Sunday, July 31, 2011

Focus, part two - body language

So I went to a milonga (Argentine Tango social dance party) for a couple of hours, danced and also made quite a few observations.

1. Binocular focus is directly perceivable.

People normally say "connection", "presence", "engagement", when they mean, among other things, the appearance of a binocular (or perhaps also uniocular) focus. 


The ability to directly perceive a binocular focus probably comes through relating to a personal experience of focusing. I clearly remember that I have seen in my life many people looking like the three dancers above. I even detected it was a pattern. I learned to notice this kind of look long ago, and I have always considered it beautiful. However, I did not relate to this kind of look, and I certainly did not think about it as connection, presence, or engagement.

In fact, binocular focus teaches us a lot about connection, presence, and engagement.

2. When looking at a person, you cannot distinguish binocular focus from mental focus
It is possible that for most people there is no such distinction. The experience of binocular vision makes it possible to have an extremely strong mental focus. If the eyes are open, the very act of shifting the gaze and switching the focus keeps you awake. Also, setting and achieving goals probably becomes strongly correlated with the tracking mechanism described in the previous post, the mechanism used by owls, eagles, and others. Say, you are a child, you see and want an ice-cream. You are tracking it with your eyes. After a while, every time you want something, the corresponding centers in the visual cortex probably get activated, which leads to an actual eye focus, where the object on which to focus may be arbitrary.

3. Sometimes it takes depth perception to understand the direction of the eyes
Maybe one can get without actual depth perception, but at least the experience of dance perception, or some kind of understanding of depth, is necessary. For example, this is a photography, so we do not have actual depth perception, but the experience of depth perception is helpful to at least try to trace the direction of the gaze. 

4. Binocular tracking is directly perceivable
That is, if you see person A watching person B even as person B moves, you understand that person A is watching person B, or at least that person A is watching someone. In fact, if person A is going towards person B with tracking, this can be seen even better.

Of course, this is also perceivable without binocular vision or experience, and you can see and feel the connection, yet it is so much more informative when you can relate it to our own personal experience. Of course, it is also creates a feeling that you are like other people. It probably helps to understand and respect other people, but it probably also makes it more difficult to do things that are not accepted by other people.

5. At least sometimes soft focus can be distinguished from binocular tracking (which is essentially an over-focus). This seems to be an essential social skill. Again, it is probably best learned by relating to the personal experiences of soft (simple) focus as opposed to binocular tracking.

6. There is a difference between binocular tracking and binocular tracking with intention. Only the second one is an over-focus. The former is still a soft focus.
In fact, there is yet another mode, which is an intentional gaze with a soft focus. That happens when you are looking somewhere with some purpose, yet trying to cover a fairly large area with your gaze. For example, you are looking for someone.


7. It is not as informative to just see where someone is looking. It is much more informative to notice the timing of focusing or the timing of changing one kind of focus to another. In order to notice such timing on the fly, noticing various kinds of binocular (or possibly uniocular) focus (or lack of it) should be automatic.

8. In general, body language is three dimensional
I already gave many examples above, but there are many more. Distance detection is essential for reading body language. Distance detection could be done to some extent with one eye using the visual cues. However, it requires a fair amount of accuracy, and as I repeatedly pointed out, visual cues only work well after an actual binocular experience. I would go as far as to say that when you meet new people (of "unknown height and shape", forgive me for describing people in such an objectified way), in order to reliably detect social distances, at least a past binocular experience is necessary, if not actual binocular vision.

Without reliable distance detection, social distances do not even get learned properly. In order to do that one would need to communicate with the same people all the time (so their shape and size are known), and then there would not be enough variety of social distances. Of course, close social distances do get learned, when we are talking about distances so close that you can and will touch, perceive warmth of the body, and so on. For further distances, I think, I had some rough measures which were probably wrong is the person was too tall or too short.However, I did not learn to judge social distance between others well. Now I look at groups of people and I start to understand how they relate to each other by, in particular, seeing their distances from each other and relating to my own experiences. I will probably need to get more social experiences with binocular vision before I can feel it well in others.

There are many other elements of body language that are three-dimensional. Facing each other, or turning a little away and being at an angle, are very important. Yet, this cannot be reliably detected without a binocular experience - essentially, without a stereo experience.

9. Emotions can be perceived in volume, such as, for example, a certain atmosphere spread in the room.
Also, when I am looking and focusing, this becomes a much stronger emotional experience for me. If I am watching a dancing couple, then this couple is (a) highlighted, since it is in the focus; (b) everything else is blurred so I am not distracted; (c) body language and specifically eye focus are directly perceived; (d) this body language is perceived very clearly since subtle movements are noticed much better (this requires two eyes actually working together, just a binocular experience is not enough). After I perceive an emotion, this emotion starts growing in me, because of (b) above, that is, all distractions are blurred. If the emotion is strong enough, it strengthens the focus or creates an over-focus with the effect of a hunting owl, then (a), (b), and (d) are further enhanced, and so the emotion grows stronger and stronger.

At some point I imagined emotions spreading from the center of the room as a spherical wave, seeing the front (spherical surface) growing from the central point to include more and more couples. The visual system got activated in no time, since it had no such previous experience. This is probably the most complex three-dimensional phenomenon that I have visualized or perceived so far. Even now as I imagine growing spherical waves, I feel how it strengthens the visual pathways and the connection between left and right.After a few waves I start to feel strong pulsation in the back of the head, on the left and on the right.

