EXERCISESREDUCE

EYES'NATURAL
BLINDSPOT
THATCOULDBEUSEFULFORPEOPLEWITH
SOMEKINDSOFVISIONIMPAIRMENT

Even if you have normal vision, you have a blind spot in your retina.
Usually that doesnt affect how you perceive the world because your
brain fills in the gaps. But now a team of researchers has found that
eye exercises can reduce the size of that blind spot, which could help
people who are blind to regain some of their vision. The study was
published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Your retina is the layer of cells at the back of your eyeball that is very
sensitive to light. But there are no light-detecting cells in the spot
where the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain. That means
theres a relatively small area in which your eye cant detect any light.

To find your blind spot, sit with your eyes about a foot away from the
screen (you might need to sit a little farther away if your screen is
bigger). Look at the image below, closing your left eye and looking at
the cross with your right eye. Voila, the dot is gone.

Blind spot illusion

In an effort to shrink the blind spot, 10 people trained for 20
consecutive weekdays. Researchers conducted initial tests to find the
borders of each persons blind spot, then tracked their eye movements
as the participants looked at a ring with different colored bands that
fell into the blind spot area. The participants had to report the color
(red or green) and direction of movement (left or right) of the bands.
But the researchers changed the size of the ring so that sometimes it
was completely in the blind spot and sometimes just on the border.
The researchers designed the task initially so that the participants
would be correct about 70 percent of the time. But over the course of
the study, the participants got better at the taskthe researchers
found that the task reduced the size of participants blind spots by
about 10 percent, as Live Science reports.
The researchers hypothesize that the participants blind spots shrank
because the cells on the border of the blind spot became more
sensitive. And, though this study was small, that kind of training could
be useful for people who are pathologically blind, either because of
damage to a particular part of the retina or due to macular
degeneration, a condition in which parts of the retina break down over
time. (The exercises likely wouldnt help patients who have impaired
vision because of a problem in another part of the eye, like the lens or
the blood vessels.)
In future studies the researchers hope to figure out exactly why the
exercises work so well by studying the differences between eyes with
reduced blind spots and untrained eyes.