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

A woman's brown eye.
(Image credit: iStock)

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.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.