A German woman who, although legally blind, has her sight miraculously restored couple of times. The 37-year-old suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), and apparently has perfect vision when she switches to eight out of her ten personalities. <evil spirit possession? or no>
Some of her personalities spoke only in German, others used English. But a major breakthrough came after about four years of treatment, when Waldvogel was shocked to witness B.T. recognize a few words on the cover of a magazine. She had assumed the personality of a teenage boy at the time. Waldvogel and his fellow psychologist Dr. Hans Strasburger began to wonder if her blindness was really a physical problem or just a psychological one. So they used an EEG to measure how the visual cortex of her brain responded to visual stimuli. They discovered that when B.T. was ‘blind’, her brain did not respond to the imagery, but when she was in a ‘sighted’ personality state, the measurements were normal.
They eventually concluded that the vision problem must have occurred due to an emotional response to the accident, where her body reacted by cutting out what she could see.“The regaining of vision happened immediately after a therapy session in which a major traumatic event had been worked on,” Dr. Strasburger explained. That was many years after the blindness first began.”Over time, B.T.’s vision steadily improved – she was able to recognise more words, then brightly lit objects, and eventually everything else around her. Her vision was first limited to just that one personality state, but slowly extended to seven others. According to the doctors, her “sighted and blinded states could alternate within seconds.”
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