Slashdot Mirror
Can Living In Total Darkness For 5 Days "Reset" the Visual System?
the_newsbeagle writes: That's what one neuroscientist is aiming to find out. He wants to put patients with a type of amblyopia, the vision problem commonly called lazy eye, into the dark for 5 days. His hypothesis: When they emerge, their brains' visual cortices will be temporarily "plastic" and changeable, and may begin to process the visual signals from their bad eyes correctly. Before he could do this study, though, he had to do a test run to figure out logistics. So he himself lived in a pitch black room for 5 days. One finding: Eating ravioli in the dark is hard.
Barry Marshall, who discovered ulcers where caused by a bacterial infection, tested it by drink a petri dish of the bacteria and got gastritis and then cured himself with antibiotics.
Got the Nobel prize.
There's a long history of doctors and scientists in medicine testing their ideas on themselves.
Fold paper in half; if it sticks together, keeping wiping.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a guru of the Bon (shamanic) buddhist tradition describes in his book "Wonders of Natural Mind" his experiences in a traditional tibetan "dark retreat" of 49 days (among other things).
By his account he said that after some days he started to experience mind-created visions and that he lost the notion of time. He said that the 49 days seemed to be, in the end, like twelve days. He also said that he had some training before the retreat, because people that does it without some instruction can be overwhelmed by the visions, which at some point seem to be very real.