"According to the Nobel Prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in which to develop binocular vision. These doors close early – at the end of childhood – after which people are locked into a two-dimensional world."
What factors would prevent someone from developing 3D vision? The article mentions overlapping images, but how would this manifest itself?
You could have a problem with one eye, like serious shortsightedness, or clouded, or muscular problems that point your eyes in different directions. If these problems get solved later in life, you might still have 2D vision.
One way this can happen is due to strabismus, which is a condition in which one's eyes can't converge on the same gaze point. It's often caused by problems with the extraocular muscles, which move the eyes.
This reduces the brain's access to parallax information contained in image pairs that have the same gaze point in common and differ mainly due to the displacement of each eye from the other.
Hubel and Wiesel showed that depriving cats of stereo cues during a critical period prevented development of depth perception based on parallax info. It may be similar for humans.
Lack of certain kind of stimulation can cause that. After 15 years of trying to play music I "tangibly" perceive harmonies I didn't even knew were there before.
Also had a similar shocking sudden brain change in october 2013.
What factors would prevent someone from developing 3D vision? The article mentions overlapping images, but how would this manifest itself?