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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.
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...
Why is it a story that someone has a hypothesis? Do the tests, publish your findings.
>> Eating ravioli in the dark is hard.
Isn't this what grad students were invented for?
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.
I don't read AC A human right
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
... And what can you do? ...
Edit Slashdot stories.
How can you tell if you are done wiping?
Yes, but eating the grad students in the dark is really no easier, and the ravioli tends to taste better.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.