I'm going to experiment by being Blind and Alone for 24 Hours

I did this years ago, in the 80's, because a classmate challenged me to after we were talking about all the challenges he had as a blind student. On his advice, I never left my apartment :-). I went for more than 24 hours, closer to 40, from Friday night to Sunday around noon when my roommates returned.

I had a basement apartment and my bedroom was totally dark without lights on, and the rest of the apartment very close to totally dark, so that really helped compared to the author as I only had to don a blindfold before leaving my room.

I tried to replicate the experience of being blind and did a whole bunch of stuff; I cooked 4 simple meals (very, very, carefully) did the dishes and put everything away each time, tried to clean my place, showered and shaved, drank a few beers, played music on my roommates CD stereo system, practised karate. I reorganized the cupboard after the first breakfast.

Maybe I have better balance than the author, but I had no trouble moving around my apartment and certainly never crawled anywhere. Heck, I became quite adept at simply walking to my roommates room, going through their CD collection and putting something on every hour (their collection was alphabetically sorted so I was sort of able to find what I was looking for with a few tries).

Mostly, I was bored. I never became lethargic on anything like that, maybe because I was getting up and moving around all the time. Maybe the karate kata and other exercises helped.

I lucid dreamed for the first time. I experienced the flashes he talked about as well. I learned to be careful where I put things as I spent the first morning constantly trying to figure out where I had set things down. I gained an appreciation for how it would be to totally blind (my classmate had zero vision).

Mostly, I was surprised the author didn't DO anything. Didn't try to make meals (ants? wtf?). Basically just sat and listened to music. No wonder he got lethargic.

> For the bathroom, I (a man) peed sitting down. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I've never understood why it is considered un-masculine for men to pee sitting down. Or even if it is, why so many men pee standing up just to play along. It's one thing to use a urinal in a public toilet, but at home it's potentially messy and probably not hygienic to release a partially aerosolised stream of urine just below waist height.

Someone actually blind here. The sleepiness is most likely because of the scarf and keeping their eyes closed. Use blackened goggles next time and drop the curtains to decrease the light pollution in the apartment. Also, check how Voice Over works on the IPhone if you want some productivity.

Here is my story with a similar experiment:

I'm a conscientious objector. For justice reasons we had to be treated equally to the guys (and it was only guys back then) doing military service. That meant not only that we had a right to our service banana[1], but also that, at least a percentage of us, had to go through boot camp.

It was only a small percentage, but of course, I won the lottery ticket and was sent off for six weeks of conscientious objectors boot camp. Apart from the usual indoctrination, which I suppose was similar to military boot camp, we had to do things that were supposed to prepare us for our jobs in hospitals and homes for the elderly.

One of these things was the Wheel Chair Experiment. Groups of three: one guy in a wheelchair, one guy playing the nurse, third guy observing how people react. To make it interesting, we made a day trip by train to a nearby tourist town - and coincidentally place of pilgrimage. Of course, we were given stern warnings not to pull off what some of our predecessors allegedly had done: Roll into the sanctuary, jump out of the wheelchair and shout: "I am healed! I am healed!!"

Apart from the joking and fun young people have together, it was a very chilling experience. Going up, only a slight rise is strenuous, and for steeper rises, the pivoting front wheels of the chair always turned crosswise. Entering the train in the morning we cheated because we were overburdened with the task. That made our instructor really mad because we couldn't stay in character for not even half an hour. I never dared to lift the front wheels because I was too afraid of falling backward with my head hitting the ground. When it comes to people, most just look away from you, which made me very uncomfortable.

It was an experience I will never forget. I have the deepest respect for anyone managing life in a wheelchair.

[1] Service personnel on ships had the right to receive a part of their pay in fruit or vegetables for historical reasons. For equality, this was extended to every soldier and later to conscientious objectors too. Humorously this was called the service banana. I only know this because it was part of our boot camp curriculum.

If your interested in this and in the area of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) I can recommend going to muZIEum (https://muzieum.nl/).

They have (among things) an indoor recreation of various day to day scenario's (a home, a supermarket, a street, etc.) in a pitch black environment. You go in there with a group under guidance of someone who is blind (or strongly visually impaired) and try to make sense of these situations. It's a really interesting experience.

Be aware that this does not represent the life of a blind person at all.

If an American goes to Beijing, they might have a very hard time communicating with other people, but that doesn't mean everyone in Beijing has a hard time communicating with other people, most Americans just don't know the language.

It's a similar situation here, if you're used to using sight for everything, you haven't learned how to use the white cane well, never actually learned where your stuff is, don't know how to use VoiceOver etc, obviously you're going to have a hard time. That still doesn't say anything about the experience of actual blind people.

