The answers
to these questions lie in trying to understand what people with such disabilities do, and how they store and retrieve from
their memory. Soppose I say "round", what comes to your mind is a spherical ball, an image which you may or may not have seen
earlier. Because you know what round is, you can imagine all sorts of colored and surface textured spheres. Suppose I have
trained you from the start saying that round is triangular, then you will definitely imagine a triangle when I say round. You
have vision, so whatever image you have stored for round will be recalled when the word is heard. Imagine the same thing
w.r.t a blind man. What he is going to recall depends on how he is able to imagine it when he touches it. He doesn't know
what a color is, what a object is, he has never see the world even once, he doesn't even know who he is. Imagine the
same condition as faced by a deaf and dumb. He doesn't know any language but has sight, so when he sees different objects
in his surrounding, how does he reference them. Will he be able to remember as efficiently as we do?
Now let us take a person
who has lost all his senses, he is not able to hear, speak or see, but can feel the touch. Now if he is given a round
ball in his hand, will be able to feel the shape? and will he be able to interpret it? If he is given the same object
once again will he be able to recognise it? Suppose he is given a similar one but of a different size how will he react to
it? Will his brain be able to say that the two objects are the same, but are of different sizes? These are the questions we
need to answer in order to know the memory architecture and handleing with in us.
It is not necessary that we copy everything from a biological system like that of ours, but what's
wrong in trying to know something that is performing a similar function as is required by us. It may not be the
ultimate solution that is required, but we can rely on it because it is stable, tested, reliable and efficient. Once we know
how the basic system works, we can always improve on it and make our system more accurate, efficient and all the more powerful. Let
me give you an example on this. We can always give our robots night vision, telescopic power, microscopic power, etc
once the normal vision is solved!
"The experiments continue......., but the person to have the cake is the one
whos brain is going to answer its own question at the earliest!"
