Coming to Our Senses by Susan R. Barry

Author:Susan R. Barry [Barry, Susan R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

– chapter 9 –

Christmas Lights on the Grass

FIGURE 9.1. Liam, 2019.

LIAM HOPES TO HELP OTHERS WITH VISION LOSS, SO HE HAS immersed himself in the biomedical field. He wants to learn as much as he can about the eye and vision and reads ophthalmology textbooks in his spare time. He has worked at a hospital emergency room and ophthalmology practice as a medical scribe and also in Dr. Tychsen’s primate-vision research laboratory. His lab job was to assemble photo montages from neuroanatomic slides of the visual cortices of strabismic monkeys. Infant monkeys with strabismus are the best animal model for revealing what goes wrong in the visual cortex of a strabismic child. Creating each montage was like piecing together a puzzle. Each slide showed a small region of the monkey’s visual brain, but when all the slides were correctly assembled, the complete montage revealed the whole unified and reconstructed visual cortex.

Liam loves puzzles, so he embraced the task of assembling the montages, but the work presented new visual challenges. To make the montages, he first had to view the slides under a microscope and then memorize what was on them. But, as soon as he put a different slide on the microscope, he forgot the first. As always, he did not shy away from the problem but broke it down into parts and solved the parts, one by one. First, Liam made a sketch of each slide and, using these drawings as a reference, then selected the best slides for the montage. With practice, he could sketch one slide, turn back to the photo gallery, which showed thumbnails of all the slides, and know which slide should be viewed next. When constructing the montage, he made a note of a blood vessel or stained cell on the right edge of one slide and then matched it with the same structure on the left edge of another. To do so, he had to move his eyes smoothly from one slide to the next. Remembering the images on the slides and tracking with his eyes, Liam told me, was initially difficult but got easier with practice. He was able to recognize when his eyes jumped instead of moving smoothly. Liam’s tedious work paid rich dividends; he was able to reconstruct beautifully the whole visual cortex of three monkeys. This work involved the assembly of hundreds of slides, a task even someone with normal vision would find daunting.

For Liam, every new experience brought visual challenges. He worked so hard on his new vision that Cindy sometimes wondered whether he should have undergone the IOL surgeries at all. She learned that some who gained sight after childhood became depressed, even ill, and rejected their vision. She had hoped that the doctors could tell her what Liam would be able to see, but they were learning from Liam too.

As for Liam, he is quite definite about the results of his operations and his new sight. He has developed his vision and restructured his perceptual world

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