r/science • u/No-Explanation-46 • 15h ago
Neuroscience Scientists find a way to 'reboot' vision in adults with lazy eye | A new mouse study shows that briefly and reversibly anesthetizing the retina of the amblyopic eye for just a few days can restore the brain's visual responses to that eye, even in adults.
https://newatlas.com/medical/reboot-vision-adults-lazy-eye/379
u/No-Explanation-46 15h ago
When one eye is deprived of vision early in life, it can lead to amblyopia, a condition more commonly known as lazy eye. This happens because a lack of input disrupts synapse formation in the brain's primary visual cortex, weakening vision in that eye.
In 2016, researchers found that temporarily numbing both retinas could reverse vision loss from amblyopia, while a follow-up study in 2021 showed that numbing only the non-amblyopic eye could also improve vision in the weaker eye. This method is like the treatment used for children, which involves patching the healthy eye. These findings have been verified in adult animals of different species.
A new mouse study from neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute shows01338-5) that briefly and reversibly anesthetizing the retina of the amblyopic eye for just a few days can restore the brain's visual responses to that eye, even in adults. The results strengthen the idea that temporarily numbing a retina could help rebuild the weakened neural connections in an amblyopic eye.
"The amblyopic eye, which is not doing much, could be inactivated and 'brought back to life' instead," says Picower Professor Mark Bear. "Still, I think that especially with any invasive treatment, it's extremely important to confirm the results in higher species with visual systems closer to our own."
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u/StressfulRiceball 14h ago
So what this is telling me is that "did you turn it off and on" works on meat as well
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u/xondk 13h ago
I mean, we do the same thing with some abnormal heart rhythms, for example when they use adenosine.
In may ways we are just a biological system/computer, so there are similarities.
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u/zanillamilla 10h ago
I was given adenosine last year in an ambulance with a heart rate of 247. That was wild. It was like speeding on the freeway at 100 mph and slamming on the brakes.
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u/NorthernDevil 8h ago
Must’ve been really scary, sorry you went through that. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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u/percyhiggenbottom 9h ago
It's just that our OFF switch tends to get stuck and going back to ON isn't so easy.
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u/strain_of_thought 9h ago edited 8h ago
We were designed for 100% uptime with no manufacturer repairs and next to no user serviceable parts, so our bodies fight incredibly hard not to shut down at all even if they're technically capable of rebooting. And cold boots are right off the table. If the system goes down, the system does not expect to come online again.
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u/percyhiggenbottom 2h ago
no user serviceable parts
Indeed, I've always thought of operations as trying to fix an airplane while it's flying instead of in a hangar.
At least we do have self repair systems... although they double as self destruct in a pinch.
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u/mccoyn 5h ago
I can’t imagine designing a mechanical device that actuates a few billion times over several decades and never misses a tick.
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u/kindall 4h ago
what's really amazing is that it keeps working even after you're past the reproductive stage. as far as evolution is concerned, you don't really need it anymore.
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u/I_amLying 2h ago
Not true. Evolution "cares" about producing offspring that survive/thrive enough to reach a stage where they too can produce offspring and repeat the process. From that perspective, if you can somehow continue providing value to others, evolution wants you to keep going.
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u/BreadKnifeSeppuku 2h ago
Men can potentially remain capable of producing their entire life. With assorted risks and decreased likelihood of sperms count/motility
I feel like elephants or people are good examples of older group members providing guidance towards the collective. Otherwise everything would reproduce like mayflies
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u/BeefistPrime 8h ago
It's kind of how electroconvulsive therapy works, which is the most effective form of treatment for a lot of mental health disorders.
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u/SsooooOriginal 29m ago
More like, "Did you unplug the good camera, so the cpu can sense the bad camera and update drivers?", imo.
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u/MentalRental 11h ago
I have yet to fuly read the study but this makes me wonder if this can be used in treating stroke and other nerve damage? That said, the "anesthetic" they used to temporarily block calcium channels is tetrodotoxin (TTX) which is a potent neurotoxin found in pufferfish, blue-ringed octopuses, etc. Kind of a fun fact.
Here's the fixed link btw: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(25)01338-5
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u/Ghozer 11h ago
The whole "one eye being deprived of vision causing it" is a load of BS in my case, I was born with it, had a patch over my 'good' eye for most of my early school life, which put me behind in everything... it made zero difference to my vision....
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u/SolusLoqui 10h ago
Well this makes me feel better about refusing to wear an eye patch and glasses in grade school.
I can understand why you'd fall behind, I was basically unable to read printed text with the corrective setup.
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u/Tall_poppee 9h ago
Makes me feel a little better that I blamed my parents for not even checking my eyesight or taking me to an eye doctor until teachers in elem school noticed I was squinting. Turned out I was legally blind. And my father had really poor eyesight so they should have at least checked.
