Dalia Burgoin & Shaun Jordan Blindsight Fundraiser

Over years of teaching, Dalia has developed a sophisticated set of training protocols for cultivating these perceptual skills. More recently, she has begun adapting those methods specifically for people who are blind—with striking results. Multiple blind adults working with Dalia have progressed within just days of training from having no conventional vision to successfully identifying colors, shapes, letters, objects, and spatial information during structured exercises.

Her vision is now to take this work much further: to create intensive training opportunities specifically for the blind community, refine and document the protocols, collaborate with researchers, and investigate just how far these perceptual abilities can be developed.

Shaun Jordan is one of the clearest examples of what has emerged from this work.

Shaun lost both of his eyes to childhood cancer and had lived for more than thirty years without conventional sight when he began training with Dalia. During their first Mindsight session, Shaun reported experiencing glimpses of light for the first time since childhood.

But the work did not stop with glimpses of light.

With training, Shaun has demonstrated the ability during structured exercises to accurately perceive shapes, identify letters and words, distinguish objects, and locate items in space—all without physical eyes. His progress has made him an important collaborator in developing this work for other blind people.

Dalia has since worked with other blind adults who have reported and demonstrated similar emerging perceptual experiences after only a few days of training.

That is the foundation of this fundraiser.

Dalia and Shaun want to move from short training experiences into sustained, intensive work: bringing blind participants together for longer periods of structured training, refining the protocols according to their needs, documenting their progress, and creating a program that can ultimately be studied more rigorously and made accessible to a much larger blind community.

The question they are pursuing has evolved. It is no longer simply whether a blind person can have an unusual perceptual experience during training. They want to understand how consistently these skills can be developed, how far they can progress with intensive practice, and what they could ultimately mean for the independence and lived experience of people who are blind.

DMT Quest is a 501(c)3 non-profit that has been supportive of both Dalia and Shaun over the past year in the form of workshop sponsorship and is acting as the fiscal sponsor for them as they await the process of IRS approval for their own institute. Funds will be directly distributed to them. DMT Quest A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 81-3529184 DMT Quest focuses on discovering innate pathways to unveil the mysteries of human perception as well as potential. www.dmtquest.org