The Brain's Way of Healing by Norman Doidge M.D

Author:Norman Doidge M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

A Move to Vienna

In 2010 a Viennese ophthalmologist, Dr. Christine Dolezal, attended a workshop Webber gave in Vienna, where he shared some of his techniques. She realized that a combination of her work and Webber’s would help many of her patients, and soon they teamed up. The eyes “organize” and control how we hold our heads, and our heads control how we hold our bodies; Dolezal realized that most of her patients who had lost central (macular) vision strain their eyes to see details, causing them to tighten their necks and upper bodies, and they start to feel unsafe and unbalanced.

While Dolezal gave them conventional ophthalmological treatment, Webber helped them work on their body organization and improved their ability to coordinate the use of their eyes, necks, and other body parts, which further helped their vision. Patients who worked at computers all day long had developed problems focusing and were getting headaches and neckaches; they could, with Webber’s help, feel less distress, and increasingly work without glasses. He helped children with misaligned eyes (strabismus), which can lead to double vision. Often people with misaligned eyes develop a secondary problem. Their brain, in an attempt to eliminate the double vision, stops processing input from one of the eyes, leading to a condition called “lazy eye” (amblyopia). He helped those children as well. And he helped a legally blind man, who was housebound after having lost his central vision from a complication of uveitis, to improve his vision and resume a social life.

• • •

THESE ANCIENT BUDDHIST IDEAS—MODIFIED BY Bates, Feldenkrais, and Webber—have been dismissed in the West due to a lack of understanding of plasticity, brain circuitry, the role of movement in vision, and the fact that the brain is so connected to the body. In this chapter I have focused on their role in a single case of blindness. Because vision is so complex, there are many paths to blindness. I make no claim that what Webber did for himself will work in all cases. I argue only that the natural vision principles behind what he did can be applied far more widely than is done now, from the milder problems of those who have blurry vision to more serious ones, and to prevent future vision problems.

There are now new neuroplastic exercises for rewiring many aspects of the visual system. Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at Posit Science have developed computer-based brain exercises to expand peripheral vision that are used with the elderly to keep them driving automobiles into their most advanced years and to help limit car accidents. Another company, Novavision, has developed brain exercises that can help people who had strokes, brain injuries, or tumor surgeries in their visual cortex, causing their visual fields (the amount of a scene they can see) to be radically reduced. Studies show that computer-based exercises can reexpand the visual fields—sometimes modestly, but every bit helps. And we saw in Chapter 4 that low-level lasers can improve visual fields.

Related to natural vision

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