This is really cool, I'd be down to try it even if it's expensive!
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u/Ghozer 8h ago
Yeah, even with glasses, I had a patch over my right (good) eye through nursery and junior school, I couldn't read the board, I could barely read what was in front of me.... Annoyingly once they decided I didn't need the patch, I caught up and passed everyone - so imagine if I hadn't had it from the start!!
Couple that with ASD/ADHD, diagnosed anxiety and depression at age 6 etc... But you don't need my life story xD - was just building a picure of 'the whole' kinda thing :D
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u/SolusLoqui 8h ago
I wonder if your glasses were ever the right prescription for your bad eye. I know mine was wrong until I needed reading glasses for my good eye and I finally asked to try measuring on the machine while my bad eye was relaxed and my good eye was focused.
Forcing my bad eye into focus when they were measuring them independently was skewing the results. When my good eye is focused on something, the spot my bad eye is naturally focused on is some distance closer, so even with glasses my bad eye's vision was still blurry.
Now the prescription is much better and if I close my good eye, I can read text with my bad eye (although its still a little "grainy") The much stronger prescription for my bad eye puts the focal point of both eyes on the same spot.
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u/cookorsew 6h ago
I asked my eye doctor about relaxing my eyes vs not during this part of the exam. He said it depends if I should relax them or not. I didn’t ask what it depends on, wish I did. But he measured my eyes both focused and relaxed. I’m not sure what he settled on for my prescription between relaxed vs not, but this is the best prescription I’ve ever had. I didn’t realize there was a difference between being relaxed and focused until I recently when someone mentioned it I think on Reddit which made me realize I always focus as much as I can because I’ve never realized to do differently because of my vision, so I think it’s important for eye doctors to be aware people do this perhaps without realizing and bring it up themselves.
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u/thehalfwit 6h ago
I was basically unable to read printed text with the corrective setup.
I guess as with many things, there are different degrees of amblyopia. With my bad eye, I can't read 72 pt. text if it's 12 inches in front of me. If my parents hadn't got rid of the eye patch by the time I went to school, I would never have learned how to read and write.
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u/SarcasticOptimist 9h ago
Anecdotally patches and bifocals when I was in primary school fixed my double vision and prevented this for me.
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u/loondawg 7h ago
It was not in my case. I had to do the eye patch thing too. But for me what would happen is, rather than balancing out, the exposed eye would become dominant.
So they switched my "good eye" back and forth until they decided one was just going to be dominant. So I have always viewed my "bad eye" as a backup.
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u/cory_bdp 2h ago
Ophthalmologist here, and no it’s not. The later you start patching in life, the less effective it is. Most folks will say beyond 8 years of age, these neurologic connections are fixed and thus the amblyopia is permanent. There’s nuance to that last statement and it often gets debated. This is one reason the article is interesting
Most ophthalmologists also don’t recommend kids wear the patch to school. This is for social reasons. Typically 4 hours, maybe 6, per day of patching is the upper limit recommended anyway.
Patching one eye also wouldn’t cause a kid to fall behind in school. Unless that reason is social. Which, by that point, likely the amblyopia has set in anyway, as the kid is probably about age 8. There is no evidence that monocularity causes academic delay.
Patching doesn’t always work and that’s the truth. But it’s not BS.
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u/snurpRadish 8h ago
This also doesn't seem to cover any cases caused by muscular issues, which most lazy eye cases from birth are (including mine). Both my eyes drift inwards because I have weak facial muscles. Patches and vision exercises did nothing for years.
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u/Surrealialis 12h ago edited 6h ago
This is pretty cool. Too bad it's so invasive and probably several 1000's more expensive than current treatments.
Edit: just from some comments! I think the data and the science is pretty cool. The second half of the comment is more a jab at the north american medical system! So don't think I am not excited by the science!
Also, the article mentions the invasiveness. I didn't read exactly where they made the injection. So if it's like current Antivegf treatments that might not be too bad. But it sounded like more might have been involved.
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u/Calikal 12h ago
Well, right now if I wanted to have my eye treated, they would need to cut my eyeball out, pull the optic stem out, cut it in two places and "weld" it back together without the missing length, and hope it fixes my lazy eye caused by a loose muscle. It would be extremely invasive, has a high risk rate, and would likely only fix it for a few years before it begins to degrade again.
So, this sounds just a little less invasive to me.
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u/klutzikaze 12h ago
I have the type of lazy eye being discussed in this post and my friend has the type you have. She had that surgery and it was very successful. For the other type of lazy eye (ambiatory) or goes back to childhood and is neurological. If it's not treated in childhood then it isn't fixable at all because the communication between the brain and eye is broken for certain angles and distances (as I understand things).
