By BEN LEUBSDORF

Associated Press Writer

6:25 AM CDT, April 10, 2009

DEARBORN, Mich.

than Cali as they ride the rattling bus to work for the first time.

“You’re a good girl, you’re OK, you’re OK,” Ramouni says softly, stroking
Cali — a 3-year-old former show horse that stands about 2 1/2 feet tall,
weighs about 125 pounds and has trained since November to become Ramouni’s
guide.

Ramouni lost her sight to retinopathy of prematurity shortly after birth.
She relies on her family to guide her around the Detroit suburbs where she’s
lived, studied and worked for all of her 28 years.

She wants more independence, but a traditional guide dog isn’t an option.
Many Muslims consider dogs unclean, and Ramouni, an observant Sunni,
respects her Jordanian-born parents’ aversion to having a dog in the home
where she lives along with three of her six siblings.

The answer, she hopes, is Cali, short for Mexicali Rose.

“I want a horse that will be a partner for the next 30 or so years. This is
a really awesome little horse … and what I really want is to be able to
take her places and go places with her that neither of us ever would have
been able to do without each other,” Ramouni says.

While most Muslims believe dogs can violate ritual purity, horses are seen
as “regal animals,” says Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter.

Still, “there would be concerns about bringing a horse into certain
establishments and areas of worship as well,” he says.

There are only a handful of the miniature animals trained as guides for the
blind in the United States. Cali’s trainer, Dolores Arste, knows of five
others.

“Taking on a horse as a guide is a huge commitment, same as a dog but with
more physical needs,” Arste, 61, says. “It is not a novelty. It is a real
working animal.”

The horses can live into their 30s, more than twice as long as most dogs,
Arste says.

Ramouni says she was a “typical horse-crazy little girl.” She heard about
guide horses as an adult and eventually connected with Arste, who earlier
helped train a guide horse.

A breeder offered Cali as a guide and the training began for both the horse
and Ramouni. Ramouni paid for the horse, $450 a month for Arste’s training
and other expenses out of her savings.

Since Ramouni had never used a dog, she had to learn how to control a guide
animal. She was partially successful at training a pet dwarf bunny named
Baylea — “she does come when I call her,” Ramouni says — and has worked
hard with Cali.

“I’ve never met a young woman with so much dedication,” Arste says.

Arste trained Cali partly in Hatfield, Ark., and partly in Saratoga Springs,
N.Y., teaching the horse how to get in and out of vehicles, guide through
crowds and stand still indoors.

Cali first came to Dearborn in December, but her three-day trip this week
was a more important test. Ramouni took on responsibility for caring for the
animal as it led her through her daily routine, including Thursday morning’s
commute on a public bus from her Dearborn home to the Lincoln Park office
where she proofreads textbooks in Braille.

Additional training may take an additional two months before Cali can join
Ramouni for good, taking up residence in a newly erected shed on Ramouni’s
lawn.
Mirrored from Customerservant.com.

Could it be?
Do blind people actually experience most of the same sensations as sighted people?
The implications are quite far-reaching if this is indeed true.
It could mean that blind people are actually…normal.
Case study contradicts theory of optical pathway delay

LiveScience

Updated: 1:21 p.m. CT Nov 28, 2006

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15937167/

Déjà vu is commonly described as the feeling of having seen something
before. In fact, some scientists have long thought that one type of the
phenomenon occurs when the image of a scene through one eye arrives at the
brain before the image from the other eye.

But researchers have now found a blind man who experiences déjà vu through
smell, hearing and touch.

The man had déjà vu when undoing a jacket zipper while hearing a particular
piece of music, and also while hearing a snatch of conversation while
holding a plate in the school dining hall.

The discovery is reported in the December issue of the journal Brain and
Cognition.

“It is the first time this has been reported in scientific literature,”
said Akira O’Connor of the University of Leeds. “It?s useful because it
provides a concrete case study which contradicts the theory of optical
pathway delay. Eventually we would like to talk to more blind people,
though there?s no reason to believe this man?s experiences are abnormal or
different to those of others.”

O’Connor said déjà vu is such a convincing sensation that it feels almost
inexplicable to the person who has it.

“And because it feels so subjective, psychology, in striving for
objectivity, has tended to shy away from it,” he said. “But psychologists
have gone some way to illuminating things like the ‘tip of my tongue’
sensation when you can?t think of a particular word. We just wanted to get
to the same sort of understanding for déjà vu.”

O’Connor and his colleague Chris Moulin also study déjà vu through
hypnosis. They believe the experience is caused when an area of the brain
that deals with familiarity gets disrupted.

In one experiment they do, students are asked to remember words, then
hypnotized to make them forget. When shown the same word again, they
describe feeling as if they’ve seen it before. About half of test subjects
say the sensation is similar to déjà vu, and about half of those say it is
definitely déjà vu.

“It would be really neat to do some neuro-imaging on people during genuine
spontaneous déjà vu experiences,” O’Conner said, “but it?s very difficult
to get them to have them on demand.”