let all the light pass through, and be clearer than any glass you can imagine). Pretty much anything you can think of reflects light in a diffuse and a specular way, albeit in different proportions. What you guys were talking about were specular reflections. Optics is such an interesting and mindblowing topic, I don't blame you for "not getting it", Tommy. Sometimes us sighted people don't get it either :P
All of these can be explained via sound analogies
No Google, I don't want to use my real name. That is a Lovely username.
very few people use their real names anyway??
Very true, since they are both waves. Although an important distinction is that the sound we hear is a lot longer in wavelength, so it is much more difficult to map out a detailed "picture" with sound, than it is with light. Bats do it with sound higher in frequency than you can hear.
Sound, with its long wavelength on the order of a yard, tends to diffract, diffuse and interfere, so it is not an easy wave to use for keeping track of an exact path from source to receiver. Imagine a 10'x10' grid of speakers on a wall, 100 of them, each playing a different tone. When standing ten yards away, could you tell which speaker is playing which tone? Not easily. Because the sound doesn't travel straight out from the speaker, and the sound interferes with the neighboring speaker.
With light by contrast, it has a shorter wavelength, less than a millionth the wavelength of a typical sound in air, it has a lot more directionality to it. If you replace that grid of speakers, with a grid of colored tiles, everyone with working color vision can tell you the color of the tile in row 6 column 2. Still diffracts, diffuses, and interferes, but it is a lot easier to preserve light in a common direction, and make sources of light that focus on emitting it in only one direction. Our eyes are also tuned to distinguish the frequencies of light, better than our ears can distinguish frequencies of sound. Our eyes can identify individual colors, whereas our ears compound multiple tones to sound like one sound, and don't instinctively differentiate them.
Long wavelengths are good for communication. Short wavelengths are good for directional detail.
J-sUn the wall muffling analogy wasn't great, because like he said certain wavelengths would be more affected. It should've been explained in terms of two sound signals interfering.
Df
I love how you are the type of person who isn’t sad about something you can’t change and happily live with it. You treat it like your ability, I really respect you.
This video is wonderful. Incidentally, Tommy do you know that milk is opaque? It's an opaque white liquid - if you pour it into a transparent glass, you won't be able to see through the other side! I've always found that strange
The way he explained translucent to him using examples he can understand with his hearing was absolutely amazing. Hats off to you.
I like putting a flashlight right up against my hand, so that it appears a tiny bit translucent, due to the strength of the light.
Its actually the red light that is going through. TED had a good video explaining it. ua-cam.com/video/awADEuv5vWY/v-deo.html
I have breast implants so if I put a flashlight under it lights up my whole boob and all the crazy veins inside. Way cool, it’s more detail than what I can see in my hand so I find it to be more fun to see how it all looks lol
Put a phone light right up to your finger and become et
Stephanie Mullins whoa there tmi
Kale Andrie it is but it’s a cool thing so who cares
I salute people who make videos like this. It can only help us all understand each other better. This was fascinating!
Looking through a transparent material is like listening to a song on a record player with that little hiss on top of the music. You can hear the hiss and it's separate from the music but you can tune it out and concentrate on the music.
Nice video, Tommy! 😊
It is so interesting to see someones reaction to something they have never see, and only read or been told about, what a great video . It has truly opened my mind, thank you.
I can come up with some analogies for transparent, opaque, and translucent using the sense of feel/touch. Let's say you're using your hand and fingers to read something in Braille on a plastic card. Let's say the card is sitting on a table, you walk up to it, you touch it, you read it. That's like someone looking at something through the air, 100% transparent. It doesn't interfere with your ability to see at all. Now let's say you put a very thin rubber glove on your hand and try to read the braille on the card. You can still feel and read the words, but maybe it's a little bit harder and you can probably feel the glove itself. That's what we experience when something looks transparent. Depending on how transparent the thing is (analogy: how thin the glove is), we can see through it with varying amounts of ease and we can also see the thing itself to a varying degree. Those two factors are usually opposite to each other, so the more you can see the thing, the less you can see through it (the more you can feel the glove, the harder it is to feel through it). This leads directly into "translucent" in that once the glove gets to a certain thickness, you can't really feel the Braille anymore. With a very thick glove when you pick up the card, you can still feel that you're holding something, but the fine details of the braille itself can't be felt through the glove. In the same way, looking through something translucent, you might be able to see that there's something on the other side, but you can't see any of the details. Opaque would be like you put a big stone slab over the card on the table. You feel the stone slab, but there's no way you could feel through the slab to have any idea what's on the other side. In the same way we can't see through something that's opaque, and would have no idea what (if anything) is on the other side of that object.