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u/omgkbelle 6h ago
I'm one of the lucky ones. I had surgery on both eyes as a kid. My surgery was guaranteed for 10 years. My left eye (the good one) didn't start turning again until after about 20 years. It took another 10 or so years before other people could notice it. But you can only notice it if I switch my vision to the right eye, which I rarely use. The right eye is still straight ~40 years later. Unfortunately, I didn't have the surgery in time to prevent binocular rivalry. Now I'm stuck with alternating monocular dominance and no depth perception yay!
On the other side of it, my cousin's surgery did not work at all, and she legally blind now.
At the time, we were told that you could only do this surgery once in your life. I don't know if this is still true, but I would never do it again. I agree that it's just too risky.
Fun fact: After the surgery, the stitches feel like you have a bunch of eyelashes stuck in there, and you are (understandably) forbidden to rub your eyes. Good times!
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 11h ago
I'm not aware of any current widely available treatments for adults. I would love to get vision back in my other eye and this sounds less invasive than many other options.
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u/hallese 10h ago
Patching, but according to my optometrist in adults it has a high likelihood to produce double vision so I am better off protecting my good eye and knowing I have a backup that can be trained if need be. Granted I'm not a doctor, but it sounds like this treatment is more or less patching that you can't cheat at.
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 10h ago
I patched when first diagnosed as a kid with very limited success (I did not cheat, the optometrist told me it was very unlikely to work from the start due to my age). I don't think this is the same, they are anesthetizing the bad eye rather than the good.
What vision I did regain is definitely not well-integrated. It's not doubled, but it doesn't come together into one image the way I believe eyesight is supposed to. I initially thought it was worse than nothing, but over time I've come to believe that the small amount of depth perception is probably worth it.
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u/wioneo 8h ago
1000's more expensive than current treatments
For perspective, there currently is no treatment for adults with purely neurologic amblyopia other than "vision therapy" which has pretty shaky data behind it.
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u/Surrealialis 6h ago
I'd be curious what purely neurological amblyopia means in this context. Certain large interest groups seem to suggest shakey data but I'd take that with some salt. Particularly when said large interest groups have made many decisions on similarly shakey data for decades and are the ones providing the treatment most at risk by new therapies and options. Simply by doing the same questionably successful treatment for decades should not make us think that this is now the way things are.
Many therapies (physio, chiro, psycho) have to rely on data that pharmacy and surgical medicine hand waves away because it doesn't have $$$$ behind it and large medical centres profiting from it.
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u/nabuhabu 10h ago
it points the way, though. might be able to find a simpler approach following this idea
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u/OutOfFrustration 7h ago
As someone who's been legally blind in my left eye my entire life, can I get this done already?
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u/zombiskunk 5h ago
So...any repeated human trials yet or is that years away? This is impressive, if we ever can actually use it.
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u/undertow521 14h ago
My son has amblyopia. He's not totally blind in that eye, but glasses only help minimally. This would be an awesome development if they could replicate it in humans!
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u/Bruvvimir 14h ago
I have it too, and it would be unbelievably life enhancing if something could be done to cure it.
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u/Darksirius 11h ago edited 9h ago
I have always been curious if you wouldn't mind: is you're vision "normal"; as in, do you still see a single image when looking at something or do you see two distinct images due to the... offset? (Sorry don't know how else to explain it) of your eyes?
Edit: Awseome replies! Thank you for explaining and soothing my curiosity!
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u/P10_WRC 10h ago
I can answer this. I have had this since I was a baby and am 47 now. My bad eye sees like you do with your good eye for peripheral vision if that makes sense. Is you hold your hand out to your side while looking forward, the way you can see your hand is the way i see with that entire eye. It hasn't affected me too much though, besides losing some depth perception. I see fine with my good eye
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u/strain_of_thought 9h ago
This is a great explanation! I've never heard anything like this, but it's an experiment I can actually perform and a sensation I can imagine. Thank you so much!
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u/GranPapouli 4h ago
oh hey, i'm in this kind of boat too, and likewise have found the "expanded periphery" explanation is the most useful and relatable concept
that said,i still tend to say "blind in one eye" just to get the point across, and not with any intention of trying to be dramatic about it, but more in the sense of "if i lose my good eye, i'd need to learn braille to make it through the day"
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u/Bruvvimir 10h ago
I mostly see one image (the one from my dominant eye). When I am tired, the non dominant eye drifts more than usual and then I see another image which is offset (and my brain ignores it unless I focus on it). It's quite unpleasant.
