This has been very interesting.

Rebecca and I were both born with very bad eyes. Rebecca can only see out of one eye because of cataracts at birth and glaucoma. I have poor vision that is off the charts (-16). For some reason we both have careers totally dependent on our visual skills. This seems strange.

We hung out with the ‘Brock University Cognitive and Affective Neuropsychology Lab’ staff and got some insight into the common behaviors of humans pursuing something that is atypical about them. The study looked at Brain Electrocortical Functioning During Vision Processing. The idea was to record brain activity while looking at visual information to see what the earliest brain responces are… and compare these results to people with ‘normal’ vision. This would show how the brain adapts if you had disrupted visual input as a child.

The most fascinating discussions were around the regularity of people pursuing their weaknesses. It is not unusual for people hard of hearing to love music, for people confused with numbers to tackle math, and as in our case, people with bad eyes to enter art.

After some Googling, it was very easy to find this commonality throughout history: “Many of the most famous artists working in France late in the 19th century suffered serious eye diseases. There are reports of Monet, Cassatt, Degas, and Pissarro that shed light on important artists and their methods of dealing with adversity.” Also, “…what I find particularly amazing is the recurring theme throughout history of artists who continue to produce masterpieces while suffering from low vision.”

Neat.

Here is Rebecca all wired up. (click to enlarge):

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Also, Life in Paint has been updated!

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Tags: eyes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 6:55 pm and is filed under art, business, creativity, science, strange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.