10. Simple gestures like folding arms when feeling in danger or nervous can be perceived and interpreted without depth perception. However, they are still more meaningful in three dimensions, since folded arms are actually creating something like a wall in space, and this body language is perceived directly. Without depth perception or the experience of depth perception I perceived cross arms as a metaphor for hiding from the rest of the world, and when I saw crossed arms, I could relate it to my own experience of crossing my arms, yet I did not experience it directly as a wall. Furthermore, crossed arms are trivial to notice, but more subtle things can be difficult to notice without properly functioning binocular vision.





Some elements of body language, particularly those where I had no personal experience, had previously conveyed no emotion for me, or no meaning, and certain things I did not notice at all. For example, continuing the topic about women, the "slipping the foot in and out of the shoe" had previous conveyed no emotions for me whatsoever. It conveyed some knowledge since I read about this body language element, and I recall consciously trying to find it attractive, but I couldn't.

Another example is standing straight and with confidence. Not very meaningful without depth perception ability or depth perception experience. On the other head, touching one's face or biting one's lips is directly perceivable regardless of depth perception, even though I am sure that I will now be able to notice more subtle aspects, and binocular focus should help to notice the exact timing and to feel the exact reason.


11. Lastly, too many people are weird or socially awkward, even though they probably have binocular vision and all the other physical components. Thus, nobody gets surprised if you are watching another person or a couple, and not picking up the feeling of the situation, or the emotions, or not noticing some socially obvious signs.

Focus

It may seem that the ability to focus on a certain object does not require binocular vision. Indeed, I tried to close one eye and was able to focus on different objects quite successfully. When I shifted focus whatever I focused on became more clear, and everything else less clear. The same as with two eyes, just less pronounced.

It is possible that even when one eye is closed, both sides of the visual cortex are working together. In the visual pathway both eyes are connected to both sides of the visual cortex. In this case a person who has always had one functioning eye since birth can learn to use both sides of the visual system and thus to focus with one eye only.On the other hand, maybe focusing does not even require both sides of the visual system, and it is merely a skill that has to be mastered by the brain.

Either way, I only learned the concept of focusing a few days ago. I probably started getting a feel for it on Wednesday.This is different from mere accommodation of the eyes. My eyes have obviously been accommodating all the time so I could see at different distances. As you can read in some previous posts in this blog, it was even possible to somewhat compare distances by the feeling in the eyes as they accommodated to different distances. However, it was never accompanied by this peculiar highlighting of one or several objects in the focus and blurring of everything else.

According to my mother, when I was a child, it was found that I had a small squint, but not sufficient to cause any problems (so they thought - in fact, by the time they examined me binocular vision is either developed or not, and the amount of squint can change over time, it can even appear or disappear). Thus, they told me to do some eye exercises, which I did, and at the same time my vision was improving. First of all, the exercises were for the squint, that is, for the aesthetic part of the squint. (If you don't know what it is, recall any people you have seen with one eye turned in or out, and think what it is like to live with your eyes looking like that, regardless of how the eyes or the brain are functioning.) That is, the exercises were not meant to improve vision. Secondly, I was doing the exercises totally wrong, as I see now, because those exercises make no sense in the absence of binocular vision. For example, one exercise was to focus on a finger and then follow this finger as it moves. Well, I guess I did not really know how to focus, so I picked a point at the top of the finger and was starting at it intently, as the finger was moving. Another exercise was to shift the gaze from a finger to a tree and back. Of course, both the tree and the finger looked equally clear at all times, so I just picked a point on the tree and a point on the finger, and moved my gaze along the segment between these two points back and forth.

I am quite happy that everything turned out this way, and have no objections that they did not examine my condition properly. However, it is peculiar how I had long remembered those eye exercises that, I thought, had improved my vision, and it gave me a lasting feeling of being able to rely on myself.



There is a lot of commonsense wisdom that implicitly includes the notion of eyes' focus.
For example: Don't look directly at bright lights when driving. In fact, "looking directly" means "focusing"; if you never focus on any object, there is really no problem with looking directly.

Another one is: Where you look is where you go. A biking instructor could say that. The thing is, without binocular vision this is not true. Think about predators such as an owl or an eagle. The prey is tracked with two eyes. This highlights the prey and blurs everything else. As the prey moves, both eyes detect it with a very high degree of sensitivity, and continue tracking. Moreover, this focus reorganizes the whole body of the predator and makes it fly directly to the prey, potentially ignoring everything else that is around. I expect that this is one of those cases where it is really essential to have two eyes, not just two sides of the brain working together. It would be interesting to check if "where you look is where you go" still holds when you bike with one eyes closed.

Actually, this experience of focusing with binocular tracking on something you are interested in and going there is very powerful. I feel how much it has transformed me already. Basically, when you want something and look at it, the visual system tells you: "GO! Get it! Everything else is not important." I guess, those people who do not suppress this mechanism are more likely to get what they want in life. Conversely, if you look at something that you want, and then you look away, this should be destroying the mechanism of focusing, regardless of the presence or lack of binocular vision. Thus, if you routinely don't allow yourself to look at things or people that you are interested in, I guess you are likely to lose direction and interest in life.


Another insight I've got is that when I look at people, they really know that I am looking at them. Even previously, when I looked at people without binocular vision, they probably felt that I was really interested in them in whatever sense, whereas I just happened to look in this direction, and accommodated my eyes (the eye that was leading at the moment or both, if they were switching back and forth) on some random point in the proximity of whatever I wanted to look at. Conversely, when I was not looking at people directly, they probably thought I was not interested in them at all, where as I was able to see a lot looking a little bit to the side, since I was not focusing on anything else either.


