Eli5: How does temporary blindness/ deafness heal back?

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I always thought that once those sensitive sensors are damaged, you lose them forever! How do they return to their previous state?

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

a lot of times in your body things are caused by like inflammation. so if you have head trauma and something is inflamed and pushing on something in your brain or around your optic nerves then you could temporarily lose eyesight but once the inflammation goes down and proper bloodflow is is restored your nerves can again function normally

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of the time individuals who have temporary blindness or deafness have done little impactful damage on their body.

When your body is physically damaged the cells around it know how to create more of themselves, every cell is also aware of its role and where it fits in the machine known as our body. Some cells however, are too specialised to just be created in mass amounts, and when our body was formed we actually used what’s known as “stem cells” to initially create these organs. If you cut your eye out for example, your body does not have the ability to regenerate your eye fast enough – instead your body will opt to try and heal over the injury to prevent loss of life (from blood loss for example).

If you have only done minor damage to your ear drum, or to the layers of the eye, the cells within the organs will work together to restore these cells back to the organ. Like a deflated football, you can only play for so long before you need to take care of the problem – similarly your eye needs time to recover, if you are always damaging it then it will never heal. A lot of people who get miracle physical healing were usually doing the harmful activity previously.

As noted by another Redditor a very typical reason that some people can lose their sight or hearing is inflammation of the areas around the nerves. In this situation you haven’t done any physical damage to the eyes or ear drums, and as such it is just a matter of taking anti inflammatory drugs (when it’s safe to do so) in order to restore vision or hearing.

People can also be mentally blind, meaning that whilst on a physical level they are capable of sight, that on a mental level they are just unable to see. In this case loads of therapy and physical exercises to encourage the brain to make connections to the eyes (you basically learn to see) is done to refine your vision.