Why doesn’t our brain recognise bad vision and realign the cells of the eyeball to restore perfect vision?
In: Biology
It tries to, but eye alignment isnt really a major problem. The real problem is eye SHAPE. the lenses is physically shaped wrong. Not much the brain can do with that
Well, there are tons of different reasons for bad vision. Things like cataracts are clouding of the lens of the eye. Astigmatism is the curvature of the cornea being off. Then there’s things like retinopathy, where it’s part of the retina in the back of the eye, starting to die.
So there’s tons of different problems, and the brain can not control directly how cells divide. If it could, then we would never get scars because it could tell skin cells how to repair properly, we’d never get cancer because it could tell the good cells to kill the bad cells.
Cellular division is usually based on the other cells that are in that area. So if you had an astigmatism and scratched your cornea, the new cells that come in just tell it to grow back the same as the damaged ones, so you’ll still have the astigmatism.
As another said, it is def the shape and length of the eyeball that is the culprit behind vision problems like myopia. Also with astigmatism it’s the shape of the cornea.
More to the point, there isn’t really any neuroplasticity inside the eye/retina. So even if there was a neural solution to the double image of myopia, it couldn’t happen. There is neuroplasticity in visual cortex but the ganglion cells in the retina have already registered the double image, as have the LGN cells, so it’s a bit late to try and correct for this given the amount of early processing occurring within the retina and LGN.
It does. Except that your brain doesn’t have that much control over the structure of the eye, all it can really do is turn the eye in different directions and manipulate the shape of the lens within a certain range, and admit more or less light within a certain range. If better vision lies outside the range of how much light it can let in or how much it can reshape the lens, it’s not like the brain can break out a whiteboard and redesign the eye from scratch to produce what you think is perfect vision.
Same reason your brain can’t redesign the bones in your arm to reach around corners better. It’s limited by the structure that already exists.
You need to understand what causes bad vision; a “realignment” of cells a) is not under control of the brain and b) not likely to remediate most of the causes.
I have really bad retinal folds in one of my eyes due to a low pressure incident in the eye following surgery. My brain certainly has re-wired itself to a certain extent to improve my perception of vision from that eye over the years. Not perfect by any means, but way better then when it first happened.
It actually does, the reason why you have bad eyesight is usually that your eye sockets are poorly grown, and there isn’t enough space for the eye in them.
Basically an electronic system (your brain) cannot manipulate a mechanical system (eye shape). Similar to how your car blinkers can’t fix your brake pads.
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