How a movie changed one man’s vision forever (BBC) {stereoblindness cured}
By Morgen Peck
Good movies change people’s view of the world all the time, but how many can say a movie has fundamentally altered their vision forever? One person who can is Bruce Bridgeman. In terms of how he sees the world, there is life before Hugo, and life after Hugo.
On 16 February this year, Bridgeman went to the theatre with his wife to see Martin Scorsese’s 3D family adventure. Like everyone else, he paid a surcharge for a pair of glasses, despite thinking they would be a complete waste of money. Bridgeman, a 67-year-old neuroscientist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, grew up nearly stereoblind, that is, without true perception of depth. “When we’d go out and people would look up and start discussing some bird in the tree, I would still be looking for the bird when they were finished,” he says. “For everybody else, the bird jumped out. But to me, it was just part of the background.”
All that changed when the lights went down and the previews finished. Almost as soon as he began to watch the film, the characters leapt from the screen in a way he had never experienced. “It was just literally like a whole new dimension of sight. Exciting,” says Bridgeman.
But this wasn’t just movie magic. When he stepped out of the cinema, the world looked different. For the first time, Bridgeman saw a lamppost standing out from the background. Trees, cars and people looked more alive and more vivid than ever. And, remarkably, he’s seen the world in 3D ever since that day. “Riding to work on my bike, I look into a forest beside the road and see a riot of depth, every tree standing out from all the others,” he says. Something had happened. Some part of his brain had awakened.
Conventional wisdom says that what happened to Bridgeman is impossible. Like many of the 5-10% of the population living with stereoblindness, he was resigned to seeing a world without depth. What Bridgeman experienced in the theatre has been observed in clinics previously – the most famous case being Sue Barry, or “Stereo Sue”, who according to the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks first experienced stereovision while she was undergoing vision therapy. Her visual epiphany came during the course of professional therapy in her late-forties. The question is why after several decades of living in a flat, two-dimensional world did Bridgeman’s brain spontaneously begin to process 3D images?
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world
This is a topic of personal interest to me -- I lost my stereovision in grad school, which made it almost impossible to do lab work. It took a long time before my condition was properly diagnosed, as it had come on incrementally, rather than suddenly. It took not one, but two, dedicated doctors to correctly diagnose and treat my condition. I can't imagine how difficult my life would have been without this treatment.
I recently read Sue Barry's "Fixing My Gaze", which taught me a lot beyond my own personal experience. She had been stereoblind nearly since birth, and was cured of the condition late in life, which many doctors said was impossible. A neurologist, she was able to discuss her own therapy with insight from her own professional training.
Even if you think you aren't affected by this, it is something worth knowing about. Some "slow readers" may actually be suffering from an inability to focus both eyes simultaneously on the material they are reading. Be sure your children's eyes are checked for proper stereo vision when you take them for their eye exams -- it is much easier to treat difficulties at a young age, and the benefit of correcting them is tremendous.
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