3D-construction

On the way to the pool today I caught a radio piece about Susan Barry who, at fifty, couldn't see in 3D. Her visual world was mono, everything laid out on the same plane. Born cross-eyed, which surgery corrected when she was two, Susan's brain lacked a capacity to interpret data sent to it from her eyes to perceive depth. Nobel prize winning scientists declared the condition irreversible, so that was supposedly that. Until she consulted a specialist who taught her a series of exercises and proved that even Nobel prize winning scientists can get it wrong.

One morning, after dutifully practicing the eye-brain routine, Susan got in her car and found 'the steering wheel floating above the dashboard.' Since I was glued to the story in the pool parking lot, I looked down to see, indeed, my steering wheel was hovering in mid air. Surreal. The narrator went on to describe the woman reaching up to adjust her rear view mirror which, amazingly, popped out at her in space. I looked up to see my mirror behaving in much the same obstreperous fashion. The story ended beautifully with Susan Barry hurrying from work on a lunch break, stopped in her tracks by the snow. Instead of falling in a uniform plane shared by buildings, shrubbery and pedestrians, the pudgy flakes drifted in a tapestry of depth which drew Susan into their choreography, cradled her with joy.

And as I stepped out on the asphalt under the storm cast skies of late June, I was two years old again, blinking at a visionary's wonderland that laughed at this flatlander's mindset, caroling, 'honey, let's play!'