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Fixing My Gaze

A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions

Fixing My Gaze Open the full-size image

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By Susan R. Barry

Foreword by Oliver Sacks

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$12.99

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$16.99 CAD

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  1. ebook $12.99 $16.99 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $17.99 $22.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 26, 2009. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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A revelatory account of the brain’s capacity for change

When neuroscientist Susan Barry was fifty years old, she experienced the sense of immersion in a three dimensional world for the first time. Skyscrapers on street corners appeared to loom out toward her like the bows of giant ships. Tree branches projected upward and outward, enclosing and commanding palpable volumes of space. Leaves created intricate mosaics in 3D.

Barry had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy. After half a century of perceiving her surroundings as flat and compressed, on that day she saw the city of Manhattan in stereo depth for first time in her life. As a neuroscientist, she understood just how extraordinary this transformation was, not only for herself but for the scientific understanding of the human brain. Scientists have long believed that the brain is malleable only during a “critical period” in early childhood. According to this theory, Barry’s brain had organized itself when she was a baby to avoid double vision – and there was no way to rewire it as an adult. But Barry found an optometrist who prescribed a little-known program of vision therapy; after intensive training, Barry was ultimately able to accomplish what other scientists and even she herself had once considered impossible. Dubbed “Stereo Sue” by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, Susan Barry tells her own remarkable journey and celebrates the joyous pleasure of our senses.
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On Sale
May 26, 2009
Page Count
272 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780786744749

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Susan R. Barry

About the Author

Susan R. Barry is professor emeritus of biology and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, where she researched stereovision, plasticity, and coordination. She's written for and been covered by the New York Times, LA Times, Big Think, NPR's Morning Edition and Fresh Air, and elsewhere. You might know Barry as "Stereo Sue," a nickname bestowed by Oliver Sacks when he wrote about her for a New Yorker essay that was later anthologized in The Mind's Eye. She lives in Massachusetts.

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