Posted: Jun 07, 2014 2:59 pm
The stuff the brain does with the raw data is the really fascinating part. A couple of years ago I suffered a bout of non arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, which is a fancy way of saying a bit of my optic nerve ceased to function for no apparent reason. I lost vision in the lower inner quadrant of my left eye. If I close my right eye I see just a grey smudgy thing in that area. It was a real pain in the ass for a couple of weeks, before my brain adjusted. With both eyes open I have no discernible deficit, even in vision tests. The brain has merged the data from both eyes into a coherent picture, but it had to learn to do that. For the first few weeks I had a blind spot even with both eyes open.