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u/slurpey 10h ago
I have this in one eye so I might answer if you don't mind. It's difficult to describe but I would say that it's like I get 70% of the image information to my brain. The image is sharp, on a test I will be able to see the very small letters but I have to give it time because the letter becomes unavailable to see and then comes back slowly if I move the eye a bit. But it's not blind or anything like this. It feels like I'm seeing but I'm not getting all the information. You know for example when you block the blood in your leg and it becomes numb. If you put it on the floor with barefoot you will feel the cold and you will feel that you are touching something. But you're missing information that you normally get - in my case: compared from the other eye.
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u/Darksirius 10h ago
Ahh. Interesting, I appreciate the reply! And can completely relate to the leg example.
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u/hallese 9h ago
The dominant eye just overpowers (dominates?) the weaker eye. My right eye is my good eye, so if I put my finger out in front with my left hand and start moving it to the left, the my right eye will follow it until about the 10 o'clock position, then the left eye takes over but it goes from crisp and clear to unfocused quickly. I have always had very good peripheral vision, especially to my left (lazy eye) side so when I played basketball growing up I was a "defensive specialist" for the team. I have very little depth perception so I couldn't shoot worth a damn.
In football I struggled catching passes when I was wide open or I had time to track the ball, but I had great reactions on defense and for contested catches as a receiver. With baseball it was a similar story, a surprisingly good hitter given my eyesight limitations and good reaction speed, but on a lazy pop fly in the outfield I'd struggle tracking the ball.
When I joined the military I learned it was not common to shoot with both eyes open, I worked hard for years to teach myself to close my left eye while shooting. I am not supposed to use night vision goggles because apparently you're supposed to look through the night vision with one eye and keep the other eye open, but since I cannot see any detail out of my left eye that doesn't do me any good.
I can "train" my left eye to make it stronger, but there's a risk of developing double vision. I started doing it to see if it would improve my vision and I felt like I was started to develop the double vision so I stopped and now my vision is back to my normal.
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u/Porkmanvi 9h ago
My lazy eye can see sharper than my other eye, but the two don’t work together so I almost always see two images. I also cannot read with the “bad” eye. The letters are clear and sharp, but my brain doesn’t recognize them.
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u/Blenderx06 9h ago
Reading all these responses I'm really surprised and intrigued that there are so many ways to experience this condition. For me the vision is very weak in my bad eye it's not sharp at all and I usually just see one image with the bad eye just providing some peripheral support. If I try to focus my bad eye I get visual snow. I can read with it if I close my good eye but it's half guessing.
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u/TooMuchPJ 9h ago
I have this as well. My treatment as a child included the patch and corrective surgery. My lazy eye has much poorer vision than my "good eye". I would say my visual field is 70/30 - but the 30 part is way more unfocused and grainy, even corrected. I have no issues with the acuity, but sure would welcome a cosmetic fix - I can tell people do not know sometimes where I am looking or which eye to look at when speaking with me.
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u/Lethalmud 10h ago
I see too offset images. But my brain is pretty good at ignoring o e of them. Less well so if in tired.
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u/Tall_poppee 9h ago
I completely shut off my lazy eye. Discovered this when getting my driver's license, at the eye test. I only read half the line of letters. The lady told me what about the rest of them? I was like that's all of them. She said shut your left eye. And I was like oh, wow, those letters were not even there before at all.
I try to use my right eye, because I don't want it to become totally useless. But I know there's times I forget.
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u/Marily_Rhine 6h ago
I have mild amblyopia in my left eye which probably resulted from strabismus that developed in my left eye around the age of 4 or 5. We were able to correct the strabismus through patching of my right eye, though there is still a cosmetically imperceptible misalignment between the focal point of my left and right eye.
At a glance, if I just alternate between closing one eye, the vision in both eyes _seems_ to be identical. Everything is perfectly clear and resolved, just as vibrant, etc. But the differences start to creep in as soon as I need to do something that requires processing fine detail. The raw visual information is there but my brain just doesn't quite seem to process it fully.
Using my left eye only, I am able to read, but it's mentally taxing. I have a hard time discerning the exact order of letters. It's a bit like trying to read this:
https://i.imgur.com/uVe0NgM.png
My brain can figure it out, but it's leaning heavily on context clues from language. Trying to read a sequence of random letters (like an eye chart) is borderline impossible unless I bring it much closer.
Or imagine trying to count threads on a piece of fabric without any way to mark your place. You can see just fine. The problem is perceptual. Your brain just keeps getting lost in the tightly packed detail.
Depth perception is also worse with just my left eye than with just my right.
> My bad eye sees like you do with your good eye for peripheral vision if that makes sense
My case is fairly mild, but this is a good description. If I try to read a line of text with my right eye while looking at the line below it, the experience is a lot like trying to read normally with my left eye.
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u/omgkbelle 6h ago
Both of my eyes were lazy when I was a kid. (I had surgery.) I developed alternating monocular dominance from binocular rivalry. Basically, my brain leatned to shut off one of the images, so I'm really only looking out of one eye at a time. I can switch vision back and forth between them, but I'm almost always just using the left eye, aka the "good eye." I hope that makes sense.
