flipping your vision

[toolman]

Hi

 

A few years back in school, by biology teacher told the class that there was an experiment that you can do to make your vision flip upside down for an hour. She never told us how to do it for obvious reasons, but now i want to try it. Does anybody know how to do this or was it just a joke?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I did a google search and apparently you have to use special lenses in glasses to do that. They did a study with these and discovered that after a day wearing them, the people's vision appeared to look right side-up again. They took the glasses off, and their vision looked upside-down, even though it was like they were BEFORE the whole study!

[Phi for All]

Please tell me their vision returned to normal after another day!

 

It's amazing how the mind adapts. I've heard of upside down vision happening with chronic migraines. Is this test with the glasses safe? I'm not sure I would want to do it too regularly.

[BrainMan]

Yes, and similar effects happen by shifting images over to the left or right with respect to normal vision. I really don't think there is any danger in doing this.

[Thales]

The experiment was originally conducted on birds i believe. They gave the bird the lenses and watched as they underwent an extended period of disorientation before their brains finally figured out how to 'flip' the image in their head and thus compensate for the upside down(or right way up on the retina) vision. When the glasses were removed the birds experienced similar difficulties but eventually adapted again.

 

There is a theory that this happens in young babies and some doctors even warn agains confusing the process by looking over your babies head (so your upside down) regularly as this is thought to confuse the process of stabilising the babies vision. So in theory we are actually looking at the world upside down in the first place as would be expected from the raw nueral data recived by the brain from the optical nerve.

[Frostrunner]

Actually the study was preformed on owls. They put googles on them from birth and compared their adapting time to that of an adult owl. They actually found that the mental map of the image was altered (the brain makes a 2-d map in the brain for sight, the owls was off by the amount of angle the googles were) in the fledglings but they could quickly restore there sight when the googles were taken off. As a side, as adults the same bird would switch back and forth easier than birds who had never worn the googles before.

 

As for people, they gave students money for a year for them to wear the googles and sad to say they adapted to the flip, but their vision was still flipped. Kinda like moving something in a mirror, you know what to do with your hand but it is harder and then gets easier but you still know it is the opposite you just have to think conciously about it less. They could do things fine but they didn't wake up with the world "normal again"

 

As for seeing things flipped in the real world- everything in the brain is flipped because of the way the light comes into the eye. It makes a cross in the eye

Light--- Eye lens (X)--retina.

But once it gets into the mental mapping it is then all relative so the flippinf effect is lost, kinda like "How do you know it is flipped if you have always had it that way."