Have you heard about the McCollough[1] effect? Check the URL, it's an image you can look at for a few minutes, and it will change the way you process images for several hours. For me it lasted days. And it's all in the brain.
To me it's pretty obvious how it works. It's a somewhat unusual pattern, and your mind is trying to remember where it saw it before and apply some of it. (In point of fact you just saw it a few minutes ago, so that's what you're remembering - it's not a long-term thing.)
If you look carefully at the word at the end of this paragraph I can't imagine that you don't see at least some of the appropriate colors faintly in it. Google.
I think the point others are making is that unlike, say, your height, "vision" is actually a combination of raw input from the eyes, and the subsequent processing of that input by the brain.
Therefore vision can be improved by making the eyes better - contact lens, lasik, etc - or by making the brain better - presumably what this app is doing.
A (very poor!) analogy would be how you you can use post-processing in software to capture better images, even without changing out the lens or the camera. Upgrading the algorithms in the software will result in better images.
Note that I'm pretty skeptical of the claims as well, but I also acknowledge that this falls within the realm of possibility. About to download the app so I can verify for myself...
> Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.
Reading is a subset of recognizing objects. Practicing reading makes you better at recognizing written language. This app lets you practice recognizing Gabor stimuli, which makes you better at recognizing a wide range of physical objects.
We're talking about the brain. The brain can change itself from the inside just by willing it. Much more can you change the brain using purposefully designed external stimuli.
The brain is like a FPGA, part of which implements a FPGA programmer.
