Lecture to focus on gaining sight after years of blindness

Michael May, a Davis man who regained eyesight after 43 years of blindness, will give a free lecture on Tuesday (Oct. 7) sponsored by Explorit Science Center.

The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. at the Davis Musical Theatre Company, across the street from Explorit at 706 Peña.

May’s lecture is titled “Vision After 43 Years of Total Blindness: Exploring Visual Perception and a Can-Do Spirit.”

May was blinded in a chemical explosion at age 3. In 2000, at age 46, he regained partial vision after a cornea transplant and revolutionary stem cell surgery.

At Tuesday’s lecture, he’ll tell his story – from the scientific advances that made sight possible to his discoveries about how his blindness affected the brain’s processing of visual stimuli. Like other people who have regained sight after decades of blindness, May could see the world but had difficulty interpreting what he was seeing.

“Mike lost his sight at a time when his brain was still quite plastic and he was still learning to interpret the visual world,” said Ione Fine, a University of Washington researcher, in an interview in Sacramento magazine in June 2007.

“So when the lights went out, his neurons re-colonized to process auditory and tactile information, which is what he needed to function as a blind person. When we looked at Mike’s MRI, the part of the brain used for vision responded very differently than a (sighted) person’s. It was clear he’d never be able to fully use vision the way (people with sight) do.”

May has learned to deal with that through memorizing the visual characteristics of certain objects – and through much practice in the eight years since his surgery. Now he can integrate the information he gathers through vision with that gathered through other senses and skills, including hearing, touch, smell, Braille and so on.

His can-do attitude in re-learning to process visual stimuli is characteristic of the man who has been adventurous all his life. He has long believed that “there is always a way” to succeed. In fact, he gives inspirational speeches that “illustrate this philosophy through stories of playing flag football in elementary school, intramural soccer in college, living in a West African village, crashing the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, starting four companies, traveling worldwide and raising two boys with his wife, Jennifer,” according to the Web site http://www.sendero.com.  “Mike’s sincerity and humor are contagious in leading one to truly believe that there is indeed ‘always a way,’ not just because he is a disabled person who has triumphed in the face of adversity, but because he has led a fascinating life with the added challenge of being blind.”

Currently May is president and CEO of the Sendero Group, a Davis-based business that develops and sells adaptive technology products, including his own GPS navigational system for people with low vision. His extensive resume also includes a stint working for the CIA at its Virginia headquarters.

Though May speaks to audiences professionally, he is giving this lecture pro bono as part of his community services. Davis Musical Theatre Company is providing the space at no charge as well.

May’s lecture is the first installment in of the 18th season of Explorit’s Cutting Edge Lecture Series. The winter lecture will be Feb. 3 and the spring lecture, April 1.

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Explorit Science Center is open to the general public from 2-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday at 2801 Second St., Davis. Current exhibits: “Move It! Science in Action” and “Puzzling Problems, Scientific Solutions.” Admission is $4 general, free for teachers and age 3 and under. For more information: (530) 756-0191 or www.explorit.org.