“When you see well, your brain is processing thousands of images a day, including those seen for only a split second. So when damage occurs to your vision, the brain can get creative and keep on generating images—filling in the poor quality ones coming from the eye. This is worrying! Some people fear that dementia […]
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My Heart is Not Blind: On Blindness and Perception by Michael Nye was published in 2019. It contains 45 in-depth conversations with people who live with low vision or blindness. The interviews are full of revelations about the many ways blind people use perception. They are about to be launched in a weekly podcast. Here […]
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A TED talk from October 2018 describes how a kid in Britain finally gave in to wearing eyeglasses and found trees had leaves and there were stars in the sky. Many of us who live with impaired sight or blindness find that volunteering our time to help others with vision loss fulfils something in ourselves […]
Read more "Many of Us Assist Others with Sight Loss, but Not Like This! Repost of TED Talk"
Re-Post How Vision Loss Can Affect The Brain, the New York Times, Studies suggest that vision loss in older people who do not receive vision rehab can suffer from cognitive decline; losing language, memory, attention and the ability to identify objects in space. The lead author of one study, Bonnielin Swenor, John Hopkins Eye Institute […]
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There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M Leona Godin was published this month. The book is also available on Amazon Kindle and Audible. (If you are searching using audio, the title There Plant Eyes is “there” as in here and there, not “their” as in their eyes and my eyes.) […]
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Man regains partial sight with new algae gene therapy | Re-Post from Popular Science, May 25, 2021 It’s not partial sight, or seeing as we know it, but it is the beginning of a breakthrough in a blinding disease. The photo shows how far this is from actual sight, but any progress is good for […]
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Blind Patients Hope Landmark Gene-Editing Experiment Will Restore Their Vision Re-Post from National Public Radio This re-post refers unfortunately to a rare genetic disorder, but still it might be a prelude to something for a wider range of conditions.
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Sylvia and her team have just launched the “Time To Be Bold” website (www.timetobebold.org) to help everyone over 55 with sight loss find services and rehab training. She also directs the Vision Specialist Graduate Certificate Program. Hannah: How old were you when your parents knew you had a vision problem? Sylvia: My parents noticed very […]
Read more "An Interview with Sylvia Stinson-Perez, Director of the Independent Living Older Blind Technical Assistance Center ( OIB-TAC) at Mississippi State University"
Re-Post from Bloomberg: A Covid Vaccine Is Coming, But Not a Miracle for Blindness Michael Schuman Vaccines Are Coming, But There’s No Such Hope for My Blindness It took scientists about 300 days to develop promising vaccines for the coronavirus. Meanwhile ancient ailments like degenerative loss of vision depend on age-old workarounds—like the cane I […]
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