Of course, I still had the experience of eye contact, even with following somebody else's eyes in space, but those were rather exceptional situations with a strong emotional connection. I also learned a lot about eye contact from Argentine Tango and probably found all kinds of compensations. The feeling of eye contact was also different. Instead of energy flowing between the eyes as I feel now, it felt, allegorically speaking,  more like touching with the eyes.

I had certainly understood the social importance of looking at people in different ways in different situations. As a rather striking example, think about a man "scanning the body of a woman" with his eyes. This now seems rather strange, but I learned to do this "scanning" because I perceived it as socially important, even though I derived no visual information from this "scanning": in most cases, the whole image was there from the very beginning, like a drawing, without any focus.

Stereopsis: UP, DOWN, and other directions

Yesterday, as I was losing and trying to regain binocular vision, I was able to confirm and further develop some of my previous observations. I am not quite sure I was actually losing the ability to use both eyes; however, I was losing the feeling of 3d, the ability to track an object effortlessly, the extra-sensitivity to fine movement, and the very concept of focusing on an object and seeing everything else less clearly, as well as the new internal sensations that come with stereovision.

When I see with binocular vision, I see a tree or a streetstand, and I know that it goes directly upwards. I know and I feel. I notice if it goes 5 degrees away from the vertical. I am not talking about towers or very tall trees, just normal trees and streetlamps and stands with signs, things like that. Without binocular vision, I see a tree, I know it is up, but I do not feel it. I am trying to feel that a tree is a vertical, just as I had an hour or a few minutes ago, and I can't. I don't understand where to go to move up. I look a tree and I see it is slanted, and it feels very depressing. It feels like living in a world that is slanted, in a world without internal structure.

It may seem that I could just take a stone and throw it down, and see, if it flies parallel to the tree. First of all, what is "parallel"? The eye is spherical, after all, and vertical lines do not have to be "parallel" in any clear sense. This gets us to the second question: from which point should I drop the stone? If there is street tiling, you can imagine that I can pick a point on the ground in the same plane as the tree, then put a stone directly above it, drop it, see it fall, confirm that the tree is up. Right?

But where is directly above? This is the same as feeling that a tree is vertical. If the tree is slanted, there is no "directly above". Surely, it is possible to understand, where is directly above. A is directly above B if, when you drop a stone from A, it falls to B. However, this is not the same as feeling that A is directly above B, since this feeling involves visualizing a perfectly vertical line in space. In my experience, it is not possible to visualize a perfectly vertical line in space without binocular vision.

It may seem strange, since you can close one eye and still feel that a tree is vertical. In fact, one can close both eyes and still feel that the tree is vertical... but only with binocular vision, that is, only if both parts of the visual system are activated and working together. Maybe this feeling does not arise in the visual system, but then it arises in some other part of the brain that is very closely connected to the visual system, which is essentially the same thing.

For example, I am standing near a tree and I feel that it is slanted. I can then look at a flower near the tree. I can look at the leaves or at the petals, walking around, watching the optic flow, that is the sequence of different projections observed during the movement, and trying to feel that what I am seeing are but various projections of a three-dimensional object. As long as I start to feel it, I can look up and see crown of the tree directly above. If I the feeling is not strong enough, it is possible to then think "wait... but is it up? it just felt slanted" - and then it becomes slanted.  It is actually better to not check if the trees are up or not, this only weakens the stereopsis, particularly because of the feeling of insecurity that arises from it, and the resulting lack of presence. It helps to actually feel that the crown of the tree is directly above, even if there is no tree. However, watching the optic flow is much more efficient, since the brain will be trying to reconstruct the three-dimensional feeling almost by itself. Furthermore, not trying to do anything helps a lot, but it is difficult to achieve. This is not exactly "presence", it is sufficient to not try to move the eyes and not try to observe things. It is essential to not try to observe things since the ways of looking at objects, going from one object to another, noticing objects on the periphery, are very different in 2d and in 3d, and correspond to different sets of habits, such as shifting the gaze as a laser beam, or as a shape morphing from one object into another, in 3d, as opposed to moving the gaze along a segment from point A to point B in 2d.

The implications for dance and other disciplines are quite profound. If you are standing on one leg and bending one knee, it is possible to go directly down, and then directly up, as the knee straightens. If you are bending from the hips to touch the floor with your hands or your fingers with the knees straight, it is possible to try to make the legs exactly vertical, or as vertical as possible, given the weight of the upper body. All this requires practice and neither the perceived direction nor the actual movement will be 100% precise, but this is not what I am talking about. Once again, without binocular vision there is no feeling of "UP", nor feeling of DOWN.


