Making its way into mainstream consciousness recently is a topic that’s been hotly debated in the eye care industry for years: vision training. Now, a new report on its effects, published in the journal Current Biology, has the optometry community talking once again. The report suggests that the physiological blind spot, a zone of functional blindness all sighted people have, “can be shrunk through training to distinguish direction signals at the blind spot periphery.” 

The study, which comes from the University of Queensland in Australia, reports “training on 20 successive weekdays improved sensitivity to both direction and color, suggesting a generalizable benefit.” 

Using a computer and an eye patch, the researchers showed 10 patients a waveform in the visual field of their blind spot day after day. After the 20 days in a row, the participants’ blind spots shrunk by about 10%, the New York Times reports. 

“Through what the authors are calling perceptual learning, they were able to demonstrate an impact on the functional size of the blind spot,” says Marc Taub, OD, chief of Vision Therapy and Rehabilitation at The Eye Center at Southern College of Optometry, who was not involved in the research. “In this study, perceptual learning refers to the distinguishing of direction signals at the periphery of the blind spot.” 

Although it’s a small, controlled study, it demonstrates the concept of neural plasticity, he says. 

“This has implications in the world of traditional vision therapy for conditions such as amblyopia, strabismus and the visual consequences of acquired brain injury,” Dr. Taub says.

The researchers consider their study the first step toward a possible future treatment for vision-threatening diseases such as macular degeneration.

Miller PA, Wallis G, Bex PJ, Arnold DH. Reducing the size of the human physiological blind spot through training. Current Biology. 2015 August;25(17):pR747–R748.