Oops, that was supposed to be Oliver Sacks, sorry. The blind cognitive psychologist, Zoltan Torey, also mentions that his doctors told him that it wasn't even worth trying to remember colors, because he would completely lose the ability to even visualize them, but he ignored the "experts." There were a couple of news stories this year about how opthomalgic surgeons have recently changed their opinion again, and now believe that older people who lost their vision very young can have useful vision restored, as opposed to the previous opinion, which was that the formally blind person would not be able to cognitively adapt to the new sensory information.