Susan R. Barry

Susan R. Barry is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience and Behavior at Mount Holyoke College and the author of three books. She was dubbed Stereo Sue by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in a 2006 New Yorker article with that name.^[1]

Barry's first book greatly expands on Sacks' article and discusses the experience of gaining stereovision through optometric vision therapy, after a lifetime of being stereoblind. It challenges the conventional wisdom that the brain is wired for perceptual skills during a critical period in early childhood and provides evidence instead for neuronal plasticity throughout life.^[2] Barry's achievement of stereo vision, with the help of a developmental optometrist Theresa Ruggiero, was reported in a BBC Imagine documentary broadcast on June 28, 2011.^[3]

Barry expanded her discussion of sensory plasticity and recovery in her second book, Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World.  In it she describes the experiences of Liam McCoy who was practically blind from birth but gained sight at age 15 and Zohra Damji, born profoundly deaf, who learned to hear with a cochlear implant at age 12.  The book describes how they each reconstructed and reorganized their perceptual world, reshaped their identity, and rewired the neural circuits in their brain.

In her third book, Dear Oliver, Barry shares her ten-year correspondence with Oliver Sacks. Their shared passions—from classical music to cuttlefish, brain plasticity to bioluminescent plankton—sparked a friendship that buoyed both of them through life’s crests and falls. In a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improved, Oliver’s declined, and his characteristic typed letters shifted to handwritten ones. Sue later recognized this to be an early sign of the cancer that ultimately ended his extraordinary life.