Research into vision changes after intense exercise shows you not only fatigue the muscles in your body – interesting changes happen in the brain too that can impair vision.
The study involving Professor Ben Thompson at the School of Optometry and Vision Science was published this month in the journal Scientific Reports and featured on CBC News and Quirks and Quarks.
Thompson explains that when you exercise, the brain’s motor control system reduces its signals to muscles under stress, amplifying the effects of fatigue. Thompson and his colleagues Charlotte Connell and Nicholas Gant at the University of Auckland wondered if these chemical changes in the brain could be impacting other movement systems in the body, such as the oculomotor system that controls movement of the eyes.
It seems that the fatigue mechanism we're studying involves a general reduction in motor output from the brain,” said Thompson. “That was the question we wanted to ask with this study. Is fatigue just affecting the part of the body that's moving? Or does it affect the brain as a whole? That's why we tracked the eyes.
Interestingly when the research team gave participants caffeine half way through the workout, it appeared to reset the brain, not only reversing the negative impacts on vision, but improve eye movement overall.
Thompson and his collaborators next plan to study this reset phenomenon in more detail by comparing caffeine to other drugs with more targeted effects.
