Blindness In Malcolm Gladwell's The Power Of Context

Believe it or not, in this world, everyone has a superpower. These superpowers are not those seen in movies or comics, however, real life powers include fixing the roof or even fighting in the battlefield with the condition of blindness. In The Power of Context, Malcolm Gladwell shows how easily individuals are influenced or even manipulated by their surroundings and further expands upon the Broken Windows theory, a criminological theory which explains how physical disorderliness of the environment causes people to commit crimes. In short, the power of context is comparing human beings to a plain white paper which can change its color as it absorbs a spectrum of colored lights; for instance, if the environment projects blue light upon them, …show more content…
In Sacks’ writing, a professor of religious education in England named John Hull, who became blind at the age of forty-eight, was able to thoroughly shift his focus on physical senses other than vision. Before Hull went blind, he would have never even imagined of “feeling” the world instead of seeing it with his eyes; however, “he wrote of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, could delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path was different from its sound on the lawn” and eventually Hull was even able to grasp a sense of intimacy with nature (Sacks 330). The loss of his vision has indeed forced Hull to reveal and enhance his abilities to hear and feel the world around him. Because Hull had no control over his own eyesight, which he never wished to lose in the first place, he was forced to develop his other senses in order to replace his vision. Hull was involuntarily placed in an environment where he could not utilize his vision, and therefore, he was forced to reveal and enhance his hidden abilities such as heightening the physical sense of hearing. Equivalently, Sacks also wrote about a French Resistance fighter Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his vision at the age of eight. Although Lusseyran began to lose his visual imagery at first, forgetting the faces of his parents and the faces of his loved ones and sometimes visualizing men and women without heads or fingers, his inner vision spontaneously started as a sensation of streaming radiance for similar reasons as the medical syndrome of phantom limb. Lusseyran was soon to realize that he was in possession of not just a luminosity but a great visual imagery. He wrote in his memoir that “names, figures, and objects in general did not appear on my screen without shape, nor just in black and white, but in all the colors of the rainbow”

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Blindness In Malcolm Gladwell's The Power Of Context

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