The most important thing to note is that these three properties are a pretty smooth gradient. Even with glass, you can move in very small steps from a piece of very translucent glass to a piece of entirely opaque glass, in the same way that you could move from a very thin rubber glove, to a thick one, to a huge chunk of rubber encasing your whole hand.
Reflection is a bit of a different thing, and I can't really think of how it would work with this same analogy. If you pressed me, I might be able to come up with something good using sound.
nice analogy
Actually reflection is fairly easy the sonic version of specular reflection would be echo and the diffuse reflection equivalent is reverb since in the former the reflected sound is clearly identifiable as the original sound (May be distorted if the reflecting hard surface is say smooth and curved but you can still make out most of the original sound). With reverb the reflected sound is scattered to the point that it's more of a general sense of noise to our ears than anything that we could clearly pick up the details of the original sound in.
An easy comparison for transparemcy, I think. You can easily hear someone from the other side of a thin door or wall like you can see someone through a window. However, you're also aware that the wall/door/window is there because the sound/light doesn't fully penetrate through. Let me know if it helps :)
This is the single best interview I have ever listened to. So glad I found Tommy again on UA-cam.
Your hand is also translucent. You cannot see through it, but if you shine a very bright light directly at it like a flashlight, your fingers will glow red! ;-)
Don't you think it would be so strange to be blind and be told about the moon for the first time.
It would be the hardest thing to imagine holy shit
@@Oliver-bn7jt "Theres a round sphere in the sky that just floats there and lights up at night. It also changes shapes." Lol
@@Lynn-ip9sh And then you have to tell him the moon gets It's visible light and figure from the sun.
@@ls200076 its confusing enough for me and i can actually see it
man blind people wouldn't understand love for astronomy :c
What an amazing Channel. This just appeared on my recommended (not this video specifically but this channel's videos) and I know for sure that I'm not the only one who has come here because of it. That's a shame that the channel is no longer uploading videos.
I loved the coffee mug plug at the end! 😂☕
Everything is reflective or else you wouldn’t see them
I was gonna comment the same thing
Facts
Oh damn you right though
They are talking about specular reflections.
Nope sorry, the sun isn't reflecting anything. And that computer screen you are looking at probably isn't either.
I could literally sit here for hours watching tommy get excited over concepts like this. Great video! Part 2 plz
To be correct: EVERYTHING is reflective. Some things more, like a polished door knob, some things less, like black cloth in a cinema.
If things weren't reflective in any way, we wouldn't be able to see them. This is because our eyes pick up the light that comes from a source that then bounces off the surface of the object we're looking at.
If no light bounces off then there's literally nothing to see.
Only things I can think of that truly aren't reflective at all are black holes and vantablack. Anything painted in vantablack literally looks two dimentional. Other than that, everything else has at least some slight reflective properties
Burytook vanta Black is reflective, just VERY LITTLE. Technically, stars are even less reflective than vantablack
That depends on your definition of reflective. Yes, they are technically reflective, but diffuse objects are not considered to be classically reflective, because reflective generally implies the reflection of distinguisible information.
@@xero2715 Can you see ? Yes?
So it's reflective with a wavelength in the spectrum visible to humans.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it.
...or there's no lightsource around...
But that's not what we're talking about.
These videos really make me reflect on how hard it is to describe senses to people who don't expierience them. It's very eye opening.
This guy is awesome! Just his attitude and demeanor. I’m a grown man, but having an inquisitive nature it’s so neat hearing his perspective.
His honesty and TRANSPARENCY is top notch!
I am going to keep asking this question until Tommy answers it haha. How do blind people solve long math problems in school? I know there is braille to read, but how would you represent complicated figures often used in advanced math? I am very curious
They are sometimes extremely good at math. Math has very little to do with sight. Adding 2+2, but in braille, is very simple to do in the your head.
A blind kid in my class could figure out what weekday a certain date was. Even if it was 100 years in the past. Or the third monday in february 2112. I used my phone to control and he was always right and it was only hard for him if I went beyond 100 years. Hard as in it would take him ten seconds and not an instant.
@@momatotsosrorudodi I think he's more talking about symbols such as integral or capital sigma, or like how they'd figure out polynomial division if they couldn't write down what they had so far. I don't think he's doubting their ability to do maths (especially since he said "long maths problems"), just wondering how they go about doing things that use symbols that aren't in the alphabet or how they keep track of large or multiple numbers.
