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.

Comments

This is called Kaya Kalpa in yoga

[Visarga]

It's supposed that if you can do it for 10 days, your visual cortex will start processing other input and add its extra processing power to your meditations. Here's a link to a presentation: http://hridaya-yoga.com/how-to...

Re:This is called Kaya Kalpa in yoga

[umafuckit]

That seems like a really bad idea for people who still need their visual cortex for vision. If you want to jack up the wiring in your brain, just abuse dangerous drugs. It'll save you a lot of time.

I don't know what you mean by "jack up the wiring" but mushrooms will probably get you there and they're not dangerous.

Re: This is called Kaya Kalpa in yoga

[karlandtanya]

It took about 5 minutes for me, but had to be *total* dakness. So dark I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut. This was in a lab where we were doin nuclear emission spectroscopy (just gas discharge tubes). Any outside light would pollute the results, so the lab was really dark until we turned on the juice.
During that period I could see as clearly as i'm seeing this screen flowing sheets of glowing pastel paint sliding down a wall that wasn't there.
Not true hallucinations of course--by definition if you know it's not real it's not a hallucination. Phosphenes I think they were called.

Anyhow, very beautiful and unusual. I don't think my lab partners saw anything--at least they didn't say they did. Or they were afraid people would think they were nuts.

Later i blacked out my dorm room & reproduced the effect. And learned it's really hard to produce absolute darkness. Tinfoil is *full* of tiny holes! And black paint is not as opaque as it seems.

Re:This is called Kaya Kalpa in yoga

[RockDoctor]

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.

That is pretty standard for isolation. If you're out of the normal day-night cycle, most people tend to drift round to a longer-than-24 hours circadian rhythm. A forend of mine did a number of experiments on this in various cave systems in Yorkshire in the 1960s, where he'd have light from lanterns he controlled, and food / water dumps would be left in the cave at irregular intervals (to remove circadian prompting). His body clock went up to something in excess of 30 hours.

Of course, since he had lanterns (OK, miner's light) to turn on, he wasn't experimenting on "resetting" his visual cortex, but on removing the circadian prompt. But relevant.

Anyone who has been a caver and has been waiting for several hours for the rest of the party to come back (or catch up), will have turned the lamp off to save the battery. (Of course, the wise troglodyte carries spare lights. but you still keep your system-level redundancy.) And the colours come and the patterns happen. and you hear the water getting louder and you wonder about whether it's raining up top. Some people freak. Most people turn the light back onto the low power setting.

Testing

[Firethorn]

I think that it's that he's willing to use himself as a test subject before inflicting it on others, fairly rare today.

Not that I suggest a heart surgeon do a transplant on himself or that a doctor inject himself with insulin if he's not diabetic...

But living in complete darkness for ~5 days can have unexpected developments/difficulties, it's probably best to NOT inflict that on kids until you know what to look for.

Re: not even a lil LED ?

[BarbaraHudson]

I've had to do it for weeks at a time when my eyes become extremely photosensitive, and my family thinks I'm crazy, so maybe you're right. But if he thinks eating ravioli in the dark, he should try baking biscuits from scratch without a timer. They were good, but it was kind of messy.

Re:Blindfold Anyone?

[Etcetera]

Why not use a blindfold for 5 days?

Are these people stupid or just trying to make everything more difficult than it seems?

A) Some light is likely to get in, and they would need to be in a mostly-dark room regardless to account for slip-ups. Even then, they wanted to get 100% darkness, not 99.5% darkness (by timeslice)
B) Ever worn a sleep mask or eye pillow? Your eye does different things when it's covered or has pressure on it (and a lot of pressure would need to be applied here, most likely). Having your eye "free" to look around (but having no source of light in the room) is likely to be physiologically different than wearing a dark blindfold.

Re:Blindfold Anyone?

[slew]

FWIW The most common treatment today for lazy eye (Amblyopia) is to simply patch (i.e., think pirate patch) your good eye and hope your brain will stop relying on your good eye and start learning how to see again through eye that the brain was ignoring (suppressing). So it is basically a type of blindfold for one eye.

For children with lazy eye, the patch is generally worn for a few hours a day for 6 months to a year. The older you are, the less well patching works (presumably because your brain is less plastic in these regards).

However, new research suggests that there might be a way to retrain your brain (without resorting to trying to "reboot" your brain) by a form of vision therapy that attempts to reinvigorate the part of your brain that uses both eyes to see, by forcing it to exercise.

One researcher has been experimenting with having people play a special version of tetris where each eye gets part of the information and the brain has to integrate both views to successfully play the game. Initially each eye would get a version that would be easy to fuse (depending on the problem that caused the lazy eye, such as out-of-alignment/direction), as the treatment progressed, the versions would progress toward the normal viewing. Seems like they got reasonably good initial results which were better than patching

Maybe not every problem needs to be solved by rebooting the system.