Susan R. Barry is the author of Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, a Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World. A beautifully written narrative that tells how two people learned to navigate the world using their new senses, it was praised in the New York Times for “giving us insight into what it means to be human.”
Sue was dubbed “Stereo Sue” by neurologist Oliver Sacks in a New Yorker article. She went on to write Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions. Published by Basic Books, it describes Sue’s astonishing experience of gaining 3D stereovision after a lifetime of seeing in only two dimensions. Intensive vision therapy created new neural connections, and with them, a new view of the world. Challenging conventional wisdom that the brain is programmed for life during a critical period in childhood, Fixing My Gaze offers a revelatory account of our capacity for change.
Sue is professor emeritus of biology at Mount Holyoke College. She received her Ph.D. in biology from Princeton University and is the author of scientific papers on the study of nerve cells, neuronal plasticity and eye-head-hand coordination.
Sue Barry’s website can be found at www.stereosue.com