This Wall Street Journal Story describes how vision replacement therapy works for those who have experienced stroke.

The adult brain isn’t fixed and immutable as once thought, but rather has the ability to “rewire” itself. Vision replacement therapy aims to train healthy brain neurons to perform the function of those damaged or destroyed by a stroke.  These new discoveries support the vision rehabilitation work Schneider has been doing for forty years with successful results.

New research supports The School for Self-Healing’s experience that the eyes can and do change by performing simple visual exercises.   In this study, 28 out of 30 adults had dramatic improvement in amblyopia, or lazy eye. Some even achieved 20/20 vision by performing simple visual tasks for a ten day period.

“Our results show that the patient’s behavior may be critical to get the brain to reorganize in response to disease,” said Eric Schumacher, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology. “It’s not enough to lose input to a brain region for that region to reorganize; the change in the patient’s behavior also matters.”

About half of U.S. adults age 20 and older have refractive errors, or eye problems that result in less than 20/20 vision, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery –what we see with the “mind’s eye”– directly impacts our visual perception.