When seeing clearly isn’t the whole story
You can have “good vision” and still struggle with the way your eyes and brain work together.
Neuro-optometry looks at the connection between your eyes, vision and brain, assessing how visual information is processed and used. It can be particularly valuable when visual difficulties are affecting your everyday life, learning, movement, balance or ability to function comfortably.
Could you benefit from a Neuro-Optometric Consultation?
You may benefit from a neuro-optometric assessment if you experience symptoms such as:
- Difficulty reading, losing your place or skipping words
- Headaches or eye strain, especially when reading or using screens
- Double vision or blurred vision that comes and goes
- Difficulty focusing or changing focus between distances
- Sensitivity to light or visually busy environments
- Difficulty judging distances or navigating spaces
- Problems with balance, coordination or spatial awareness
- Visual difficulties following a concussion, head injury or neurological event
- Difficulty tracking moving objects
- Visual fatigue or needing frequent breaks when doing close work
- Difficulty concentrating on visually demanding tasks
- Changes in vision following a stroke or other neurological condition
- Children who struggle with reading, copying from a board, handwriting or visual attention despite having otherwise healthy eyes
Sometimes the problem isn’t simply what your eyes see, but how your brain interprets what they see.
Neuro-Optometry & Children
Helping children make sense of what they see
Children don’t always know how to explain that they’re struggling with their vision.
Instead, visual difficulties may show up as avoiding reading, losing their place, struggling to concentrate, becoming tired during schoolwork, reversing or skipping words, having difficulty copying from the board, or simply becoming frustrated with schoolwork.
A child may have clear eyesight on a standard eye test and still experience difficulties with the visual skills needed for comfortable and efficient learning.
How can Neuro-Optometry help your child?
A neuro-optometric assessment looks at the visual skills involved in learning, including how the eyes move, focus and work together, as well as how the brain processes visual information.
Depending on your child’s individual needs, neuro-optometric intervention may help support skills such as:
Reading efficiency
Helping children develop more efficient eye movements and visual skills needed for following lines of text and maintaining their place while reading.
Eye teaming and focusing
Assessing how well the eyes work together and maintain comfortable focus during close-up activities.
Visual tracking
Helping assess the ability to smoothly follow words across a page or track moving objects.
Visual processing
Understanding how efficiently a child interprets and makes sense of the information they see.
Visual-spatial skills
Supporting the visual skills needed to understand position, direction, distance and relationships between objects.
Visual-motor skills
Assessing how effectively vision works together with movement and coordination.
These skills can play an important role in how comfortably and efficiently a child engages with reading, writing, schoolwork and their visual environment.
Megan especially loves working with children
Megan has a particular passion for working with children and helping them understand and overcome visual challenges that may be making learning more difficult than it needs to be.
Every child is different, which is why the goal isn’t simply to identify a problem. It is to understand how that child’s visual system is functioning and where they may need support.
A neuro-optometric assessment can provide valuable insight into whether visual skills may be contributing to a child’s difficulties.
When a child says, “I hate reading,” it may be worth asking whether reading is actually difficult for their visual system.
Why Neuro-Optometry?
Traditional optometry primarily focuses on the health of the eyes and how clearly you see.
Neuro-optometry takes the assessment a step further by considering how the visual system communicates with and is processed by the brain.
Vision is much more than reading letters on an eye chart. Your brain uses visual information to help you read, move, balance, coordinate your body, judge space, concentrate and make sense of the world around you.
When the visual system is not working efficiently, everyday activities can become unexpectedly difficult.
How can we help?
A neuro-optometric consultation provides a detailed assessment of your visual system and how it functions in relation to your brain.
Depending on your individual needs, the assessment may look at:
- Eye movements and tracking
- Focusing and visual endurance
- Binocular vision
- Visual processing
- Spatial awareness and visual perception
- Visual-motor integration
- Functional visual skills
The results can help identify areas where the visual system may be contributing to your difficulties and whether a neuro-optometric rehabilitation approach may be appropriate.
You don’t have to struggle with “normal” vision
Many people assume that if they can read the eye chart, their vision must be fine.
But clear eyesight and efficient vision are not always the same thing.
You might be able to see 20/20 and still experience headaches when reading, lose your place on a page, struggle in busy environments or feel visually overwhelmed.
These symptoms deserve attention.
Learn More From Megan
Not sure whether neuro-optometry could benefit you or your child?
Megan has created a video series on our social media pages where she explains neuro-optometry in an easy-to-understand way, including the visual skills involved in reading, learning and everyday life.
From children’s reading difficulties to visual challenges following a concussion or neurological event, the videos are designed to help you understand the important connection between vision and the brain.
Follow us on social media and watch Megan’s Neuro-Optometry series to learn more.
Meet Our Neuro-Optometrist
Megan Lewis
Megan is a neuro-optometrist who specialises in assessing the complex relationship between vision and the brain.
She has a particular passion for working with children, as well as patients experiencing visual difficulties following neurological events or injury.
With a detailed, patient-centred approach, Megan works to understand not only what you are experiencing, but also how those visual difficulties may be affecting your everyday life.
Your vision is more than what you see.
It’s how your brain understands the world.
Could Neuro-Optometry Help You or Your Child?
If you or your child are experiencing unexplained visual difficulties, particularly with reading, learning, concentration, visual comfort, balance, coordination, or following a concussion, head injury, stroke or other neurological event, a neuro-optometric consultation may be an important next step.
Book a Neuro-Optometric Consultation with Megan Lewis
Your eyes see. Your brain interprets. Neuro-optometry connects the two.
