August 13, 2024

Why, post concussion, would turning your head cause snapshots of vision to follow slowly?

That's actually a really cool one. So when you're turning your head there's a couple of different things that need to happen. One if you're turning and looking at a stationary target you know your…
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Opto-Mization Optometry & Vision Therapy

That’s actually a really cool one.

So when you’re turning your head there’s a couple of different things that need to happen.

One if you’re turning and looking at a stationary target you know your eyes have to stay on that.

But oftentimes when you’re turning your head, we’ve got motion moving across our visual field but then your eyes are also making small saccades and jumps to come over to where you want them to be.

Now it’s common that it basically we end up having trouble because normally what happens is when you move your eyes your brain actually suppresses the information while your eyes move, which is why it doesn’t look like you the whole world moves.

If you move your eyes from looking at something on your left, your right, you see there but while your eyes are moving your brain kind of suppresses the information and fills it in.

So you think you’re still seeing it but you’re not actually really seeing the movement.

Now sometimes when vision start stops working quite as well as it should, you can actually start to get some of those experiences of seeing that movement when we go through it another place.

A lot of patients notice that is they’ll be tracking my finger, watching it moving around, and then we switch their prescription and they say it’s like wow all of a sudden that went from sort of like stuttering with tracers or trailers to like i can smoothly watch and follow that thing. Similar kind of effect to that.

Definitely a good thing to get yourself checked out for that because if you’re in the hands of somebody who really knows what they’re doing, you could actually stand to benefit a lot because I know you see it in that place only once in a while but that does indicate that there’s probably a bunch of other areas where your vision may be part of it but you might not realize.

I have people where they talk about multitasking being really difficult or even conversations, but they don’t realize that when you’re having a conversation and you’re looking right at someone, it’s a lot visually to maintain focus.

Both eyes are processing the background. Your brain has to make sense of the doubling in the background too so sometimes people will have things that trigger them that they don’t even realize vision can play a role in.

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