If you do yoga, you probably know that "cat-cow stretch". A common instruction is "shoulders directly above the wrists". I have always used two things to check if I was following this instruction. First, it is possible to look if the arms are perpendicular to the floor, which can be learned by experience. Second, it is possible to feel proprioceptively the various muscles in the arm and those connecting the arms to the shoulder girdle, and to feel if all these muscles are in balance. This second one is a very good compensation for many purposes. It also works for balancing on one leg, but only to a degree, and even when it works quite well, it takes a lot of constant attention with specific control of various muscle groups. On the other hand, with binocular vision, there is a direct perception of "UP". In cat-cow stretch it suffices to merely place the shoulders directly above the wrists, and no further action is necessary.  The center of gravity can be perceived as exactly above the area that the foot is standing on. More importantly, it is possible to visualize, or intend, that the center of gravity be directly above the area that the leg is standing on, and just this intent already coordinates all those various muscle groups, sometimes better, sometimes less, depending on the experience and other things, but all this takes considerably less attention. It is similar to learning a foreign language and using associations to memorize words. You may create a short sentence for every word you are trying to learn that helps you to memorize the meaning. However, this does not allow you to process language on the fly. It simply takes too much mental work to recall this association for every word. You want to perceive the words of a foreign language directly.

Even more profoundly, there are no diagonal directions without binocular vision. There are really only four clear directions: forward, backward, left, and right, just like the arrows on the computer keyboard. You can get a hint of what's wrong with the diagonals, if you recall that "up" goes diagonally as well. As far as dance goes, there is no direct perception of croisé, écarté, or effacé. It can be inferred quite well, but only approximately. I do not feel it right it, because I do have binocular vision at the moment, and had for most of the day yesterday except for several hours when it was disappearing and occasionally coming back for a few seconds. However, once again: the point is not how well the directions can be inferred, but how direct is this experience, and how much mental concentration it requires.

 As it should be already clear, without binocular vision there is no sense of gravity. I realized recently that "dropping my shoulders" means that they are moving down, closer to the ground. Now I also understand how the shoulder can get wider, as I learned from Alexander technique: they can move a little bit back, if the tendency is to contract forward, and this allows them to move more to the sides, making the surface of the body flatter. Without binocular vision it is possible to feel that the shoulders move a little back, to the sides, get wider, but I couldn't understand, why it was happening.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Challenges

Apparently, it is not so easy...

Emotions knock me out of stereovision. For example, I get scared or confused or annoyed or disturbed, the stereovision shuts down, and I get even more confused or annoyed. There is really nowhere to knock me out so I get some intermediate experience.

Not particuarly easy to work. The letters don't want to fuse, and if I read with one eye, it again knocks me out of stereovision, and I feel lost and depressed. When I am in stereovision, the mind is too busy processing information to do anything else. Lots of old visual habits come up that make no sense any more. As eyes come more together, this leads to double vision. The brain tries to choose one eye or to move the eyes apart. Apparently, the right eye decided it could sometimes have double vision by itself, even with the left eye closed.

Not many objects around to focus on. Forgive me this detail, the only one that is reliable for fusion is toilet paper... Well, there are a couple of plants that kind of fuse. Printers are not bad. However, monitor screens and all those white panel surfaces just disintegrate the vision, and the light and shade are not helpful here. Same with the carpet.

I tried to align the eyes with intent for center fixation - as a result things in the focus started to literally get smaller. Not sure what it means.

Also tried palming. The old palming method does not work - it used to relax each eye separately. Now I sometimes see 3-dimensional blur, and I don't know what to do with it. Overall, still quite interesting...

Convergence insufficiency and strain according to the Bates method

Apparently, some aspects of my binocular vision still need to be developed.

One thing I noticed is that I haven't really learned to focus on things with both eyes, particularly in the case of small objects such as a pen or a finger. I may somewhat fuse a sufficiently large cup. However, if I am trying to look at a finger or a pen, I see it with my right or my left eye as before. If my eyes switch when I am looking at a pen, the pen moves a considerable distance. Thus, the background is fully fused and three-dimensional, yet a particular object inside this three-dimensional space can be seen with just one eye, as before.

If the object is at least several inches in diameter and sufficiently easy to see and track, then I can focus on it with both eyes. Perhaps most of the object will still be seen with just one eye, but at least the boundary of the object will be fused, thus the object appears to be in focus. If the object is sufficiently small or complicated, then both eyes do not even stay on the same object, and one eye start deviating immediately. This is quite uncomfortable, and if there is enough strain, one of the eyes gets suppressed more and more, and deviates further and further, and eventually binocular vision disappears. Reading is a little tricky, since I am not even close to fusing two images full of fine print that have to be aligned exactly right for the fusion to happen.

On the other hand, if at least the outline of the object can be seen with both eyes, then tracking the object is generally fun and seems to improve convergence. It helps if the object looks the same from different angles and is of a fairly homogeneous color, like the ball from yesterday or the water in a cup, so that misalignments do not prevent fusion.

Fundamentally this should be normal experience with only a quantitative difference. Probably, every person focusing on an object sees a small patch of this object with one eye only, and this eye is called dominant. This patch is then seen equally well in its entirety. According to Bates, trying to see an object equally well leads to strain. I guess, this is because in order to see, say, a small letter all equally well, the eyes have to look at the opposite ends of the letter, and this creates strain. On the contrary, if one can see or imagine a very small perfectly black dot, this leads the eyes to converge very closely, thus reducing strain.

Bates was writing that one should see a letter one is looking at than a letter that one is not looking at. If this does not happen, then Bates explained that this is cause by strain that should be relaxed, and suggested to try two objects further apart. This agrees with my understanding. If the area of the focused part of a binocular vision that is seen with only one eye includes two letters, then it is possible that one will be seen better than the other. After "more relaxation", that is, after more convergence is achieved, the letter that was previously seen better will go into the fused periphery (every focus has its periphery, there is no clear distinction) and thus will become seen worse than the letter that we wanted to look at.

First conclusion: much of the Bates method is for people with binocular vision.

