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Comment by crispweed | Hacker News Reader

It can't be as simple as this appears to make out, right? Otherwise, it seems like you could just close one eye while reading..

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Eye patches have apparently been tried over a decade ago with some success -- here's a reference from around 2000:

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/eye-patch-therapy-a-boo...

The difference is now we have a strong hint as to why they work.

I would expect that the social stigma would severely limit uptake in school though, which is why this isn't standard today -- kids can be rather vicious when they pick up on any hint of difference or weakness.

> I would expect that the social stigma would severely limit uptake in school though, which is why this isn't standard today -- kids can be rather vicious when they pick up on any hint of difference or weakness.

Random idea--what about a completely opaque contact lens, with an image of an iris/pupil on the outside, customized for the person's eye color? It would likely be noticeable up close, but could take away a lot of this social stigma.

Better yet, would be to simply have tinted contact lenses, so that the eyes wouldn't be "identical" but they would still give 3D vision.

Note that eye patches are already being commonly used in that age group for treating amblyopia

If it were a mechanical system, perhaps. But biology suggests that visual experiences will shape the way neurons connect during the brain's development...I hate computer analogies but consider all previous visual experiences as the training corpus for the brain's neural network. The response to a particular stimulus from one eye could readily evoke a response to that triggered by two eyes. The evidence is that people can usually read with one eye closed, under variable lighting conditions, partially obscured text, and wrds mssng vwls...though sometimes #/w is considered a vowel.

At 10% incidence of dyslexia, wouldn't it be possible to survey whether people blind in one eye for a long period of time or from birth have a lower rate of dyslexia?

10%???

Quoted from the linked article:

> About 700 million people worldwide are known to have from dyslexia – about one in 10 of the global population.

Could the linked article please stand up and give us some reference for this ridiculous claim?

> Dyslexia is the most common learning disability and occurs in all areas of the world.[3][11] It affects 3–7% of the population,[3][6] however, up to 20% may have some degree of symptoms.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia

That's a great idea, as long as there's no common bias driving both factors.

Although I suspect blind-in-one-eye will be primarily due to accidents, so that hopefully isn't correlated with dyslexia.

> I hate computer analogies ... neural network.

Isn't this a biological analogy?

He's already talking about a biological phenomenon, and describing it using an analogy to machine learning neural nets, so the analogy is not biological.

>an analogy to machine learning neural nets, so the analogy is not biological.

Except that "neural nets" are only "neural" by a (biological) analogy to neurons.

So he is describing a biological phenomemon by comparison to a a type of machine learning which is itself described by the very same biological phenomenon he's trying to describe.

(nothing personal)

This is why I hate them.

They only hold up at the level of analogy.

I am somewhat dyslexic. I especially remember having trouble with switching the "b" and "d" when I was very young. At some point (age 10 or so) I developed a lazy eye. I can't help wondering if this was my brain's way of adapting to this problem of matching patterns in the receivers of both eyes.

At times I have tried using a single contact lense for my lazy eye, but it causes headaches so I gave up on that.

> if this was my brain's way of adapting to this problem

Probably no. It's normal for a certain period of child development.

Maybe several Unis should attempt studies with diagnosed dyslexics and controls where they attempt to read text with an eye patch?

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