It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => Science, Technology, & Medicine => Topic started by: trapeze on January 23, 2014, 08:49:00 PM
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LINK (http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/23/app-can-eliminate-need-for-reading-glasses/)
Like death and taxes, reading glasses can seem almost inevitable -- perhaps until now.
A new app called GlassesOff claims to be able to improve your vision, eliminating the need for reading glasses for sufferers of the near universal condition called presbyopia (from the Greek for aging eyes). The condition hits nearly everyone -- an estimated 1.2 billion sufferers are predicted by 2020, according to one study.
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It sounds impossible -- yet it’s real, and based on a very simple yet groundbreaking discovery, Madar explained. “Vision actually happens in the brain,” he told FoxNews.com.
Eyes may be windows to the soul, but like a window, they’re simply panes of glass. You don’t see with your eyes, Madar explained. Eyes are the lenses on a digital camera; your brain is the computer chip that interprets the light signals and translates them into a picture.
The eye captures light, the brain interprets that data -- and the app can in theory alter how the brain does that.
“We’re changing the way the brain interprets that information,” he said.
iPhone and iPad only, though.
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Hmmm. The lens in the eye is physcial, not brain, per se. In time, it loses its ability to narrow significantly enough to focus short-length.
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So, it really is just all in my head?
The voices were right! ;D
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Hmmm. The lens in the eye is physcial, not brain, per se. In time, it loses its ability to narrow significantly enough to focus short-length.
Just like a camera is only as good as it's lens. If the lens gets cloudy, you won't get a good pic.
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It is fascinating, though, how much of our perception isn't the raw input but rather the interpretation and collation that happens in the brain. I read about some new microsurgery that can repair damage to retinas and optic nerves, sometimes even in people who have been blind for years. They said that for these people who have been sightless for a long time (or since birth) when their vision returns it is just a jumble of light. It takes quite a while before it becomes coherent vision, because the brain is having to relearn how to process optical stimulation.