Our visual efficiency has a vital impact on the way we perform in the space we live and work in. Delays in this area can lead to difficulties with control of eye movement, orientation, reproduction of shapes and forms, visual discrimination and depth perception.

Children who keep losing their place when reading, miss words and skip lines, have letter and number reversals and substitute words are telling us that their visual systems do not work efficiently. Visual difficulties usually go hand in hand with problems in other body systems, so it is not simply the eyes that are causing problems.

Vision and visual processing are complicated processes: 90% of vision takes place in the brain rather than the eyes. When you consider that young children not only look at but touch objects around them to learn about size, texture and dimensions, it is clear that visual processing is closely linked to the vestibular system.

Jim shared an article with me that ‘opened my eyes’ about vision and the vestibular system. In an experiment to perceive how much of vision is ‘learned’ from touch and proprioception scientists wore special pairs of mirrored glasses, which turned the view of their environment upside down and back to front. Initially, the scientists were disorientated, bumping into and falling over things. However, several days later they had adjusted and their upside-down world appeared normal. Their clever, functioning vestibular system was aware that the world had not been turned upside down. The scientists could move and see without a problem – that is, until they removed their glasses at the end of the study. Their body and eyes then needed to learn all over again, and they endured several days of disorientation and accidents.

This story made it clear to me that, though we are born with eyesight, vision is learned. We actually train ourselves to learn this, and the brain, sense of touch and vision are inextricably linked.