Study finds the human eye's blind spot can shrink through training

A new, very small study suggests that people can shrink the blind spot in their eye by doing certain training exercises.

In the human eye, the blind spot is where the visual field corresponds with an area in the retina that has no receptors for light. Researchers studied 10 people, and over the course of 20 days had them take part in a "direction-discrimination" task. An image of a ring was centered in the blind spot of one eye, and the participants had to say which way waves of dark and light bands were moving through the ring. After some manipulation of the image by researchers, the study subjects were able to better detect the images in their blind spot, shrinking it by 10 percent.

That's "quite an improvement, but people wouldn't notice, as we are typically unaware of our blind spots," study author Paul Miller of the University of Queensland told Live Science. "The real significance is that our data shows that regions of blindness can be shrunk by training, and this may benefit people who suffer from pathological blindness." The results seem to show that the training made receptors that overlap or are adjacent to the blind spot more sensitive, making the eye more sensitive to signals coming from the site of blindness.

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