I was recently in Zurich Switzerland and had the good fortune to be taken to The Blindekuh (Blind Cow) Restaurant.
The Blindekuh is a restaurant where everything inside the dinning room is totally pitch black. There is no light in there what so ever. Basically by walking into the dinning room you loose your sense of sight. You become blind. Totally.
At first myself and others at my table had the illusion that we could still see our own hands moving in front of our faces, even though we couldn’t see anything else. I put this to the test by getting a friend’s hand in front of my face (an inch away), only to find that I couldn’t see it at all. It had been a trick that my mind was playing on me by making me think I could see my hands.
The experience for me was amazing. After the few initial minutes of feeling wary and concern about where my hands were and if I was going to knock over my glass etc wore off, I began to relax in to the realization that I no longer had my sight to rely on.
Listening to people’s voices took on a whole new level of awareness. The tables are shared and seat 6-8 people, so our small group of three joined a table by another group of 3 Americans. During the whole lunch I never got to see these people at all, I only had the sense of sound and topics of our conversation from which to evaluate them.
The thing that struck me most about the whole experience was the ability to try living in someone else’s shoes. Being in that pitch-black room, gave me (even if just for a few hours) the experience of being blind in the world.
Simple things take on a whole new dimension with out sight. Things taste different, sounds become more precise and simple functions such as using a knife and fork or pouring a drink become a mechanical challenge of wit and logic.
Our senses are our external filters of the outside world from which we create a model of that world in our brains. By loosing a sense and especially the sense that you rely on the most, suddenly that ‘model of the world’ changes drastically.
Not only do we no longer see, but we are also forced to think in a whole new way, which opens up possibilities that we hadn’t thought of before. Pouring water into a glass with out sight, is not as hard it may seem when you know to put your finger in the glass to measure when the glass is full. This is just a small practical example of the ways your brain finds to get around the lack of sight.
I left the restaurant with a profound respect for people who are blind, but not out of sympathy for them, but rather out of the fact that they have ability that most of us lack. The ability to function in a different way, yet still achieve the majority of results that we can and perhaps some we can’t
While I have heard some people freak out in the dark and have the sense of claustrophobia, for me the whole experience was a freeing one and certainly one that I would recommend everyone try if they are given the chance.
By trying on other peoples ‘model of the world’ whether that be their beliefs, values or their lack of certain physical filters such as sight, it often shines a spotlight on areas of our own ‘model of the world’ which are far too often covered in darkness.
