Every human has a naturally occurring blind spot in their vision. This blind spot can actually be potentially reduced in size with certain types of eye-training exercises. A study conducted by scientists determined that with special eye-training techniques you can reduce the blind spot in your vision as much as 10%, thus improving overall vision.
There is a blind spot in everyone’s vision due to there being a spot in the retina of your eye that has no light receptors. In this particular spot, the optic nerve reaches the back of the eye all the way to the surface of the retina. Light receptors line the retina of your eye and the optic nerve takes some of that space away from the light receptors, thus creating a gap of light receptor coverage. You need light receptors to detect images in your vision, so this tiny spot that lacks receptors creates a tiny spot of blindness in our vision.
The special eye-training conducted involved the use of a ring of light places direct in the blind spot of a person’s vision this ring of light would show flowing waves of color and the objective was to figure out which was the waves of color were moving. The size of the ring of light would change, sometimes it would be so small it would be completely within the blind spot of the vision and other times it would be much bigger occupying the space just outside the blind spot. Those who participated in the training were also asked to determine was colors were in the ring of light.
Scientists concluded that reducing this blind spot by 10% “is quite an improvement,” unfortunately most people will be unable to notice a difference, as they were unaware of the blind spot to begin with due to how the brain pulls visual information from surrounding areas of the blind spot. There is a bigger picture to consider when weighing the significance of the end results of this research—exercising your eyes can potentially reduce blindness.