Second conclusion: binocular vision starts from big objects, not from small objects. It is not necessary to be able to fuse a flower or track a pen with both eyes to have some degree of binocular vision.

Third conclusion: convergence exercises with following a pen or a finger are only for people who are already doing pretty well, that is, who are able to see a pen with both eyes. Otherwise they will be tracking the pen with one eye only.

Binocular experience - observations. Part one.

1.Everything is big and colorful, like in a cartoon. There is a lot of light everywhere. Possibly because two eyes take in more light than one, or possibly because the suppression of one eye creates tension.
2. In my experience, the eyes DO NOT have to come together. When I woke up in the morning, the eyes were pointing all over the place, yet the binocular experience was there. Both eyes were engaged and were taking in light. As long as I tried looking at objects, both eyes were focusing on the surface. Sometimes it brought them together, sometimes not. (This means I still have to work on it.)
3.There is still a leading eye. When I am moving an object in my focus from the left to the right, I feel how the eyes are switching the dominance, it is just softer than it used to be. I can still switch the dominant eye on purpose.
4.I am still able to see things on a flat screen with one eye closed, although it is getting more difficult, as I am learning more visual cues. Those visual cues are breaking the experience of a flat screen.
5.In the street, things in the distance are blurry. This is probably because my right (weak, overextended) eye is now happy to lead in the distance, where it couldn't see well after being suppressed for so long. I can switch to leading with the other eye to see more clearly, but I don't really need it, and both experiences are equally interesting (blur or no blur).
6. The thing they I described in my previous posts for taking in more periphery is really moving my eyes towards where I feel something is stuck and the retina was more stimulation. When I was doing this,  I was really moving the eyes out of alignment. This may explain why my squint has got so visually pronounced after Peter's retreat.
7. Cellphone screens, monitor screens, and books are flat. Thus one can look at a photograph, and then use imagination to imagine volume. I already thought about it, that there should be stereoscopic memory and imagery - I wrote about it in a previous post where I first mentioned face recognition. However, I cannot do it yet. I am looking at a photograph and the fact that it is flat is singular enough to imagine anything.
8. My perception of volume in sinks and cups is similar to a few days ago.
9. However, my perception of trees and larger configurations is very different, particularly outdoors. Large trees and their configurations, bushes, people, feel pretty much like in a video game with the effect of a virtual reality. That is, I never played one, but pretty much like I thought such games should look like. The sense of personal presence is not necessarily stronger, but it is different.

I think it's enough for now. Will keep posting.


Tracking the ball

I came home and started doing some thing I was planning to do, when I saw a small ball that I had used in the past for releasing tension. I bounced it off the floor a few times and then threw up and caught fairly easily. At this point I somehow connected with my recollection of how they show ball games in the movies. You know, when they show a flying ball, everything blurred, but the ball - here it is, and the player catches it. Of course, when I saw it in the movies, I had always thought it was some cool special effect. Simultaneously, I connected with another thought that when I am catching a ball, it can feel like it is important for survival. In those movies it was very important to catch a ball, so important, that everything else blurred. So, I felt, if I really try to catch a ball, maybe I can overfocus too.

So I started throwing the ball up and catching it with one or both hands, trying to overfocus it. In particular, it tried throwing it in the direction of dishes, so I could overfocus on catching.  After a few times it felt like I could see the ball better than everything else, but I kept playing in a random way.

After enough of this playing I started to notice that the background made a difference. It was particuarly pronounced when I was throwing and catching the ball while standing against my couch covered by a blanket with a deer pictured on it. The background was fairly monotonous, but not exactly so. I also felt that it made a difference if I kept watching the ball after it started falling from the highest point, and the longer I could track, the more I felt I could see everything else worse. Somehow, this probably came from the Bates concept of central fixation that I want to see everything else worse, but mostly just from this popular notion that when you focus you see other things worse, and with those movies where players catch a ball.

A few times I was able to track the ball from my hand moving up to the ball flying up, to the ball hanging in the air, to the ball flying down, to the ball being caught. What was new is that the moment the ball stopped moving in my hand, it was suddenly all very clear, not at all like it was when flying. This, as I already explained, only worked against some backgrounds, but it worked against the couch covered by a blanket with a deer. Every time I caught the ball and saw it clearly, the background looked like water, and there was a little wave going over the background as it stabilized. I also felt some sensation in the head or in the visual cortex, but it was not relaxation.

At this point I recalled the theory about binocular neurons. What if I had just 1 binocular neuron or a few? - and I wanted at least a million. I stopped all other things and just started to reproduce the experience, over and over and over, throwing the ball and catching, with as little variety as possible, to make sure the neurons get divided (if it is at all possible), or the neural pathways get created or stimulated, or whatever. As I felt more comfortable that the experience will stay, I started to vary the trajectories more and more. I was trying to throw the ball from the right hand to the left as back, to make sure it connects both eyes better, as well as different parts of the retinas.

I tried throwing the ball more to the side, where the other eye couldn't see it, and I couldn't really catch it. I could, but it was really hard. Then I tried closing one eye. Again, catching the ball was so much harder, even though it was not easy to say, what changed.

