People's Senses Are Ever-Adjustable

April 9 -- Those soldiers and Marines who battled their way across the deserts of Iraq while blinded by fierce sand storms succeeded despite the fact that they had temporarily lost the use of the most critical of all sensory systems — vision.

Our eyes are the "teacher" that helps us calibrate all our senses, enabling us to sort through the flood of confusing sensory messages and navigate across the battlefield, or maneuver through the maze of chairs and desks in our offices.

That may be stating the obvious in that we all know it would be tough to be blind, but ongoing research at the University of Rochester Medical Center shows that our eyes are far more than just the tools we use to see the world around us. They are the key to our remarkable ability to adapt to the loss of some of our sensory abilities, according to neuroscientist Gary Paige, and his research shows that we adapt much more quickly and efficiently than had been thought.

All in the Eyes

It is our eyes, he says, that taught our brains how to figure out which direction a sound is coming from, and which voice belongs to which person calling out in a crowded room.

Paige worries about a lot of things, like how pilots can take off from an aircraft carrier into a dark sky, and fly essentially blind across hundreds of miles to drop their bombs on dark targets. They do it with instruments, of course, but he notes that the fact that they are able to do it at all is nothing short of remarkable.

"You have an airplane that is capable of incredible acceleration and maneuvers, and vision that is somewhat worthless because there's nothing out there to see," he says. "You have no bearings whatsoever through vision."

Rapid acceleration distorts the sense of gravity, and a pilot feels like the aircraft is climbing sharply, even if it is going straight ahead, leading to possible errors that could be deadly.

But it is the eyes that allow the pilot to focus on instruments instead of his errant senses, and after awhile the pilot doesn't even have to think about it. It just comes naturally.