The Smiley Face the ultimate icon, an abbreviation for the concept of all that is nurturing, soothing, stimulating, warm, human, good - in short, for the concept of Mother. Therefore, recognition of the Smiley Face is hardwired into every baby's cranium. Research shows that babies are attracted to any face-like configuration of light and dark areas (the sculptured hills of Mars, for instance.) The preference for something that looks like a face, rather than a representation of some other thing or an abstract pattern, is a basic instinct. One magazine recently showed magnified photos of tumor tissue with "faces" in them. People used to see a Man in the Moon. (Some still do.) Yet powerful as the face-recognition instinct is, it has, like the ability to learn languages, an optimum time frame. To an adult with newly regained sight, a human face looks like a blur, and when eventually it becomes possible to discern rearrangement of the features, the job is only half done. The expressions still must be decoded and interpreted. The film Blink gives some indication of how the world appears to someone in that situation. A violinist who was traumatically blinded at age eight gets her sight back, and can't even recognize the murderer who stalks her. Furthermore, she doesn't have a clue whether her own face is pretty, and has to ask other people.
Marius von Senden was so fascinated with the problems faced by newly sighted adults that he researched every known case over a three hundred year stretch of history, right back to the time when John Locke first posed a hypothetical question in a 1690 essay. A person who had been born blind, Locke knew, could learn to distinguish between a cube and a sphere by touch. If he suddenly became able to see, would he recognize the cube and the sphere by sight? Locke didn't think so. When Sacks' patient became able to see, he couldn't tell his cat from his dog without feeling them. Von Senden's research led him to conclude that such people invariably face a "motivation crisis". To learn to see is overwhelmingly difficult, and there is a temptation revert to blindness, where one knows how to cope. Not every patient makes it through this stage.
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