Recovery from blindness
Recovery from blindness is the phenomenon of a blind person gaining the ability to see, usually as a result of medical treatment. As a thought experiment, the phenomenon is usually referred to as Molyneux's Problem. The first published human case was reported in 1728 by the Surgeon William Cheselden. Patients who experience dramatic recovery from blindness experience significant to total agnosia, having serious confusion with their visual perception.
As a thought experiment
The phenomenon has often been presented in empiricism as a thought experiment, in order to describe the knowledge gained from senses, and question the correlation between different senses.
John Locke, an 18th-century philosopher, speculated that if a blind person developed vision, he would not at first connect his idea of a shape with the sight of a shape. That is, if asked which was the cube and which was the sphere, he would not be able to do so, or even guess.
The question was originally posed to him by philosopher William Molyneux, whose wife was blind:
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