Superbowl Sunday

While watching the Superbowl last Sunday I got to thinking about the key parts to hosting a successful Superbowl Party.

• The game

• The commercials

• The party

  • Food

  • People
     

I then started to think about each of these things relies on vision (it’s a disease, I know) .

The Game: Beyond the obvious

Ever hear of sports vision?  You will, it is one of the fastest growing sections in eye care.  Last year’s Superbowl MVP was Larry Fitzgerald he wholeheartedly endorses sports vision.  Sports vision is actually very similar to vision therapy.  We have talked about processing, especially when it comes to reading, and sports vision is about processing sport information faster.

For example

A receiver cuts across the center of the field, glancing at the ball he immediately predicts its trajectory.  He instantly adjusts his path to both avoid the referee and to meet the ball, simultaneously he is aware of a defender in the periphery of his vision and plans his route for after the catch to avoid being tackled.

The Commercials:

Commercials are designed for you to remember their product and advertisers use many different methods to make their product stick including, humor, originality, and visual stimulation.  Think about nearly every car commercial you have ever seen; frankly I have never seen a car look as good in real life as it does on TV.  The surroundings are manipulated to promote the product; this can be as simple as an appropriate background or even include extreme lighting and time lapse photography.  Another example of visual stimulation is the latest series of Coca-Cola commercials in which there is very little actually relevant to the taste of their beverage; the commercials are simply imaginative and filled with vivid colors and shapes.

The Food:

The idea that eating involves more than a simple sense of smell is not new.  How things look matter, especially when you are about to eat them.  I feel that presentation is half of what you pay for at any expensive restaurant.

The People:

Are you aware that there is actually an area of the brain whose sole purpose is to recognize faces.  You can test this on yourself can you recognize this famous face?

It is actually a very famous person and you have probably seen this very photo before.   We can simply disrupt our ability to recognize faces by simply looking at them from an unusual direction.

The inherent inability to recognize faces is a recognized disorder called prosopagnosia and it can be quite difficult to deal with.  Consider how socially difficult it would be if you never recognize any of your friends until you heard their voice.  People with these conditions even talk about losing friends because their friends believe they have been deliberately ignored.

Just a simple party, but it helped to remind me how vision affects nearly every aspect of our lives and how our lives would be different without it.

“Dodge”

William Dodge Perry, OD

Falls Church VA