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> There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia. My paed

> There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. For what it's worth, here's my story with amblyopia. My paediatrician failed to diagnose congenital hyperopia which resulted in amblyopia by the age of five. After a couple of years of eyepatches I was told my vision in the affected eye would never improve. My ophthalmologist explained that past the age of five the brain doesn't have the neuroplasticity to "learn to see" with the amblyopic eye. To describe the condition, it feels as though the affected eye sees in very low resolution. I was somehow able to know what word I'm looking at after staring at it for a couple of seconds, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't tell individual letters apart. At university, when my nonamblyopic eye got overstrained, I would patch it and use the amblyopic eye with the aid of software screen magnification. A couple of years later I realized that my formerly amblyopic eye suddenly sees almost as well as the nonamblyopic one. I suspect the fact that my amblyopic eye was unwittingly overprescribed by 1 diopter might have played a role by giving it an advantage for reading even when not using an eyepatch.

darkerside 6y ago
Are you saying that reading with the overprescribed lens trained your eye to see?
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but it certainly gave the amblyopic eye an advantage for close range which is where the nonamblyopic eye was struggling after a day of study/work. The base value in my calculation is a regular prescription, so adding one diopter would put it in the area of a reading glasses prescription.
klipt 6y ago
Maybe having sight in one eye means your brain already "knows" how to process it, and just needs to learn to redirect the input from the other eye to the visual processing center somehow? Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.
el_benhameen 6y ago
That's fascinating, and somewhat similar to my own experience. I was born with a large, central vision-obscuring cataract (or developed it very early on) in my left eye, and my optometrist told my parents not to worry about it, so they didn't. My left vision was as you described, very low-resolution and dark, with the addition of a large dark spot near the middle. I read with my right eye, though it felt like a little bit of the left was integrated. This led to eye strain, especially after I got into software and spent 8-10 hours a day staring at tiny text on a screen. I had the lens with the cataract removed at 26, and while it was initially fascinating to have brighter vision and be able to make out large print words, I eventually felt kind of disappointed that I didn't have a better result. My vision was still very blurry (significantly worse than the right eye), and since the artificial lens I received can't flex to focus like a real lens, glasses only correct for a single fixed distance, and text had a weird shimmer to it that made it very difficult to read when my brain integrated the two images. So I mostly stopped wearing glasses and went back to reading with my right eye. But I recently had a series of headaches due to eyestrain, got a new reading prescription that was better than the old one, and have been wearing glasses any time I read or look at a monitor. And until you mentioned it, I hadn't really realized that the "shimmer" is almost gone, and my left vision is much better than at any other point in my life. Cool!
- fouc 6y ago
  I wonder if wearing an eye patch over your good eye for a week or two would help the left eye develop new neural pathways and strengthen its ability to see.

darkerside 6y ago

Are you saying that reading with the overprescribed lens trained your eye to see?

GrantZvolsky 6y ago
I'm not an expert, but it certainly gave the amblyopic eye an advantage for close range which is where the nonamblyopic eye was struggling after a day of study/work. The base value in my calculation is a regular prescription, so adding one diopter would put it in the area of a reading glasses prescription.

klipt 6y ago

Maybe having sight in one eye means your brain already "knows" how to process it, and just needs to learn to redirect the input from the other eye to the visual processing center somehow? Probably very different from someone whose brain never adapted to sight at all.

el_benhameen 6y ago

That's fascinating, and somewhat similar to my own experience. I was born with a large, central vision-obscuring cataract (or developed it very early on) in my left eye, and my optometrist told my parents not to worry about it, so they didn't. My left vision was as you described, very low-resolution and dark, with the addition of a large dark spot near the middle. I read with my right eye, though it felt like a little bit of the left was integrated. This led to eye strain, especially after I got into software and spent 8-10 hours a day staring at tiny text on a screen. I had the lens with the cataract removed at 26, and while it was initially fascinating to have brighter vision and be able to make out large print words, I eventually felt kind of disappointed that I didn't have a better result. My vision was still very blurry (significantly worse than the right eye), and since the artificial lens I received can't flex to focus like a real lens, glasses only correct for a single fixed distance, and text had a weird shimmer to it that made it very difficult to read when my brain integrated the two images. So I mostly stopped wearing glasses and went back to reading with my right eye. But I recently had a series of headaches due to eyestrain, got a new reading prescription that was better than the old one, and have been wearing glasses any time I read or look at a monitor. And until you mentioned it, I hadn't really realized that the "shimmer" is almost gone, and my left vision is much better than at any other point in my life. Cool!

fouc 6y ago
I wonder if wearing an eye patch over your good eye for a week or two would help the left eye develop new neural pathways and strengthen its ability to see.