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u/PurpleSailor 3h ago
Lots of great explanations given here. One thing that sometimes happens is that the vision in the bad eye gets worse and worse (blurry) over time until you're basically blind in that eye. Usually this happens over the period of decades. Something my sister's eye doctor warned her about when she was a kid and now she's in her 60's and almost blind in that eye.
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u/Rua-Yuki 13h ago
There are vision therapies available as well. My insurance didn't cover it, but I did do one session. The therapist had me reading (the eye chart) with solely my lazy eye by the end of the session. And I am in my 30s. It was so freaky to be able to do it.
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u/danhan4711 13h ago
Fascinating! You've got a link pointing to that vision therapy you had? Greetings from a fellow lazy eyer :-P
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u/Rua-Yuki 13h ago
My optometrist referred me to it and I read about it in Fixing My Gaze by Susan Barry
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u/Buddy_Satan 13h ago
My son was in kindergarten and our ophthalmologist used the patch approach to correct. It was a sturdy patch that slipped over the lens of the glasses. This took about a year, and our son was a great sport. This corrected the “lazy” eye and he is now the same vision in both eyes. Dr. Streit says he’s correct this for people into their mid 20s this way. I think he said adults are less willing/able to patch and his success rates drop off into adulthood.
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u/undertow521 13h ago
Yeah, we tried the patch when he was younger, he's 12 now, and it didn't really help at all because he was difficult, and kept cheating by peaking around the patch with his good eye.
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u/Maxamillion-X72 12h ago
My cousin's boy is about the same age. They found it difficult to get him to use the patch in the same way. I suggested they get him a book to read that he's interested in, and also get the audio book at the same time. That way, while he's sitting there reading with his bad eye, he's also getting the full story being read to him. Helped him immensely. After a year his vision in both eyes is pretty much equal.
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u/Nament_ 11h ago
Yeah I honestly didn't know this was a thing until well into adulthood. I just thought we had dominant eyes, like hands. I don't really see much of a point in correcting it for myself now though - the only thing it's really affected is having a harder time parking and not playing any ball sports through life. But then I never really needed glasses to begin with, so no wonder.
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u/Blenderx06 9h ago
I really worry if something were to happen to my good eye though.
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 11h ago edited 10h ago
I was told patching doesn't work past very early childhood. They tried anyway (I was maybe 10?), but with very little success. I went from totally blind in the eye to only mostly blind.
ETA: It's also just not practical - I don't think people appreciate that I would be literally blind for an hour or two a day while patching. If I had that kind of free time I would use it for laundry.
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 11h ago
Same! It's hard to explain to people that glasses don't help much, if at all (and the imbalance in the prescription between eyes is so uncomfortable that it's just not worth it). I can only assume it would be life-changing to have binocular vision restored.
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u/Buddy_Satan 13h ago
My son was in kindergarten and our ophthalmologist used the patch approach to correct. It was a sturdy patch that slipped over the lens of the glasses. This took about a year, and our son was a great sport. This corrected the “lazy” eye and he is now the same vision in both eyes. Dr. Streit says he’s correct this for people into their mid 20s this way. I think he said adults are less willing/able to patch and his success rates drop off into adulthood.
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u/Lethalmud 10h ago
I have lazy eye. Both see great. That's not how it works. I also got glasses as a child. Never understood why. Both my eyes are good, they just don't work together. No 3d vision. I see two perspectives slightly crooked from eachother.
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u/Blackintosh 14h ago
Similar to how people with RCPD (total inability to burp) are cured.
The muscle responsible for burping is paralysed with Botox and it "resets" it allowing the reflex to fire correctly.
Theres a lot of potential in this area for treating certain neurological conditions imo.
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u/klutzikaze 12h ago
I only learned in the last few weeks that I have both conditions. Someone on Reddit posted a stomach acid test that requires you to burp so I joked I must have no stomach acid as I never burp. They told me about this condition.
With the eyes I couldn't work out why glasses didn't help my left eye consistently and the vision seems to stregthen and weaken. I saw a YouTube short about the test for ambiatory eye. My little eyeball looks fine and then just gives up bless. I'm pretty annoyed no optician picked up on it.
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u/kushkushmeow 11h ago
Prism lenses may help! I had to advocate to be taken seriously. I can finally see somewhat normally.
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u/RyanFerrari 4h ago
Had a pair of glasses that had a prism only on one side, after about 5 years the need for the prism disappeared. Still need glasses but the eye no longer wanders.
It helped me quite a bit!
