05 Sep Visual Training Can Reduce Extent of Functional Blindness

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Paul Miller PhD student
The University of Queensland
Australia

Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: All humans have a blind spot in each eye where the optic nerve, which sends signals to the brain, passes through the retina, the light sensitive layer in each eye. Where this happens you cannot detect light, so people are blind to images that project to this location.

Behaviorally, people tend to report blindness for an area that is larger than physiology dictates. We found this curious, and thought it might be driven by people reporting blindness for regions that border the blind spot, where sensitivity is degraded, but not absent. If so, we thought that this could be improved by training. When we tested this theory, we found it was true – we were able to reduce the extent of functional blindness by about 10%.

Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?

Response: The key take home message is that it’s possible to reduce regions of localised functional blindness through training. More over, we may be able to develop optimised training protocols to achieve this using normally sighted people.

Where these findings are particularly interesting is their potential for application to treat cases of localized blindness resulting from pathology, such as age related macular degeneration – the leading cause of blindness in the western world. In future, training could also augment technologies designed to reverse blindness, such as the bionic eye or retinal stem cell therapy.

Medical Research: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Response: Our findings show that localized regions of functional blindness can be reduced through training. In the near future we are hoping to optimize the training protocol, determine whether such training can be similarly effective for localized blindness resulting from pathology, and possibly develop an application that will allow people to self administer the training at home.

Citation:

Paul A. Miller, Guy Wallis, Peter J. Bex, Derek H. Arnold. Reducing the size of the human physiological blind spot through training. Current Biology, 2015; 25 (17): R747 DOI: 1016/j.cub.2015.07.026

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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:, & Paul Miller PhD student (2015). Visual Training Can Reduce Extent of Functional Blindness 

Last Updated on September 5, 2015 by Marie Benz MD FAAD