[1] Barry's first book greatly expands on Sacks' article and discusses the experience of gaining stereovision through optometric vision therapy, after a lifetime of being stereoblind.
It challenges the conventional wisdom that the brain is wired for perceptual skills during a critical period in early childhood and provides evidence instead for neuronal plasticity throughout life.
[2] Barry's achievement of stereo vision, with the help of a developmental optometrist Theresa Ruggiero, was reported in a BBC Imagine documentary broadcast on June 28, 2011.
In a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improved, Oliver’s declined, and his characteristic typed letters shifted to handwritten ones.
Barry has published a blog in the magazine Psychology Today, entitled Eyes on the Brain, which explores the practical applications of the theory of neuroplasticity.
[8] Years later, after a colleague drew her attention to her tendency to disregard raised hands at the back of the large classroom, she consulted an optometrist who referred her to Ruggiero.
Together with ophthalmologist Bob Wasserman and vision physiologist Ralph Siegel, he came to visit her and Ruggiero in February 2005, and in 2006 he published an article on their story in The New Yorker.
[13] Hubel explained to me that he had never attempted to correct the strabismus in animals in order to examine the effects of straightening the eyes on visual circuitry.
[citation needed] This happened also to neuroscientist Bruce Bridgeman, professor of psychology and psychobiology at University of California Santa Cruz, who had grown up nearly stereoblind and acquired stereo vision spontaneously in 2012 at the age of 67, when watching the 3D movie Hugo with polarizing 3D glasses.