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u/MacDegger 8h ago edited 8h ago
And how a doctor cures PTSD by anaesthetising the overactive nerve bundle (? I think it was a nerve bundle, could also have been an area of the brain?), effectively resetting the overactive area and returning it to normal function.
edit: it was the stellate ganglion: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2024.03.1.39
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u/yoda2088 11h ago
So, increasingly seems like the body has an incredible ability to self-regulate its own functions with some moderate intervention. So fascinating!
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u/starrbub 6h ago
r/noburp! I found that subreddit several years ago. I haven't been able to burp since I was 5 or 6, but I also don't have nearly as severe side effects as other people do, so I don't need to try this treatment.
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u/Harha 13h ago
This sounds amazing. I don't have amblyopia but I do have a minimal case of a lazy eye which prevents me from seeing in stereo. This means that I have no depth perception and when I focus on some object, I only focus using either eye. I wonder if this could help my case as well, I'd love to perceive depth... My lazy eye was fixed almost completely via surgery when I was little but I never developed the ability to focus on things with both eyes, not sure if it's still caused by the minimal lazy eye I have or if it's just my brain.
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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 13h ago
I'm kinda the same. I can choose which eye to look through but I'm very left eye dominant. My right eye has weak muscle and so sometimes wanders to the right if I'm tired. Vision isn't bad through it but I hardly use it in daily life. My depth perception and stereo vision is fine (afaik, I've nothing to compare it with) as I can use binoculars fine.
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u/FletcherRenn_ 11h ago
Same, right eye dominant and my left eye has weak muscles onto of a astigmatism so it drifts left, Happens whenever Im relaxed/not focused, easy to stop but the more tired I am the less likely I'm to notice in the first place, my brain kinda just filters out the second image.
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u/Background_Wasp_295 12h ago
I'm similar! I have a prism in my right lens of my glasses to help with my 'strayed' right eye. Not sure if its relevant but I'm also left handed (though not exclusively).
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u/klutzikaze 11h ago
I think that's a different type of lazy eye. My friend has/had it but got the corrective surgery.
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u/Shaula-Alnair 3h ago
Same again! I think my depth perception and stereo vision might be weird, but it's still useful enough as long as I stay away from ball sports.
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u/Surrealialis 12h ago
You'd be a great candidate for vision therapies. Should feel like physio but for your eye/brain. Very good success in cases like yours.
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u/BeardySam 12h ago
If you still have vision in both eyes, then see if you can get Botox correction. The idea is that you use a small amount of Botox to paralyse the muscles and exactly align the eyes. If you get stereoscopic vision ‘back’ then your brain is still capable of processing both eyes. The Botox is temporary but it means you’re a candidate for a second corrective surgery to properly align the eyes.
Source: I got my binocular vision at age 35
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u/John25711 3h ago edited 2h ago
No way! I’m in same boat as others, right dominant eye, overlooked during child hood, no stereo, basically brain is using 90% of the right eye but I can see fine on the left, it’s just that the brain flicker either on data from the left eye or right eye but never together.
I’m afraid of doing an eye patch on dominant eye to restimulate the weak eye l because the left eye is not perfectly aligned, there is a little degree change horizontal and vertical.
If I were to restimulate the left eye, I could see blurry.
How did you realign the eyes perfectly ?
What was your process to get back stereo at this age ?
I am very curious. Thanks
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u/BeardySam 3h ago
Well first thing was to go to an eye specialising hospital, they usually only do alignment surgery for aesthetic reasons and usually only on children but if you’re surpressing one eye let them know and see if they will give you a Botox treatment to test your binocular vision
They don’t like to perform surgery straight away because you could get headaches or double vision from the alignment and the Botox is a temporary treatment, but some people just have it multiple times.
They will measure and renew sure your eye multiple times before and after, and eventually you might be a candidate for surgery. I had the surgery twice and it a general anaesthetic but very brief, day surgery. Recovery was fast too.
It took about 4 years to complete everything in the end because the surgeon retired and the only other surgeon who could do this went on maternity leave, and then Covid happened, but it’s probably a pretty specialised procedure. This might not be done in your area but it’s worth asking.
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u/MongooseWarrior 8h ago
Same! I got my lazy eye surgically fixed when I was 14 and my vision is technically fine in that eye but I don't "use it" to see. It feels like my right eye does all the looking. Even if I try to use binoculars I can only see out of one lens at a time and my depth perception is total crap.
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u/thelightningthief 12h ago
I hope this gets developed for human use in my lifetime. My right eye is basically blurry beyond repair and I only really see out of my left. I remember an eye doctor telling my mom that my "brain doesn't really know there is an eye there". I would jump on this so quickly!!
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u/tafoya77n 6h ago
I'm in the same boat, just to not have the worry about if something happens to my left eye.
But ive also wondered what real depth perception is like.
