When you first learn to drive, you are taught to use your peripheral vision to check your mirrors and blind spots, but what exactly is peripheral vision?
What are the limits to a human’s peripheral vision? If you notice changes in your peripheral vision, is your eye or your brain affected? Most importantly, what types of eye disease or brain conditions result in a loss of peripheral vision?
Agnosia is a rare condition that affects the senses. Imagine smelling a rose and not being able to place the smell. Imagine eating mom’s chocolate chip cookies, but finding out you don’t recognize the taste.
While it’s likely you know someone who temporarily lost his or her sense of smell or taste as a result of Covid, it seems almost impossible for someone to no longer be able to look at a common object, word, or even face, and be unable to tell what or who it is. However, that’s exactly what happens when someone is afflicted by a rare condition known as visual agnosia.
According to the United Brain Association, agnosia is a communication disorder that disrupts and impairs the brain’s ability to process sensory cues, most commonly visual and auditory cues.
Visual agnosia specifically disrupts your brain’s ability to process and understand what you are seeing with your eyes. In other words, your eyes are working correctly and as they normally would, but your brain is not.
As the medical community learns more about visual agnosia, they have come to understand there are actually several different types of the condition, including types that specifically affect your ability to recognize common objects (akinetopsia), words (alexia), colors (achromatopsia), and even familiar faces (prosopagnosia).
Lazy eye is misunderstood. What does having one really mean?
A true “lazy eye” is not an eye that is fatigued or has a high corrective prescription. The definition is an eye with reduced vision due to abnormal visual development.
Individuals with lazy eye depend heavily on their normal eye to see, while the weaker (amblyopic) eye will worsen over time from a lack of stimulation from the brain. Why is an eye considered lazy?
Lazy eye presents in only 3 out of 100 children. However, it is the leading cause of decreased vision in children. Also, understand that you are born with lazy eye. You cannot develop it later in life.
The harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays have been well documented. However, one of the most important, but often overlooked, areas of concern is the possible sun damage to eyes.
A recent report from The Vision Council estimates nearly 35% of the adult population has experienced eye or vision damage resulting from prolonged exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
To shed light on the importance of protecting the eyes from ultraviolet rays, it’s important to understand the various types of ultraviolet rays, the serious eye conditions that can occur, and how to protect your eyes and your vision from damage caused by exposure to the sun.
