An international team of neuroscientists has found that people can improve their ability to see fine visual detail by looking at a rapidly flickering display for about 10 seconds.
There are two major pathways that carry information from the eyes to the brain. One is fast and transmits coarse processing of the scene. The other is slower but sends detailed and fine-grained information. But suppressing one, researchers found they could improve the other.
Results provide a broader understanding of the eye
“We were surprised actually,” says Melvyn Goodale, visual neuroscientist at Western University and a co-author of the study.
“We, perhaps in a frivolous way, suggested that if you were trying to read the back of a medicine bottle—the fine print there about how many pills to take—maybe you would be wise to first of all look at a flickering display because it would help your detail vision improve.”
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More seriously, Goodale says the research gives a broader understanding of how the visual system works could help understand eye deficits that people have such as glaucoma. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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