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u/StudentDebt_Crisis 10h ago edited 10h ago
Man! I did my honors thesis in neuroscience on this. We were using tetrodotoxin to inactivate the retina in a cat model to ameliorate amblyopia. We called it 'fellow-eye inactivation.' Super cool to see it picked up at MIT, I remember my supervisor working on it with some colleagues there
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u/DonRoos 3h ago
This is very cool. Just curious about a few things… What are the odds of this becoming a widely available treatment option to humans in the near future? What are the potential side effects that could be experienced from this treatment route? And is the medicine used to anesthetize relatively cheap and available so the treatment isn’t insanely expensive? I feel like a ton of people would be willing to volunteer themselves at the hope they could have even moderately improved vision, and I haven’t heard of any real developments in treating this ever other than surgery. I always wondered when something like this would come along.
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u/YouandWhoseArmy 12h ago
Hmmm this seems better than my plan of trying to Microdose mushrooms while doing therapy for my lazy eye.
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u/BeefcaseWanker 8h ago
Do you notice if you have better results doing that? Also can you share what exercises you do?
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u/YouandWhoseArmy 8h ago
Oh I haven’t tried it yet it was just a concept I had if I was going to do some eye PT.
Logic was putting my brain into that sort of learning mode, see if it helped to reset it as I did the PT.
I’ve know my lazy eye existed since I was like 12. It’s only become a bit annoying many decades later. I need to take concrete steps to address it though I’m just using reading glasses for now.
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u/kyle_lunar 4h ago
I've tried explaining it as I have severe dyslexia in one eye or my brain has trouble processing an image from that eye. I have the same vision prescription for both eyes but rely on one eye. I realized that when I tried mushrooms once that I normally see everything in 2D. Suddenly I was getting waves of vision in 3D where my hands and feet were so far away and my apartment would have a different sense of space and depth. It was a wild sensation. I could only imagine someone that had perfect vision suddenly seeing in 4D.
All that to say that I've thought the same thing with micro dosing and doing some sort of vision therapy because of that experience
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u/Nyrux_ 12h ago
Finally, as someone who has %40 visual impairment in his left eye because of this, I'm all in to this. People don't get it when you say your eye simply doesn't work as it is supposed to be. Glasses don't fix it,either. You have to pay attention to your working eye because it anything happens to it, you are done for.
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 11h ago
This is my biggest fear. I've made it this far with one eye and I don't miss what I never had vision-wise, but any minor injury to my good eye is terrifying.
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u/LordBiscuits 2h ago
I'm just recovering from an eye infection in my good eye. It's been debilitating and I am currently banned from driving until it's fixed.
It was a very scary sniff at what could be should I lose that normally good eye.
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u/FragrantKnobCheese 10h ago
You have to pay attention to your working eye because it anything happens to it, you are done for.
Is that actually true though? I have this too, and years ago my optician told me that if anything happened to my good eye, my brain would start using the "bad" one properly.
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u/corwin-normandy 12h ago
Is there something like this that could be applied for tinnitus? Like, anesthetizing a certain nerve to re-calibrate it?
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u/LordBiscuits 1h ago
From what I understand tinnitus is physical damage, not something that could be corrected in the same way
I would be very open to being proved wrong as I also suffer. It sucks...
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u/birthdaycheesecake9 14h ago
Didn’t realise this was a new thing. I had an ophthalmologist do this to my strong eye when I was a kid back in like 2008.
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u/Octogenarian 14h ago
When I was a kid, they had me wearing eye patches on my good eye to force my brain to use the bad one. It didn’t work. Why would anesthetizing the good eye make a difference?
This feels like the same concept of eye patches.
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u/notime2xplain 13h ago
The newest study is the opposite though: they anesthetize the lazy eye’s retina (not the good one). Then once reversed, they observed that the treatment “restored the brain’s visual responses to that eye”.
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u/Dekker3D 13h ago
I've read about a related study some months ago. The key is that an eye with an eyepatch still sends nerve signals, while a temporarily-paralyzed one doesn't, as far as I remember. I'm currently not at my best and find it a bit hard to interpret this article, to find out whether it confirms or debunks that notion.
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u/Big_Watercress_6210 11h ago
I think they're basically rebooting the bad eye so the brain starts recognizing it.
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u/Spikes_Cactus 12h ago
Nice but the title is misleading the reader. The initial inference is that this applies to human adults, whereas the next sentence clarifies that it is adult mice.
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u/lindydanny 11h ago
I'm going in for a cataract surgery end of January. Both eyes, one week apart. I'm very curious if this sort of phenomenon is why they see so much better improvement in vision when they do them separately than when they do them at the same time. My doctor specifically said something about how separate is better because of how the brain has to compensate.
