In the new movie "At First Sight," actor Val Kilmer plays Virgil Adamson, a blind man who works as a massage therapist at a spa in a small resort town in upstate New York.
One day he meets Amy Benic, a stressed-out, divorced New York architect played by Mira Sorvino, and soon they fall in love.
Like most sighted people, Amy assumes that Virgil's life would be better if he could see. When she learns about an experimental procedure that could restore Virgil's eyesight, she calls the surgeon and arranges an appointment.
Virgil has been through miracle cures before that did not work and his older sister is against exposing him to more trauma and disappointment, but he agrees to have the surgery.
And it works. Virgil can see, but because his brain is not used to processing visual stimuli, the world for him is a blur of colors and movement.
"The fact that you restore the vision of people who have been blind for years and years doesn't mean that they know how to see," said Robert Scott, a sociologist who has studied the disabled and now is associate director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
"All it means is that their eyes now work. There was this perfectly understandable but mistaken assumption that if (surgeons) make their eyes work, suddenly and miraculously they would be able to see and walk out of the doctor's office and that would be the end of it.
"But in fact, vision is a very, very complicated sense modality that requires all sorts of coordination and interpretation and inference. Without that structure behind it, all you get is this incredible, confusing, bewildering blur of stimuli."
Scott used the example of a telephone on a desk. To identify it, a blind person would "scan it" with his hands, "piecing together a sequence of touch sensations."
A sighted person would look at a telephone and "see that it's an instrument in its totality," Scott said. "The difficulty that blind people have is they do not understand that what they're supposed to be doing is trying to apprehend the thing in its totality, in a single whack, so to speak."
"At First Sight" is based on the real-life case of 50-year-old Shirl Jennings, as told in the essay "To See and Not See," by neurologist-author Oliver Sacks, who has a cameo as a reporter in the film.
The real Virgil had been virtually blind since early childhood because of retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary condition that eats away at the retinas, and thick cataracts.
Virgil learned to read Braille and became adept with a cane. He graduated from a school for the blind, trained as a massage therapist and worked at a YMCA in a city in Oklahoma. He was very good at his work and had made a modest life for himself. He loved baseball and maintained close ties with his mother who sent him hampers of food from the Kentucky farm where he grew up.
Then, after more than 20 years, Virgil called Amy, a swimming coach he had dated briefly after they met at a cat show in 1968. She had moved to another state, married and divorced.
After three years of long-distance phone calls, Virgil and Amy (also a fictitious name) met again and eventually married.
Virgil's life struck Amy as dull and passive, and she pushed him to take a chance on surgery that might restore his sight and give him a fuller life. Fearing disruption, his mother was against it, saying, "He is fine as he is."
Afterward, like his movie counterpart, Virgil experienced confusion and disorientation. "Three days after surgery, they had gone to (a supermarket), and Virgil had seen shelves, fruit, cans, people, aisles, carts -- so much so that he got scared," Sacks wrote. " `Everything ran together,' he said. He needed to get out of the store and close his eyes for a bit."
Virgil found walking "scary" without touch and without his cane, because his judgment of space and distance was uncertain. He confused his cat and dog, which were both black and white, until he could touch them.
Most people begin learning the complex task of perception fairly unconsciously, beginning in infancy. That's why a baby will stare at its hand and move it back and forth.
For Virgil it had to be systematic and, therefore, tedious. So he often fell back on touching.
In fact, he began buying toy soldiers, cars, animals and replicas of buildings and spent hours learning to see this toy version of the world.
Kilmer's younger version of Virgil conducts these experiments with a Jim Morrison flair, walking out into traffic to observe how the perspective changes as the cars move toward him.
At one point, because he had trouble perceiving distance, he crashes through a plate-glass window.
Cases of restored sight after decades of blindness are extremely rare. Only 20 cases in 200 years, according to the movie production information.