Cover a healthy eye for 2+ years - permanent damage?

March 31, 2008 6:59 AM

What would happen if you wore an eyepatch on a perfectly healthy eye non-stop for 2-3 years?

I found a study where people who were blindfolded for five days had their vision return to normal after 60-90 minutes, but I'm wondering if serious, permanent damage would happen to an eye after years of disuse.

posted by Lucinda to science & nature (7 comments total)

The term you need for your searches is "monocular deprivation." My (shallow) understanding is that monocular deprivation in rodents in an early, critical period changes the architecture of the visual cortex. This is called ocular dominance plasticity. More recent evidence suggests that later deprivation may have an effect as well.
posted by Jorus at 7:13 AM on March 31

I can say that people who've had markedly decreased vision in one eye (from cataracts or whatever) for a long period of time (a decade or more) can have serious trouble ever getting true binocular vision back if they regain good sight in the affected eye. For some people, they never truly get binocular vision again (as is the case with my dad).
posted by biscotti at 7:53 AM on March 31

As a small child I had a squint in one eye which was corrected by surgery but until it was I spent a lot of time in an eye patch. As a result of this happening at the developmental stage I don't have binocular vision. One eye or the other is dominant depending on what I'm looking at and it's a constant source of entertainment for optometrists at my yearly check up. It also made racquet sports trickier for me than for you stereoscopic types. Oh, and those stereogram images of dolphins and stuff will never work for me.
posted by merocet at 8:12 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

[a few comments removed - save pirate and frankenstein jokes for someplace where they are remotely appropriate.]
posted by jessamyn at 2:20 PM on March 31

I have horrible vision and trip over my own feet without my contacts in. Years ago in my younger and more stupid days, I went about a year with only one contact in. Which sounds strange, but my eyes adjusted to this and I learned to see out of only one eye. Over time, the eye without the contact became smaller so for fear of looking like a complete freak, I bit the bullet and went and got more contacts. Over time, the smaller eye went back to normal. I imagine completely covering an eye would have a stronger effect.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 3:08 PM on March 31

Monocular deprivation. Let's see what I remember from my introductory neuroscience class.

Your ocular dominance will shift, and your spatial resolution in your lateral geniculate nucleus will be impaired - you will most likely develop significant depth perception problems, and your nondeprived eye will dominate most cells in your visual cortex.
posted by kldickson at 8:20 PM on April 1

It'd never occurred to me to get my husband to ask someone at his job (he works at the center for Visual Science at one of the local colleges). He asked one of the professors, who said that if the person in question was a child, the eye would go blind. If the person was a teenager or an adult, there would be no permanent damage.
posted by Lucinda at 1:56 PM on April 4