Body Dysmorphia

    My brother told me about a study recently conducted involving blind people who could now see, thanks to corrective surgery (read the article discussing the study in the New Yorker here).

   The study sought to answer a hypothetical question that has been around for awhile called “Molyneux’s problem.” If you give a blind person a sphere and a cube and then ask them which one is which, they will be able to tell you correctly which one is the sphere and which one is the cube. After hearing descriptions of what a sphere and a cube look like, they are able to feel the objects and tell the difference. So, if they gain the ability to see, and there is a sphere and a cube sitting on a table across from them, will they be able to still tell you which one is which?

   I thought, of course! They felt both objects. They would know that one is smooth and one has edges. They would be able to see the difference.

But this wasn’t the case. The formerly blind people couldn’t actually see the difference between the two, even though they had been able to feel the difference between a sphere and the cube.

   This study was fascinating for me. How was it even possible for them not to see a difference between the sphere and the cube? But as I thought about this study, it also made me start asking myself some questions. How I could possibly have thought I was so fat during times when I was underweight? How could I have looked in the mirror and seen something so different from reality?

   I think this study with the formerly-blind people might have an answer, or at least, give us a better way to understand body dysmorphia. Even though though the formerly-blind people could see, there was so much their brains and eyes had to learn to process and interpret. What some people had been practicing since birth–developing their depth perception–they had only begun to develop. And it made me wonder if perhaps people who struggle with body dysmorphia or body image come into this world with a less developed sense of proper body perception.

   In some ways the study also makes you question how uniform or reliable our vision actually is. I mean, it always amazes me that in a studio classroom 15 people can all be drawing the exact same still life and have 15 vastly different ways of seeing it. No one sees the objects in exactly the same way, and that becomes apparent when everyone has different ways of representing something on paper that they see. We know that people don’t always perceive color in the same way, especially as evidenced by those who are color blind.

All that to say–is our understanding of what we see really as solid as we want to think?

   My perception of myself has changed a lot over time. I look back at some pictures of myself–pictures I remember feeling so ugly in at the time–and kind of laugh. I am not ugly at all, and it is often a good picture of me. So how could I have ever not seen that?

   Even now, when pictures are taken of me now, I kind of cringe to see them. Sometimes I can’t bear to look at them at all. I am sure I am ugly or that I look fat. And maybe, if I look at the photo right in that moment, that is all I will see. But I find that a few months or years down the road, when I look back, I see the photo in a totally different light. Most often I look fine in the photo I was so utterly terrified of.

   This experience (and many others) has taught me that I can’t always trust what I see in the present moment. There seems to be an inability to perceive myself correctly, at least physically. And honestly, I imagine it is a process somewhat similar to what blind people who have the ability to see have to go through. So they can’t, at first, distinguish between a sphere and a cube. And I couldn’t, at first, distinguish between an underweight or a normal weight body. A person with body dysmorphia can’t see their body in an objective and normal light. IT is like they cannot distinguish between a sphere and a cube, even though in their minds, they may understand the difference.

   These are undeveloped musings on the topic, but the idea that sight is something that you have to develop and strengthen is fascinating to me. I think we naturally associate this with babies, but we don’t think about sight as something we have to continue to develop and strengthen when we’ve “grown up.” I know that my perception of what I see–when I’m looking at myself–isn’t always interpreted correctly. Maybe it’s because I only see what I want to see, but maybe, it’s something deeper. Maybe those who struggle with body dysmorphia actually have an inability to distinguish things about themselves that they may mentally understand. The blind people knew from descriptions what cubes and spheres looked liked, but they weren’t able to connect that reality with what they saw. In the same way, I think that those who struggle with body dysmorphia have to learn to see the deeper and finer nuances of themselves, much like the blind people had to learn depth perception and distinguishing edges of objects.