iStockphoto
If I absolutely had to get into a school-yard fight back in junior high, I don’t know why it had to be with Ira Blitz. I should have known I wouldn’t stand a chance.
First of all, unlike me, Ira had mastered a number of exotic skills that gave him a distinct advantage in almost any scrap. Punching, for instance. More important, Ira actually seemed to enjoy fighting. Whenever I faced the possibility of an after-school brawl, my first response was to submit the matter to binding arbitration and hope for a resolution satisfactory to all parties. If that didn’t work, I’d ask my family if we could move.
Most important, however, was the matter of Ira Blitz’s name. If you’re looking for a partner for an adolescent brawl, it’s always a good idea to avoid someone whose surname sounds like it applies less to a person than to a Panzer division. I’m not saying that Ira’s family handle was the only reason I lost this battle, but I would have been a lot more comfortable if he had been named, say, Ira Negotiated Settlement. As it was, however, Ira won our scuffle handily, deftly landing head-to-toe blows and finishing me off with a pop in the eye that caused me to see stars, several comets, and a large portion of the Crab nebula.
While my one childhood fight taught me a couple of valuable lessons (notably, to be incredibly nice to Ira Blitz until after graduation), it also raised a question: Exactly what kind of trauma had I put my body through? Why had I seen stars, for example, between the time fist hit eye and I hit asphalt? What was responsible for the singular sensation I experienced when I was hit in the stomach and had the wind knocked out of me? Why did my nose turn out to be such a sensitive—and utterly breakable—organ? What on earth is a cauliflower ear, and had I run the risk of developing such unwelcome vegetation?
Happily for us nonpugilists, we don’t have to go to Ira Blitz for the answers. Easier and less painful explanations are available from the world of science. Even if you’re a lifetime pacifist, it can be interesting to learn just what your body has been missing all these years—and why it should keep on missing it.
Among the most remarkable sources of information on the physiology of injury is Jeremy Wolfe, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and a senior lecturer at MIT. Nearly every year in his classes, he offers a one-hour visual-perception seminar straightforwardly entitled “Ten Things You Can Learn by Poking Yourself in the Eye.” Although such a lecture struck me as less than a natural crowd-pleaser, the students at MIT apparently think otherwise. At one of Wolfe’s presentations, he played to a crowd of 50 enthusiastic undergrads, all of whom gladly went along with his eye-poking exercises. I was not on hand to watch Wolfe’s pupils attack their pupils, but I was able to reach him on the phone, and he agreed to talk me through some of the experiments. To be perfectly candid, I was not looking forward to the experience. Spending half an hour on the phone learning how to poke yourself in the eye seemed about as appealing as hunkering down for an hour on an airline’s outsourced customer-service line, and probably more painful. Nevertheless Wolfe assured me I would be perfectly safe as long as I did the exercises very gently and attempted them only under his guidance.
Wolfe first asked me to partially close one eye and gently press a finger against the eyelid near the tear duct. What I should see, he said—apart from a good personal-injury lawyer—was a flash of light in my field of vision on the side opposite the spot where I pressed. This, Wolfe explained, illustrates the phenomenon of labeled lines.
All nerves send signals to the brain when they are stimulated, Wolfe said, but the part of the body those nerves service determines how the brain will perceive the stimulation. If you activate a tactile nerve in the skin, the brain will register the stimulation as touch. If you activate certain nerves in the ear, the brain will perceive that as sound. When you press the eyeball, you’re mechanically stimulating retinal nerves, and the brain registers that as light.
