The novels, rated at an eighth-grade level or lower, included Alice in Wonderland and The Count of Monte Cristo. Subjects practiced at home by reading novels online upside down. Before and after training, they measured subjects’ reading speed in both orientations when reading silently or aloud. “I can’t change the fact that you’ve got this blind area,” Barton says, “but how can I help you live with it? How can I help you circumvent it?”īarton and his team set out to test whether healthy people could learn to read inverted text as efficiently as upright text, and how long it might take. Other therapeutic approaches involve practicing longer rightward eye movements, but reading upside down is more of a strategic approach, says neuro-ophthalmologist Jason Barton, senior author of the study. Since inverted text is read from right to left, those who have lost vision to the right can gain more information with each fixation. Brain injury patients rank the inability to read among the most significant effects on their quality of life. So in a society that reads from left to right, left hemianopia has little effect on reading ability, but right hemianopia can be devastating. When we read, we see only three or four letters to the left of our eyes’ fixation point, but we pick up information 10 to 15 letters to the right. Hemianopia, from the Greek for “half sight,” most often results from a stroke, but can also befall patients with multiple sclerosis, brain tumors or traumatic injuries. Any damage to the left occipital lobe of the brain, or the pathways connecting it to the eyes, can cause this disorder. This could be promising news for people with right hemianopia (hemi-uh-NOH-pee-uh), a condition that erases part of the right field of vision in both eyes. After 30 half-hour sessions over a period of 10 weeks, they gained an average of 35 words per minute in reading speed on inverted text. To assess how such neuro-ocular blundering might be improved, researchers at the University of British Columbia asked seven volunteers to practice reading novels upside down. You’ll stumble along in fits and starts, your eyes pausing longer and more often, each movement bringing less information to your brain. To appreciate the visual skill involved in reading, turn a text upside down. Reading, recognizing faces and distinguishing colors or musical tones are all forms of perceptual expertise. You’re a perceptual expert.Īs you read, your eyes alternately focus and move along each line of text in a seamless sequence honed over years of practice.
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