I’m on a road trip in New Mexico right now, enjoying the incredible scenery, the mountain air, and occasionally NPR.
That’s how I caught a program on neuro-opthamology, which is something I’m growing more and more familiar with but only now have a name for.
My nine-year-old daughter is being treated with neuro-opthamology for ambliopia, “lazy eye.” Twice a week she attends eye therapy where she does various exercises, and every day she’s not in therapy I do four different kinds of exercises with her for an hour and fifteen minutes.
Exercises include reading letters at increasing distances with one eye, reading small print through different lenses, and watching television through colored filters.
I’ve watched her ability to read rapidly improve, and it’s improving her school work greatly. In a year or thereabouts she should have highly improved depth perception as well.
The National Public Radio program The People’s Pharmacy was called “What to do About a Ghost in Your Brain,” and if you are interested in such things I highly recommend you look it up.
A highly successful artificial intelligence researcher suffered what seemed to be a mild concussion when his car was rear-ended. For the next nine years he suffered from his senses, perceptions and thoughts giving him weird and conflicting signals. He had problems with his balance and once easy tasks became almost impossibly difficult.
He recounted trying figure out what was behind a nagging feeling of something wrong by sheer force of will. After a few hours of hard thinking with sweat pouring down his face he realized he’d put his shoes on the wrong feet!
After finding a therapy program his is almost completely recovered. And the fascinating thing is, a lot of the therapy he described sounds like the kind of thing my daughter is doing.
The eyes are an extension of the brain and what goes in through them can alter the way the brain functions, help it to route around damage.
And by damage, they meant lesions so small they could not be detected by MRI or CAT scan.
There was much fascinating, and worrying, information about the effect of concussions from car accidents, falls, and sports injuries. For example a minor concussion one doesn’t think much about can leave the brain more vulnerable to a later concussion, even much later.
The good news is, the damage is treatable and we’re learning more about how to treat it all the time.
And though it’s better to start treatment soon after the damage occurs, it can still be treated years later.
One of the scientists on the program tried to give an idea of the complexity of that organ where the mind resides. She suggested an order of complexity equivalent to 100 million personal computers. The truly amazing thing is that we are starting to get a handle on that complexity.
We stand at the beginning of an age of exploration that may be as important as the exploration of space.
Best of all we have hope for those that have suffered the most feared loss of all, the loss of self.