My friend, who is studying to become an endocrinologist, told me about a podcast done by Eyes on Success. Maybe it was two epidodes, but anyhow, in one of them, they used synaptic exuberance by snorting stem cells to encourage new pathways to be developed.
I am patiently awaiting to get a permanent biological cure for hearing, as that is what I would love to cure first. It stinks being caught up in the DeafBlind world and the hearing world. I also have an older sibling who is DeafBlind, but they have never developed verbal communication skills.
I would only cure my blindness if only to satisfy my synaesthetic curiosities, then sharing it with other folx for research purposes.

@123
Nope.  I've got at least one other blind friend who does this, and at least one other blind friend who has strong visual memories from time to time.  And then there's Charles Bonnet syndrome where you just have strong visual hallucinations all the time just because.

I don't see things I'm not "supposed" to be able to see, that is if it's out of my line of sight I can't see it, but I had just enough vision to develop models for such things.  And it's helpful because it's accurate.  Like, my short-termn spatial memory went and decided to live in my eyes.  Sort of anyway, there's also a synesthetic component which makes me sound like I'm on drugs when I try to explain it.

As far as I can tell the best way to go blind, if you're going to go blind, is to not have full vision in childhood, but to have enough that you get all the critical periods.  There's not really enough research because in all honesty blindness in childhood is really a lot rarer than you'd realize, and so I doubt you could even start splitting up the cohorts.  But in my personal experience there's a sweet spot where you get the sighted critical periods but you don't have enough vision to do large print, so you end up developing all the blindness skills, braille, cane, screen readers, etc. while you're young and learning is easy.  Go too far one way and you don't get spatial reasoning etc. and also don't really ever become fully aware of things like expressions and body language.  People who were born without any vision, for example, seem to have a lot of trouble learning to read a map or work with a compass.  Go too far the other way and you have to learn braille and the cane in your 30s.  I would love to see someone take this seriously at some point.  It feels like the kind of thing where there's a lot of scientific knowledge if someone did the studies.

@130
Yeah, well, as I said I don't know for sure that there is a rule.  There is surprisingly little research on this stuff at all either way.  I've looked and unless I've looked in the wrong places the most we've got is "FMRI shows activity in visual cortex" and "Blind people don't understand perspective".  The former says basically nothing useful being as we don't know what if anything it's doing, and anyone could figure out the latter with 5 minutes of thought.

DarkEagle, as far as chess goes, I would be rated somewhere between 1750 and 2000 I believe. I don't know if that means anything to you.

I would still prefer biological cures though than a bunch of electrodes and implants in my head. That is also being worked on, and is becoming more feesable with gene editing tech  and stem cell research.  But I really struggle alot with even basic spacial concepts. I thought it was a problem with me at a point, though I don't have comprehension issues in other things except math. I really tried hard to understand alot of directional concepts and maps, but they elude me always.

Haha stories.

There's the two times I got burned pretty badly, the worst one in college when I was trying to pour boiling water to make tea.  I actually cook a *lot* and hot water doesn't frighten me in the slightest, so it was bound to happen, but was a valuable lesson in what kinds of pitchers not to buy, namely anything remotely narrow where your other hand needs to be involved.  I think he second-worse cooking mishap, fortunately only almost a mishap, was that day my grandmother decided to move a pan of oil I was heating up to fry some french fries to the other side of the stove.  If it'd been another 3 or 4 minutes or another inch, I'd have been making cannibal chicken fingers.  Obviously there was a lecture after that one.

There's the time one of my classes got handed over to another professor for a few lectures and when I walked into the room with my guide dog (I had one back then) the first thing he says is "I thought this would happen one day, either you leave or I do, I'm deathly allergic to dogs and you can't have it even on the other side of the room".

Just 6 months ago, I literally ended up running 30 gates at the Detroit airport with two helpful strangers from the plane who happened to have time because I needed to make a connection, the plane on the way in was a little late, and Delta dropped the ball on getting me help.  Literal running.  On the moving walkways.  At midnight.  And I wish I could see the faces of any bystanders to that.

There was that job interview, where I almost got the job.  I didn't fail to get it because of blindness, but because I said I valued stability and it was a small tech startup.  But on the way out, the interviewer goes "They probably told you, but watch this narrow door" and a little mini-conversation later it turned out that they were the financial tech startup that managed to get space in a building that used to be an old bank which put conference rooms inside all the old bank vaults and I'd been interviewed inside one.

I've got at least one aggressive full-contact prayer story, which is exactly what it sounds like and is also why I won't ever tell someone they can pray for me again.