@@jonathanodude6660 There are braille math symbols. Math is a language. The symbols simply translate the same concepts. The plus sign doesn't have to look like this(+). It could look like this (.:.) and 2.:.2 would equal 4.
If they learned math(it's a language you can get fluent in) then they would probably be good at describing their own thought process on paper with their equivalent math symbols that would make sense when 'translated' into our symbols.
Mats Rudi well + is a simple symbol that has a definite meaning. Sigma is a Greek symbol that can mean sum as a capital, but then how do you write the starting point and limit? And then after that you have to have the actual equation that you're summing up. If they can't write things down, how do you feel how many times you've summed? And then lowercase sigma means standard deviation but it can also mean an angle, electrical conductivity, the Boltzmann constant, surface charge density or surface tension. Is the symbol for all of these different? Or is there a difference between the Greek letter sigma and the maths version of sigma? If so do they have to understand multiple languages of braille or can they just imagine what it would be in their mind? Or is every sigma the same just like in English? And if it is how do they tell the difference between them when it appears multiple times in a single equation? If it's just context like we use then sure but they can't exactly write in braille so how do they keep track of their thoughts? Do they just have to remember everything or do they make a picture of the equation in their mind and imagine writing the working down? Also how do they tell the difference between capital and lower case letters such as when you're doing a probability assessment where you'd write something like p(X)=x? How much would they need to remember considering they have to remember not only how their language works, but the meaning of all these symbols that use the same format as their language but a completely different meaning? I searched it up just then and they actually do have to remember not only English braille, but nemeth braille and international Greek braille in order to do maths. But that still leaves the question of how the hell do you write braille to show how far you are in computing ∫tan^2(x)dx if you can't write down your steps?
@@jonathanodude6660 They have special paper that they can press braille into by hand. It's thin plastic(the ones I have seen are translucent like a shower wall) A4 sized 'paper' notes. Whatever language they use it's not limited in anyway and they should be able to express calculus(but with modified symbols). I'm not sure how the symbols look like in braille though.
They can also do math on a computer with a braille keyboard. They can type in their process in word and their keyboard allows them to read the lines.
Tommy is such a pure soul. In every video I’ve watched he just has such a sweet, pure, innocence to him 😭♥️
Its weird to think that he hasnt ever seen a human. He can make a guess based on what he feels but theres no way for him to know.
I cant wait until we find some way to let blind people see and watch their reactions. Sight really is amazing
Well if he died he wil- Never mind. Not the right time yet
I should really go to bed but this guys channel is so relaxing, he's so excited by these little things we pass off as normal every day. Really makes you appreciate the little things, I want to buy this guy a beer
everything is reflective of light. otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it.
Man if I had super powers to grant everyone one thing to give some one I would give him the ability to see
This was my favorite video so far♥️♥️I love your excitement with the little things that we take for granted every day. You just seem super cool. Thanks so much for making this channel!
This seems like it should be very easy to explain to a blind person by using sound as an analogy (muffler is translucent for sound, echoes are refection, sound proofing is opaque, etc) so the can conceptualise how it works.
smegskull great way of thinking. It was immediately obvious to me once I read it, but believe it or not, it wasn’t my very first thought.
Anyone else noticed it was removed first and then reuploaded?
Shamsa Shakir yeah
Those dang typos never show themselves until _after_ you post.
I didn't catch the typo. Did he spell translucent wrong? lol I do that shit all the time.
I wish they were more transparent about their shady video movements.
The thing is we weren't grateful enough the first time, so they just took it down for a moment
Reflectivity is super simple to explain - it's like an echo.
Using sound to explain all of it is definitely the right approach
I hope someday we can make him see somehow
siZeDcuBe I don’t think he’d want to
Maybe one day we will have the technology.
Even if we had the tech to fix his eyes, his brain missed the developmental part of growing up so he would have no idea how to process the data going to his brain.
What a cheerful and bubbly person! Much love, Tom!
Seems like a wonderful person. 😊
Everything is reflective... Otherwise we wouldn't see nothing xD
DrSaw ...like a blind person
DrSaw what?
I think "reflective" here means reflective of an image, not just a specific color of light.
DrSaw well, usually we call surface reflective if it doesn't scatter light, but reflect rays in the same direction
Double negative
I rarely ever subscribe, but watching these videos just fill me with happiness like very few things ever do, thanks Tommy, you have my sub.
Man i love this guy
Not sure how I ended up here but I'm glad I did. There's something about just watching and listening to Tommy that makes me want to be a better person. . .
wait til he hears that a reflection in a spoon appears upside down
I want to see when we can give him vision and see his reaction
The things we take for granted man. The way this fella reacts makes me smile!