The expected pathway of vision development is that a child’s Mind and visual system develops through a process of Integration. What a young child sees with his visual system is integrated with information from all the other senses…what is felt, heard, smelled, and tasted.
Eventually, vision should be able to stand alone. A person should eventually get a great deal of understanding just from vision alone. Beyond the strict information gathering process of vision, is the “Perception” of understanding what is seen and the “Processing” of visual information that takes place in the Brain.
Vision Integrates at the level of comparing to different types sensory Perceptions.
Vision also Integrates at the level self-generated visual information. When a person recalls experiences, the pictures that are generated come from the Mind, not the eyes! A person may often file information in terms of WHERE or WHEN the experiences took place. This can be called Conceptual Vision.
Conceptual Vision involves thinking with self-generated visual imagery. Visual Processing is not measured by common perceptual testing like copy forms, the Beery VMI, or other tests of Vision Perception. Visual Processing is measured with cognitive testing such as the Stanford Binet or the WISC-V. Visual Processing is essentially visual thinking. The ability of a person to visually think should grow as they go through different levels of education.
The assumption is that each educational experience should “stick” in a person’s Mind and the Minds of children should grow steadily as their Minds continue to INTEGRATE these new experiences into the Minds.
Situations take place where just the opposite takes place. Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-1980) was a Polish psychiatrist and psychologist, who studied gifted people. From his observations, Dr. Dabrowski developed his theory of Positive Disintegration. This is a process where operating systems on the Mind break down and are replaced by other systems. In the first three levels of these, the breakdown results in reduced function. Dabrowski proposed that some individuals were able to reach a 4th or 5th level of disintegration which could result in growth with positive implications.
The founder of Behavioral Optrometry proposed theories which were similar about disintegration. Integration causes the Mind to increase in processing potential, while disintegration results in less visual information “sticking” what he termed the tempero-spatio-chemico affinity lattices. He proposed that certain syndromes exist where vision problems result in a disintegration pathway through which learning was affected.
Psychologists have noted that patients exist who exhibit progressively dropping IQ scores when measured over many years. Our office has seen patients who had drops of IQ of 30-60 points over a ten-year period due to Disintegration. We have had patients where a decade of more of disintegration have been reserved or eliminated by restoring the process of Visual Integration.
These are some of our most successful patients. We have seen cases where a decide or more of disintegration was eliminated within a period of 6-12 months. If you have multiple IQ scores over a period of many years, that can be very helpful in calculating the ceiling or potential of improving cognitive performance in patients who went through a sustained period of disintegration.