All right so that title is a little clickbait-ey.
But let’s look at this not-Schroedinger’s cat experiment. It’s meant to figure out how our brains might develop, relative to our eyesight. It’s brilliant and fascinating, and goes counter to whatever current profit-minded eyesight medicine will tell you.
Ready for a fascinating pirate cat story?
Back in the 1960’s this guy Torsten Wiesel from the Harvard Medical School’s department of neurobiology ran an experiment on kittens.
He wanted to more clearly understand the early development of the visual cortex.
To do so, he came up with a fairly brilliant (though just a little sad, I apologize!) experiment. He took a kitten, and sutured one eye shut. One eye open, one eye shut, for the first three months of the kitten’s life.
Guess what happens next, when the suture is removed.
Actually, let’s have Torsten tell the story himself. (image here, I don’t have his story to share with you digitally):
Copyright: The Nobel Foundation, 1982
That’s intense, yes?
Three months of no vision in early development, and the cat is blind in that eye. The brain’s wiring is deeply affected by environmental stimulus, in fact entirely dependent on it.
This all goes back to and ties in with my soon-to-be-ready, “A Quick History of Glasses”.
My point to be made there is that glasses have very little to do with medical science. I’m stipulating that these things were invented long before science came to understand the eye and brain, and has since continually been perpetrated for profit and as a quick fix.
But meanwhile studies going back 50 years already show that there is a highly complex biological connection between our mind, our consciousness, the biology of the brain, and what we see, or don’t see.
All this goes way, way deeper than some kittens from the 60’s. (though 60’s kittens, that’s deep too)
Don’t blame me for that one. It’s Google’s opinion when you type in “60’s kitten”.
In my BackTo20/20 rehab program I include a whole lot of activities that deal with the brain primarily, to balance out ways we stimulate the eyes. The current paradigm that’s all focused on the eyes is very limited (shortsighted, a smartass may say). Even the curious Internet geeks limit themselves to close-up lens exercises, and fail to really dive into the big picture.
You need an involved brain, to have healthy vision.
If you feel depressed and also have high myopia, I guarantee you that those things are very likely connected. If you reduce your dependency on those high diopter glasses over time, you are also very likely to have improved moods and mental wellbeing. At various points we might dig up some of my other favorite books on topics on the brain, which discuss a mind boggling (heh) amount of studies and findings.
Our conscious manifestation isn’t isolated bits and pieces. You don’t just stick a lens in front of eyes, ignore causes, and then hope to escape the correlated consequences.
Everything is connected.
Every short term quick fix has ripple effects that will echo through your entire life. Shortcuts now will be deep cuts later.
Take care of those eyes. Pirate kittehs.
Cheers,
– Jake