After throwing the ball for many times, I stopped, took the ball holding it with both hands and looked at it. The background went into blur right away. I started turning on one spot very quickly, still looking at the ball. Everything went into a mess, but the ball remained very clear. I could turn it, read my name on it, anything. Interestingly, I felt very dizzy when turning. I had never felt so dizzy from turning. Not that I was good at turning, but I had never had such an experience of dizziness.  It felt as if my eyes tried to connect to everything they saw and to create a spatial awareness, and the brain or the visual cortex was exhausted by trying to constantly reconstruct new spatial awarenesses. Previously I had thought everything looks like a mess because it is so difficult to see a stable image since it is changing all the time, and the resulting visual mess is disorienting.

After the ball I tried other objects. Ball was probably a good choice since it is symmetric. When it is flying, both eyes see essentially the same thing. A pack of napkins proved quite difficult to handle, probably because of this effect. Another ball was too big. A safety razor was perfect - it was crisp and clear and I felt I learned to much from it. A toothbrush was quite difficult, and I couldn't really learn to catch it. I kept playing with all those things, looking at them, throwing and catching them, making sure the changes are deep enough to be permanent.

Amazingly enough, the eyes were not always in alignment. Even though looking at things seemed to bring the eyes closer together, in general the presence of the binocular perception seemed totally uncorrelated with whether the eyes were close together or not.

An observation. It occurred to me later that seeing an object better than the background is not really a binocular function. Every camera can do that. It is doable with one eye. The secret is in the visual habits. Binocular experience teaches the eyes to focus on the object. This is probably what I felt a few days ago when I was writing about intentionally looking at the surface of an object rather than at an object in general. Without binocular experience eyes may never know what it means to focus on something. Instead, the eye leading the monocular vision may focus on some random point appropriate for the occasion. There is little awareness of the notion of focus with monocular vision. In one of my previous posts I described a muscular awareness that happens when the gaze shift closer and farther, but this is too subtle for most people to notice. At least, for most people who have never studied Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais method, or anything similar. I believe, this is the most important component in reeducating the eyes for binocular vision: learning to look at the surface of the object. Even with only one eye open, this makes a huge difference. Even one eye open can perceive the surface of an object through the changes in accommodation. According to my current subjective perception, there is  almost as much difference between seeing with one eye flatly and seeing the surface of the objects, as there is between the latter and seeing with both eyes.

Directing the retinas

After I stimulated both retinas and felt them both present, it occurred to me how to use it. I found another flower. I stimulated again both retinas with the streetlamps and by moving the eyes and taking in the peripheral vision. Then I probably recalled, subconsciously, how one participant at Peter's retreat explained to me how to look at a flower with both eyes (even though their exercise was to look out of focus) - in response to my question of how a fused image could be continuous with the periphery. I did not think about this conversation yesterday, but somehow I felt that flowers were good objects to look at.

By this point I was already not sure which eye was leading, even though it was probably my right eye. One thing that is helpful for forgetting, which eye was leading, is Peter's exercise with looking far away (e.g. high on the skyscraper), then moving the gaze close, then far away again, and so on. As long as the gaze is moving continuously and both eyes are seeing with peripheral vision, the eyes will inevitably come together. (Of course, during Peter's workshop I was mostly moving the eyes flatly, not across the surface, but as they were coming close to near my feet, I felt I was actually experiencing the surface in a different way - that was during Peter's workshop.)

 Anyway, so I felt what I had to do. I directed both retinas to take in the image of the flower so it gets engrained on the retinas and then passed through the optic nerves. This wasn't a verbal direction, as I recall. What was the result? I didn't really see anything new, however, I felt that the retinas were still very stimulated from the lights and the peripheral vision, so I thought maybe the mind will do something with it anyway.

At this point I felt it was time to go home.

Evening, July 28th - part 3.

After looking at my reflection in the street windows on several occasions I noticed that even though my right eye was leading, my left eye has come much closer to it. They were not as together as usually when leading with the left, but now my right iris was maybe at one-third from the lateral boundary of the eye, as opposed to being at the middle, as I expected. (I was only starting to realize I could actually see where the eyes was looking by seeing the shape of the eyeball and was still mostly relying on just the amount of white to the left and to the right.)

I felt much more able to access both sides. Maybe an hour ago or so I had already realized how it was easier to access the right vitreous humor and everything else when the right eye was leading. Now, I noticed some flowers and I tried looking at one with both eyes, perhaps for a minute. Then I walked a little more, found another flower or plant, and tried again.  Not sure it was a flower, more like a leaf (not on a tree), somewhat similar to the leaves around it. This time the experience was similar to the morphing experience with the cellphone - I saw changing shapes and I was not quite sure, what exactly I was looking at: there were many of them, and they were similar.

I also played with the streetlights. A few days ago I noticed how when I look at a lightbulb with my eyes almost aligned, the eyes start to switch back and forth, and I see the lightbulb changing its appearance back and forth. This time I tried with the streetlamps, and I tried not to switch consciously too much. Then I realized that steretlamps were like sunning, they were stimluating the retina, so it can see. I already knew from my right-eye-leading experience how important it was to stimulate the retina. Thus, I tried to look at a streetlamp directly through the center, so it was shining right on the center of the fovea centralis. I had never had such a precise spacial awareness to even conceptualize it, yet this time I aligned one eye and let the image of the lamp grow into a large shining ball like a sun, strongly illuminating the fovea, and somewhat illuminating the periphery. I suspect I even saw where the fovea centralis ended. Then I repeated the same thing with the other eyes. I had to move the eyes quite a bit, so I figured they should be pointing in very different directions.

Evening, July 28th - part 2


I hope my manager would forgive me for spending so much time at work writing these notes, but I will regret if I don't document it all very thoroughly, since I may not be able to recall those things even with some notes that I took yesterday so I don't forget anything important.

