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adventuringraw t1_jdxn4xh wrote

Reply to comment by affordable_firepower in The two retinas are tied/linked together in the brain. Are they tied 1:1, so that each retinal point corresponds to the same retinal point in the other eye? I.e., each retinal point from one eye shares the same binocular neuron with its counterpoint in the other eye? by ch1214ch

That reminds me of one of the diagrams from the book I got this from, I took a screenshot and posted it if you're curious.

And yeah, if the severed nerve is between your right eye and the optic chiasm, then it seems that is what happens. Half your left eye's view gets sent to one hemisphere, the other gets sent to the other, and then they get stitched together again upstream. Though I suppose if it happened when you were young enough, it could be a fair bit different... injuries when you're still in the 'critical period' can rewire in really unusual ways.

That diagram shows what's lost from severed optic tract at different points through the pipeline, thought you might think it was interesting. For every one of those, there's probably a bunch of people living that life. Sounds like you're number '1'. I think I'd actually prefer that to '2' or '3'.

Anyway, cheers... glad I could share something you found interesting. I've got ADHD, so I've got my own version of neuroscience adding to my understanding of myself, haha.

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affordable_firepower t1_jdxodk0 wrote

Oh wow. Thanks for that.

The cut is definitely before the optic Chiasm. In fact, it's not far behind the eyeball so yeah, I'm a No.1

The accident happened when I was around six months old, so definitely still in the developmental stage. Now I'm wondering how my optics are wired 🤣

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adventuringraw t1_jdxpfd3 wrote

Interesting, yeah. I bet that'd be an interesting thing to find out about even, maybe eventually brain scan technology will be cheap and powerful enough that you could look into it for a lark:).

That book mentioned that approximately 50% of the brain (or 50% of the cortex at least?) Is dedicated to vision, and there's evidence I guess for tissue that'd normally take on one function to end up doing something else if the normal input feed's down for some reason. With only half the visual input coming in when you were that young, seems like that's a lot of computational hardware that's freed up for something else. Maybe you've got some only vaguely noticed superpower you'd be surprised other people don't have, who knows?

Edit: one last thing you might find interesting. Elsewhere in this thread actually, there was a discussion about biological inspiration behind convolutional neural networks from the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The inspiration was from Hubel and Wiesel, two really foundational Neuroscience researchers in the late 1950's and 1960's. They won the Nobel prize for their work, one critical experiment of which involved keeping one eye of a kitten closed and seeing how it changed their development. I don't know the details of their findings, but given the historical significance of that research, I bet your case actually has a lot of understanding behind it. Just wondering out loud more than sharing anything specific, but interesting that Hubel and Wiesel more or less came up in two comment threads here.

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