This post comes about as a part of a conversation I am having with Olena Markaryan author of the Bionic eyes and arms blog.

Getting visual perception late in life is challenging. One of the hardest concepts I have had to grasp is how 2-dimentional things on paper relate to 3-dimentional objects in the real world.

For example, if I see the drawing of a table and feel the same table I will not be able to tell that the table in the drawing is the same as the one I am feeling.

Yes, vision and touch are different senses but sighted people are able to bridge this 2d-3d gap probably because they have had long experience of such things. The brain is an inference engine and has had plenty of time to learn how to do this.

I need to backtrack a bit and tell you that I got my house remodeled in 2011. Version one was broken down and version two was constructed. I had looked at the architectural plans of the to be built house using the vOICe. One of the features that stood out was the snake like staircase.

Mind you the stairs are not snakelike at all when I walk on them but that is the impression I got when looking at their drawing.

The penny dropped for me the day before yesterday when I was walking down the stairs. I was tilting my head in all directions to get an idea of how the stairs looked when viewed at different angles. When I looked at themn sideways, I perceived the same pattern that I did in the autocad drawing.

I need to explore this more. I do not know how this happened. I guess that I had the same perspective as I did with the drawing so that may have helpped but it is exciting. I had seen the drawing about four years ago and remembered the staircase.