Optics have been studied for a millennia and as the ancient Greeks taught us, the process of seeing is not an isolated function of the eyes, but a dynamic action of the mind. Such a sophisticated statement in more primitive times, and yet more emphasis is still being placed on 20/20 sight than on how we process our world.
Imagine that, at this moment your eyes were not working together as a team. It would probably make reading this article difficult, wouldn’t it? Your eyes might be alternating back and forth, and you’d have to reread once, twice, even three times before understanding what the words meant. One eye might be working against the other, sending contradictory signals to the brain. This disparity means you are left with less time and energy to process, little time for thinking ahead and less knowledge retained. Although a significant population might exhibit this “alternating” system, another group of individuals live with a “compressed” visual style. To identify this population, you might notice ones self avoiding action suited activities, like sports, or experience increased heart rate and sweaty palms when encountering open or enclosed spaces and fast moving objects. Persons with compressed systems may be quickly overwhelmed by crowded areas, such as department stores, city streets and highways and are overall likely to live an apprehensive day to day lifestyle.
As visual disturbances progress, we see greater interference with nervous system processing. For children, reading and learning issues, as well as developmental delays and spectrum disorders are of rising concern. Symptoms of headaches and migraines, motion sickness, gastric issues, fatigue and very often, anxiety become evident later on in life when visual processing deficits are left untreated.
Barbara Kotsamanidis, MSE has been a visual therapy provider with The Center for Visual Management since 2003. She holds her Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Masters in Science in Educational Psychology. Her concentration is in visual-spatial management, specifically treating patients with perceptual, developmental, emotional and learning differences. She additionally provides private testing and consultations in the areas of visual-motor & sensory development, school-readiness and educational planning development. Please feel free to forward any questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
At The Center for Visual Management, we examine patients who are confronted with such issues. The goal of the lenses we use and the visual therapy program we provide is to reorganize visual processing patterns and stimulate new synaptic experiences in the brain. Much like the growth of our motor development and even speech, vision matures in a complex manner and plasticity enables us to transform to greater degrees of efficiency. Regardless of age, neural programs are constructed and continuously work to execute representations for who we are, how we learn and how we can continue to excel in more complex ways.