I've never had a bad cane story, but I've almost had a few.  Learned the hard way not to use those carbon fiber telescoping ones, and after that day in high school when some idiot literally decided to jump it like a jump rope and failed, I always just decided that I'd carry an extra cane on me if I'm going to be traveling somewhere far from home (I've got 3 on hand at the moment, you can never have too many canes).

The smoke detector thing will probably happen to me at one point, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's a common one.  Most of the other ones I've got offhand are common enough.  Oops sharp knife on the counter, oops hot pan where you didn't mean to put it, etc.  If I weren't very meticulous in certain ways some of those would have gotten me at some point or another, especially with how much I do in the kitchen.

I know roughly where the smoke detector is, but by nature of it being a small object on what is something like a 16 foot ceiling, I can only get it to within a few feet and have to struggle for the rest.

Fire alarm, meh.  My dad set off the fire alarm in a mall once because he's kind of dumb sometimes and decided that we absolutely had to take the emergency stairs with the weird beeping lock thing that had a giant sign explaining how you needed to use it while I'm standing there pointing out that if you're supposed to hold the bar for 10 seconds and it's making an ear piercing screech the whole time this means it's not a normal exit, so it's not like being sighted helps.  And I also almost set off the fire alarm in college, except that it turned out that that emergency door was actually broken and should have set off the alarms, which I only found out after using it several times (and in hindsight I should probably have told someone).

@140
I know where it is.  It's not possible to remember the precisely exact position. But I at least know where the ladder goes.

Also, your story is a typical college story, you realize that right?  We had that once a month or so in my dorm for the entire duration of college, including the one memorable night where someone did it just 4 hours after the fire drill.

How mine works is that I have the experience of seeing things, but only things that I know are there. So I guess my brain just makes up a visual representation of things I am aware of by other senses. Dark eagle's comparison to a phantom limb seems like a good way of describing it, I've never had a phantom limb but I can imagine it would be the tactile equivalent. All my dreams are also still very visual, and I tend to think by visualising things. Jayde, I'm curious how this works for you, since if I understand you you've never had vision. So what do you get in your head when you work with a map or a chessboard? Is it a set of relations between objects? I guess it might be hard to explain but I'm curious. There are sighted people who also have this actually, it's called aphantasia and it's the inability to visualise anything when they're not looking at it at that moment. I remember there was a study that found aphantasia is underrepresented in creative types like artists (not surprising), but overrepresented in scientists, and the speculation was that maybe it's because people who don't visualise things have to think more logically to connect those things in their minds.
I've actually had a car running over my foot. I think at that moment they noticed me because the car stopped on my foot, and took a few seconds to reverse off of it. I don't think they ever realised though. This happened back when I was in school on the school premises. It was a school for the blind, and many of the children there had parents with visual problems, so I suspect it might have been one of those. There are people that end up driving cars that I really think should never be allowed to drive cars. Fortunately I had shoes on (because as part of the school uniform we were forced to wear them), but I still had issues with that foot for a long time after. I'm usually barefoot though when I have a choice about it, and that would have probably been worse. Just as a random side-note, people tend to think anything you do is typical of blind people. When people see me walking barefoot on campus they seem to go for it's a blind people thing to feel the ground to navigate, whereas actually it's just a me thing and don't think I've met any other blind person who walks outside without shoes. That reminds me of a funny story. So rain tends to disorientate me, I've never been sure why but I know it's not just me. Light rain is fine but I'm walking in pouring rain I feel like it's so much effort to keep track of where I am and where I'm going, and I tend to get lost easily. So I was walking with another blind friend in rain and we ended up being helped by someone. I can't remember exactly how the conversation started but we mentioned that we're more disorientated in rain and she said something to the effect of "that makes sense because then you guys can't feel the vibrations." Lol I have no idea where that comes from or if it's at all common that people think we use some kind of vibrations.

@142
I'm only talking about the fire alarm.  I think every incident in college was someone cooking, except the one where someone pulled it on purpose because they were drunk and we all had to stay outside for 2 hours at midnight while they pulled the video.

I don't actually have trouble telling the difference between burning and smoke, but then I don't burn stuff often.

Well, you just explained part of your chess issue.
I don't even have to have a board in front of me to play, and if I do, I definitely don't have to turn the board around. In fact, that would complicate things needlessly for me.

I play chess on my iPhone using Shredder, but used to play KChess Elite, an old, old chess program, years back. I got kicked around pretty handily back then because its playing strength was really weird, but nowadays I usually play Shredder at between 1600 and 2200ELO depending on how brave I feel. I've lost at 1600 when I make a stupid move, and I've won at 2200 when I have a prepared combination and the AI doesn't see it all the way to the end.