We aren’t born knowing how to see. We learn. From infancy, our brains are busy making sense of the visual world around us. We learn to recognize shapes, judge distance, understand where things are in space, and coordinate what we see with how we move.
And increasingly, research on neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change and adapt with experience, is helping us understand just how much our brains can learn throughout life!
One of the most fascinating examples comes from a group of neuroscientists at Stanford University and, unexpectedly, a group of barn owls.
Owl optometrists are a hoot!🦉
Barn owls have an extraordinary ability to locate prey using both sight and sound. Their brains contain neural maps that help align auditory and visual information about where an object is located. In a series of experiments, Stanford researchers fitted barn owls with prism glasses that shifted their visual world. The prisms created a mismatch between where the owls saw something and where they heard it.
At first, their visual and auditory maps didn’t line up.
But the owls adapted.
Their brains gradually changed the way they mapped the world so that visual and auditory information once again worked together. That, in a nutshell, is neuroplasticity.
Interestingly, young owls adapted quickly, but adult owls didn’t seem nearly as capable of making the same changes. Researchers initially found that adult owls wearing the prisms while simply sitting around and being fed didn’t adapt very much. But when the researchers required the owls to hunt for live mice while wearing the prisms, the adult owls adapted too.
Their brains needed a good enough reason to change.
The experiment helped demonstrate something important about neuroplasticity: experience, motivation, and interaction with our environment can influence the brain’s ability to adapt, and adult brains aren’t excluded from the process.
So what does this have to do with our vision practice in Charleston, SC?
Quite a lot.
We often talk about vision as though it begins and ends with the eyes: Can you see 20/20?
But seeing is much more complicated than reading the smallest line on an eye chart.
Your visual system has to coordinate information about where objects are, how they move, how far away they are, and how they relate to everything around them. Your brain also has to coordinate the two eyes, control eye movements, adjust focus, interpret visual information, and integrate what you’re seeing with information from the rest of your sensory system.
Your eyes just collect information. Your brain makes sense of it.
Just like other skills, visual skills can be learned and developed.
The brain can adapt to the demands being placed on it.
We can use specialty prisms like with the owls, but also through vision therapy programs where the eyes and brain can learn to work together more efficiently. Through carefully designed activities and repeated practice, we can challenge the visual system and give the brain opportunities to develop more efficient ways of performing certain visual tasks.
This doesn’t mean that neuroplasticity is a magic reset button or that every visual problem can be “rewired.” But it does mean that the brain is capable of change well beyond childhood.
At Brighter Outlook Vision, we see this every day. We work with children who struggle to keep their eyes together while reading, adults who experience visual discomfort after a concussion, patients whose binocular vision makes everyday tasks exhausting, and people of many ages who have spent years compensating for visual skills that weren’t working efficiently.
So maybe the lesson from those prism-wearing owls isn’t simply that you can teach an old owl new tricks.
Maybe it’s that the right experience can give the brain a reason to learn a new one.
And that’s a pretty exciting thing to remember because there is hope for help at any age! Don’t wait and see. Let’s get started on a brighter tomorrow, today.