As I was walking and looking at things, I noticed more and more. I was not reallying trying to feel volume like I was a few days before by intersecting two huge spheres in space and seeing volume in the intersection, as I already described in a post on spherical mirrors. I was not even trying to consciously look at the surface of the objects, which I also did for one or two evenings after realizing it was helpful (see one of my previous posts). Instead, since I was still leading with my right eye, just looking and feeling the eye relatively awake because of night vision was good enough, even if it was not really night vision because of the street lamps. For example, I would stop and look up at a tree. Now I had a much more direct experience that the crown of the tree was above me. I would look and sometimes see two or three layers of leaves. I was still not sure if it was interpretation, but interpretation seemed like also a good thing to learn.

After all, I was thinking, if the binocular experience is mostly habit and interpretation, let me learn to do this interpretation, and then I can do pretty good even without catching balls or measuring distances well. If it is not just interpretation, then I must be learning the real thing, since I see all though things that I notice, and some are quite singular, as I already described, like being taller than a taxi.

 At some point a thought about eye exercises crossed my mind. I was probably still feeling this "stetch" around my right eye. The muscles in the eyes were eager to move so new information can come in. I figured eye exercises were not such a bad thing. So I made a few circles with each eye in both directions, trying to make large, sweeping circles, really accessing the boundaries of the visual field. The tendency for the head was to move with the eyes, not to isolate the eyes. When I tried to only move the eyes, not the head, it actually again felt good, like a good stretch, whereas when I tried such things years ago, it would only bring more strain.

It was particularly interesting to move, for example, the left eye around its rightmost positions, with the right eye open, and seeing or tracing in space the boundary of what is seen by the left eye (and hence by both eyes), separating things only accessible to the right eye. This was somewhat similar to what I described in the post on spherical mirrors. I also took care to close one eye at a time and to trace the inside boundary with the other eye, just in case there was some part of either retina habitually suppressed by the other eye.

During the eye exercises I felt how difficult it was to move an eye in a circle. I realized that if my eyes were so uncoordinated, no wonder they couldn't both track an object at the same time - I had so much trouble even with one eye at a time.

A little later I noticed that when I was shifting my gaze, I was doing it along a straight segment connecting both points. As soon as I noticed it, I could change it. The new experience was like I was shooting a straight ray forward until it contacted the building, and as I was turning, I was shooting at different points on the building and other objects. I realized that this is what Bates meant by shifting, and that my previous idea of shifting could only bring more strain. I also realized that actual shooting, for example, for military applications, strongly benefited from depth perception.

It occurred to me that I could shift in other ways, not just horizontally. So I practiced shifting or flying from window to window, between the buildings on the opposite sides of the street. I realized at some point that if I wanted to look into a window to see what's inside, some positions on the ground were better for me than the others.

Evening, July 28th - part 1

After ballet class I had another revelation that the taxis in the street and not as tall as I am, but a taxi with a sign on top can be as tall or even taller than me. Not that I was curious or cared to find it out, but it just dawned on me that the taxis were not so tall. My right eye was leading again, I was relieved of the frustration of looking presentable (as opposed to white sclera instead of the white eye with the iris in the corner) and felt somewhat better after dancing, although not as much better as on some other occasions. I had been frustrated in the dance class and though if my eyes looked together, and I still the leftovers of the anxiety. Before the class I had been trying to consciously direct myself, like to look at the surface of my eyes in the mirror, or to start with the eyes farther away like Peter taught as, and to bring the gaze closer together, and back again, and so forth, so the eyes can get more together. Of course, all this trying to stay present instead of getting overfocused with the desired result. However, now I was feeling more and more relieved from the frustration, and reminded myself that it was almost like night vision, so the right eye will get a different experience when it will lead at this time of the day, not the same as the bright colors of the daylight.

Just like in the previous days, I wanted to spend some hours walking on different streets where I could look at various things so I can experience the growing depth perception, even it was just learning to use the visual cues. By that time it was clear that those visual cues or whatever it was created a really new experience inside me, perhaps through the visual cortex, the experience that does not depend on eyes or vision after it is experienced.

After all, as I was thinking on some days, I am a dancer, I should be able to experience space directly and learn depth perception through a direct experience. Also, I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics, and my thesis was in geometry, about properties of a certain 4-dimensional object. I suspect I could have and maybe had reconstructed some depth perception in my visual cortex through the study and research in advanced geometry. Yet it is stunning, how clueless I had been in my use of the mirror and in my perception of the faces for all these years. Regarding face perception, until a few days ago I had been constantly surprised by seeing the same person from a different angle, and sometimes not being sure if I was indeed talking to the person I thought I was talking to, if this was not a very close acquaintance. 

Dance and depth perception

When I came to the ballet class, I felt tired and frustrated. I had to again switch to the left eye for cosmetic reasons, and it took some presence to allow the eyes to get aligned by looking at the surface and seeing shape of my face in the reflection on the surface of my phone. This is, of course, in contrast to the habitual way of just looking at a mirror like a photo or a monitor screen.

Apart from the anxiety, now that the right eye had been leading for some time, leading with the left eye was difficult again. There were some little things that I didn't notice but that I recall now. For example, I was probably able to focus on my hand as I looked at it on one occasion, when instructed to do so.