To actually get some idea how it's like, I suspect you'd need a couple years and some good teachers.

If you have the opportunity, post-Covid19, I recommend checking out one of these places that allow visitors to experience being blind. In Germany one such place may be found in Frankfurt, it's called DialogMuseum. I believe similar setups can be found in other countries too, someone mentioned the Netherlands. For me this visit was a bit of a revelation. The way it works is you book a guided tour, at that time they had 60 and 90 minutes options. You get there and are handed off a white cane and then enter through a corridor as a group led by a visually impaired guide who will take care of the group. From that point on, the place becomes professionally(!) pitch black, there is no slight source of light, the eyes cannot see anything wide open even even after the few minutes it would normally take to adjust, this actually triggers a feeling of uneasiness, and the guide carefully checks if anyone goes into a panic attack - there are actually exits you can be guided to if you can't follow the tour for any reason. The place is split into "rooms" which simulate different environments: you go to a park where you need to avoid hitting trees, then a boat ride that is a bit of a challenge to board, then trying to cross a street with a high curb and traffic light that you need to figure when it's safe and in the end we went to a bar where I just handed my wallet to the bartender since I could not figure out how to prepare the right amount of money - got the wallet back and actually they took just the right amount of money! The environments are built authentically at least feel that way to the touch or bump, and there's also sound effects for completion. That tour gave me a lot of insights and respect towards the everyday challenges a visually impaired person encounters, that I otherwise only theoretically had.

The light patterns when rubbing your closed eyes could likely be phosphenes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene) by mechanical stimulation.

Those have intrigued me for a while. I have some but likely triggered electrical stimulation. Sometimes triggered by a sound while half asleep.

I build my sites mostly at night, when kids are asleep and the house is completely dark. I am the ghost of this house as I can navigate every nook and cranny without making noise or turning on lights by this point. When she turned 2 my little one asked that I lay next to her crib as she falls asleep. Laying on the floor in the pitch black dark with some lullaby music has helped me do some of my best thinking - problem solving, new ideas, all flow right in and the only reason I get up is because I can’t contain all of them in memory and have to run to dictate or type them down without waking the kids. Darkness is focus. Your brain stops worrying about anything else and focuses only on the task at hand. I even built a new type of notepad/daily logging tool for myself to capture all the thoughts that come in with the lowest possible latency.

Seriously? I am blind, and I find this article pretty pathetic. If you dont attempt to interact with your environment, this is no challenge. I know people who have done a similar thing for 24 hours, however, they went to the uni cafeteria and even tried to prepare food at home. And guess what, they didn't write a "rich kid is having fun" article about it.

This is a clear case of aiming far too low. Next time, try for real.

I would recommend swimming goggles with semi transparent paper tape. It does not touches the eye lids and does not cause irritation. It blocks enought light for sensory deprivation, but leaves enough hint not to bump into walls. Person needs to feel safe to be able to "let go".

I would not work, listen to podcast etc. It as an information detox. Maybe single playlist in loop, with an option to pause. Part of detox is to remove decision process.

And have some food ready that does not require preparation.

This is a longer experiment wherein shit happened

Scientists made people wear blindfolds for 4 days. The resulting hallucinations were incredible.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/scientists-mad...

We used to play Marco Polo a lot as kids. It turns out everyone peeks when they play this game. We learned this the hard way by deciding that too many people were cheating so we took a pair of goggles and spray painted them. We made sure there was no way to see anything and whoever was "it" would wear the blacked out goggles. Immediately people started slamming their head into the wall or the bottom of the pool. It was crazy just how obvious it made it that everyone cheats in Marco Polo.

The way this relates to the blog post is that I hope the author reads this comment and considers spray painting goggles as a way to replace the scarf. I imagine swim goggles for 24 hours would be terrible so I would recommend finding a pair of ski goggles that could easily be blacked out. This is probably the most comfortable way to black things out and it would be very hard to "cheat".

Interesting that when they finally checked the time, it was just five minutes after the alarm.

If you consider they were trying not to look at the time (and so probably spent a while deciding whether or not to finally "give in"), I'd take that as a strong piece of evidence that humans have an extremely accurate internal chronometer, and that we are just bad at consciously accessing it.

This is a bit like closing your eyes and seeing how many steps you can take in a large empty (safe) parking lot before you just can't take it anymore. This matches the author's first listed goal of "Do I have the willpower to get through the experiment?"

It's not easy to do for a long time.

The previous owner of my apartment must have been a shift worker because every single window - even the small ventilation window in the shower! - has a black out blind. It would be the perfect place to try this experiment.

The nicotine lozenge and music in the dark seems to be an interesting part of the experiment as well. Will definitely give it a shot!

Fantastically written, well done.