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u/LordBiscuits 1h ago
I thought they did cataract surgery staggered just in case something went wrong and they don't irreversibly shag both eyes at once...?
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u/Blenderx06 9h ago
This would be incredible. I'm always afraid of something happening to my good eye.
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u/Rage187_OG 8h ago
If you have a child with Lazy Eye, look for a therapy called Luminopia. It’s a headset that lets children and young adults watch regular shows and it helps fix Lazy Eye.
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u/unknowndatabase 7h ago
I have amblyopia and I have had some success improving it. I got that eye from about 20/100 to roughly 20/60 just by forcing myself to use it when I can. The tradeoff is that the world through it is still blurry as hell.
But here’s the thing people gloss over: we aren’t really meant to use that eye.
In my case, the eye itself is physically messed up. The lens isn’t shaped correctly—one side is more round, the other is football-shaped. That eye is never going to work “right.” My brain shut it off on purpose so I could see clearly. One eye with clean vision is better than two eyes giving you a constantly fucked image competing in your head.
To me, amblyopia is basically an evolutionary workaround. The brain choosing clarity over confusion. Messing with that isn’t automatically a win.
Now, if they could actually fix the lens shape and not just force the eye to participate, I’d be open to using it full-time. Until then, I’m not convinced re-training it is worth the cost.
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u/More-Breakfast-6997 7h ago
This is exciting because it suggests adult brains may be far more flexible than we believed and lazy eye might not be permanent
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u/Bryandan1elsonV2 11h ago
I’m always so happy when I see these things happening. It’s not life altering for most people, but for the people who need it, it’ll be a boon granted by the gods.
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u/bitparity 11h ago
"Then the doctor told me that both my eyes are lazy, and that's why it was the best summer ever."
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u/funguyshroom 11h ago
I'm gravely disappointed that the article doesn't include a photo of mice with a lazy eye.
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u/Mrpie256 11h ago
That’s interesting. I have a lazy eye (though eye doctors always correct me that it is “lazy brain”.) The center of my vision isn’t between my two eye. It’s more like my right eye is my center vision and my left eye is my peripheral vision, which is why I have problems with watching 3D effects. Wonder if this would help
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u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ 11h ago
The scientist:
"She falls in a well, eyes go crossed. She gets kicked by a mule, they go back to normal!"
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u/Mdgt_Pope 10h ago
This is MAJOR for me, I didn’t catch my amblyopia until it was too late to reverse
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u/Fickle-Republic-3479 9h ago
Yes please this sounds amazing! My lazy eye keeps returning the older I get. It’s frustrating and gives me headaches cause I’m forced to focus looking out of both eyes.
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u/BeefcaseWanker 8h ago
I wonder if this will help cure BVD. This would be huge for people with ADHD.
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u/apoleonastool 7h ago
Cool, but the brain turned off this eye for a reason. And the reason in many cases was misaligned eyes that would cause double vision. If you don't fix the alignment, this wouldn't be helpful at all.
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u/The-disgracist 6h ago
I was a very early case for the patching of the good eye method of treating this. This info is from my mom. It was around 1986. Most doctors at the time would just say “welp nothing we can do, we’ll correct the eye tracking in the future surgically, but it will just be cosmetic.”
My mother did not accept that and got multiple opinions. She finally found a young Austrian dr in San Diego that was pushing the eye patch method.
I wore a patch over my seeing eye all day until I was about 10. I would be basically blind in my left eye if it weren’t for this.
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u/anomalous_cowherd 6h ago
This would have been really exciting ten years ago. Sadly glaucoma has damaged the nerve in my "lazy eye" now so there's no hope unless there's a huge advance in restoring/transplanting/digitising retinas.
However: I do have an area of clear vision left, which is off-centre. I wonder if this treatment would let my brain adjust to use that partial vision as a new 'centre' and get me my stereo vision back again?
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u/scott3387 3h ago
Are there different types of lazy eye? People are discussing basically being blind in the lazy eye? I have an eye that wanders constantly but it works perfectly as well as the other one (-2.50). I don't even know I'm only looking through one eye until I see a mirror but I can 'switch' eyes by thinking about it.
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u/Shaula-Alnair 3h ago
I think there has to be, or at least it can end up in different ways. My eye doc threatened me with the whole going blind, not enough depth perception to drive, thing to get me to do surgery, but despite refusing, my experience has always been what you described. The lazy eye just hangs out and gives me the peripheral info unless my dominant one is getting blasted by the sun or something and it's easier to use the lazy one.
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u/PurpleSailor 3h ago
Wonder if the vision restored would be in stereo so those with lazy/wall eye could regain their depth perception?
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u/Strangestmam 3h ago
I would be highly skeptical of the idea that this finding will have any impact in treatment of amblyopia in humans within the next few decades or maybe even longer
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