Summer is the perfect time to further your understanding of cortical visual impairment (CVI), neuroplasticity, and the visual brain. These podcasts and talks can help. So kick back, plug in, and listen.
Blind On Blind podcast: CVI Teacher Ellen Mazel discusses cortical visual impairment (CVI) on Perkins’ Possibility Radio podcast, Blind On Blind. “I went back to my students and the techniques worked and I looked like a genius,” Ellen, after attending her first lecture on CVI by Christine Roman-Lantzy, back in the day. Includes her descriptions of the ten characteristics of CVI.
Blind On Blind podcast: Dr Lotfi Merabet of CVI Neuroplasticity Research Group discusses the visual brain and cortical visual impairment (CVI). “The profile of visual impairment is changing.” As the only researcher studying cortical visual impairment, Dr Merabet frames CVI as “a public health crisis.”
Blindness Is Just Another Way of Seeing: TED Talk by Dr Lotfi Merabet. Blindness has nothing to do with living in the dark. Behind eyes that don’t see is a brain that does see. In fact, blind people use the same visual centers of the brain that sighted people do, and can teach us more about the brain than we think.
Can We Create New Senses for Humans? TED Talk by David Eagleman, author of The Brain, The Story of You (highly recommended read for understanding how utterly unique the brain is and how every experience we have shapes the brain and who we are). His discussion of his latest research exploring technology that bypasses sensory impairment will blow your mind.
CVI for the TVI & Other Professionals: Monthly series from Perkins School for the Blind featuring guest speakers on CVI. Some are best viewed but listening is good too. Link includes the fill series.
How brains learn to see: Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment through Project Prakash to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism. And even CVI.
Invisibilia, Batman: This debut podcast episode, Batman, explores the question, Can other people’s expectations of you alter what you can do physically? Specifically, they look into something that sounds impossible: if people’s expectations can change whether a blind man can see.
Kaleidoscope: The Cortical Visual Impairment Podcast: Sharing stories of neuroplasticity and visual perception. A podcast by Jessica Marquardt, CVI parent. You do not want to miss this podcast on the parent experience of navigating through diagnosis and the medical and educational worlds with a child who has CVI.
What Do Hallucinations Reveal About Our Minds? TED Talk by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks on Charles Bonnet syndrome — in which visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail, and walks us through the biology of this underreported phenomenon. “We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well.”
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