A Defect That May Lead to a Masterpiece

The New York Times:

In learning to draw or paint, it helps to have a sense of composition, color and originality.

And depth perception? Maybe not so much, neuroscientists are now suggesting. Instead, so-called stereo blindness — in which the eyes are out of alignment so the brain cannot fuse the images from each one — may actually be an asset.

Looking at the world through one eye at a time automatically “flattens the scene,” said Margaret S. Livingstone, an expert on vision and the brain at Harvard Medical School who helped carry out a study on stereo vision.

That appears to give people with stereo blindness a natural advantage in translating the richly three-dimensional world onto a flat two-dimensional canvas, she said. They use monocular depth cues like motion, relative size, shadows and overlapping figures to stimulate a 3-D world.

Read the whole story: The New York Times