WIKIPEDIA, RAMARunning while watching moving patterns can restore vision to mice suffering ‘lazy eye’, or blindness in one eye, according to a study published this week (June 26) in eLife.
This form of blindness, known as amblyopia, is caused by a lack of visual stimuli early in life, as a result of a droopy eyelid, misaligned eye, or congenital cataracts. If left untreated, the lack of signals from one eye causes deficits in the visual cortex of the brain.
Michael Stryker and his colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco, recreated this condition in mice by sewing an eyelid shut for several weeks of the animals’ early lives. When their eyes were re-opened, mice were allowed to run on a “treadmill” of Styrofoam balls suspended on a stream of air, either with or without a visual stimulus.
Within a week, the group that watched moving patterns had nearly identical brain responses to visual stimuli ...
