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Comment by pavement | Hacker News Reader

  In people with the condition, the 
  cells were arranged in matching 
  patterns in both eyes, which may 
  be to blame for confusing the brain 
  by producing “mirror” images.

I mean, geeze. I’m kind of flabberghasted reading that.

Wow. Weird. Of all the things. A rare moment when symmetry in the human body turns out to be a bad thing. I guess if it was going to a problem, optics would be the rational place where that sort of issue to seems to crop up.

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This feels like a scenario where something is so weird and surprising that it is almost certainly incorrect. Amazingly weird reasons are almost never the reason.

Why would this be a problem for reading but not for every single other freaking task where both eyes look at and identify the same object?

3 random guesses:

- most objects are larger than letters

- the details of most objects are less relevant than with lettering

- you can spend more time recognising each thing, whatever it is, without slowing yourself down so much that the task becomes intractable (when reading, you have to recognise, and correctly, a lot of letters per minute)

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