Overall, however, even though I was somewhat depressed and frustrated, my spatial awareness was growing like it had been for the several days prior to that. The new spatial awareness included being at some point in the studio with some things directly above me. I already had an experience on Wednesday when it was pointed out to me that I was not doing the plie direclty up or down, and that I could visualize a string going up (this was accompanied by a demonstration of the direction "up" with a hand or a finger), and somehow I was able to visualize or feel a really vertical string, different than before.

Continuing with yesterday experience, I felt much more that there was some space around me on the same level, as well as some above. I felt rather than saw it. It seems, as I already suggested in my previous posts, that binocular experience from an early childhood allows us to learn or feel other things that technically do not even require eyes. That is, if I close my eyes, I can still keep my new spatial awareness. I am not sure, though, may be this spatial awareness involves visualization from the visual cortex and is using some of the binocular vision mechanism.

The turning, even though lousy, was very different. It felt more objectified, like I was an object turning around some axis located at some specific place in space, rather than overly subjective, all about my experience of turning.

Also, as I had started to discover in the last few days, and as I realized intellectually even before discovering, when you are watching a teacher demonstrate or other dancers dance in a dance class, it is helpful to see things in volume, in the space, even if it feels like relying on visual cues. If the dancer of the teacher is moving, then technically one eye should be enough to perceive volume, but wrong visual habits prevented me from seeing it. Also, I had often used the mirror as a flat screen, and I had often been confused when I looked differently at different angles, and tried to adjust myself in space to achieve a certain effect in a 2-dimensional mirror. (I realized and started to experience this only a few days ago that the reflection in a mirror is also 3-dimensional.)


What felt different on Wednesday and much more so yesterday was the growing feeling that "I am right here, right now, and I can perceive myself in relation to this thing and that things and that thing" as opposed to "I am right here, right now, and this is my experience right now. I see that there are all those things around me, some closer, others farther away."

Left eye, right eye

Yesterday after work I was going to have my ballet class. Of course, I wanted to allow my right eye to lead on my way there so it can get more experience in seeing without being suppressed by the left eye. I was not so worried that some random people I can meet in the street will be scared by my left pupil being pushed to the left corner of the eye so that mostly white sclera was seen.

As I went out of the building, I saw even more volume and color than on the previous days, but qualitatively the same as on the previous days, this feeling just has been growing every day. My right eye was wide open and I felt it was taking in this huge circle of everything, color and light and movement and volume. As I was walking, I felt how my right eye was stimulated by light and, particularly, color. It felt like I actually experienced the rods and the cones waking up.

It was particularly nice to feel the rods on the right side of my right eye I guess, there shouldn't be any cones there, but whatever it is, the outside periphery of my right eye was waking up particularly dramatically. It found it actually pleasurable to turn my eye and my head to the right, since as I was doing that, more colorful images were coming in, again from the right, and the right eye felt awakening more and more every moment. So I kept turning to the right as I was walking. Sometimes I would stop and turn to the right a few turns on some spot, particularly when waiting  to cross the street, but also at other times, since it felt so good. After some point I thought it might be good to stimulate the eye on other sides, so I moved my gaze in other directions, where it felt good, where I felt the vision was stuck.

Sometimes there was a nice physical sensations in the eye, which felt like stretching. This way a muscle feels good when you are stretching - not to the extreme, not like in ballet, but just like normal people stretch after siting for a few hours. I felt this kind of sensation in a circle around the eye, as if the muscles circling around the right eye were stretching (are there two such muscles?)

I was not particularly worried about 3d. I already had had some interesting 3d experiences yesterday. For example, one of them that I forgot to describe was a sudden perception of the distance from my eyes to the monitor screen. However, this time I was just taking in all this color and movement and open space, particularly on my right side. I tried doing the same thing with my left eye, but it just didn't feel as good, and also I felt I was losing my right side. I equally felt I was losing my left side when I was with my right eye, but I was not so concerned about my left side and eye since they had been leading for so long.

Morphing and eccentric fusion

Another experience that I didn't describe in my yesterday post on eccentric fusion was with my cellphone. Recall, I was looking with my right eye to the table, my left eye was pushed to the left. I put my cellphone so half of it was seen with my right eye and half was not; the whole cellphone was right in front of the left eye. I was seeing with both of my eyes - with the right because it was leading at the moment, as I described, and with the left because it is so much stronger and used to lead all the time. Merely switching left-right-left was not enough for the mind to resolve confusion.

So the mind started morphing the phone. It was growing larger and smaller, changing shapes. What was interesting is that the mind was trying to come up with a picture based on my past visual experiences. My phone is Motorola Droid, just a rectangular box. However, as it morphed into a smaller object, it looked like smaller cellphones I had seen, some even with at antenna. In fact, I think that it looked like cellphones that I had in the past.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Eccentric fixation and eccentric fusion

Somehow today my right eye decided that it has been suppressed for long enough, so it decided to become dominant. Not just switched, but pushed the left one to the side. Usually the right one is to the side, sometimes just a little bit, almost imperceptibly. However, in this case the right one took the center and pushed the left one all the was to the corner with no sclera seen laterally to the iris.

I let it do it for some time, trying to make sure nobody noticed it, or occasionally closing my right eye or blinking, when some minimal social interaction was necessary. I don't have that much eye-to-eye interaction at work, so I can afford that kind of experiments. I also took a lunchtime Pilates class with the right eye being in the center. Quite quickly the right eye occupied the center with confidence, so that it became nontrivial to switch back to the left being centered, since the right one would spontaneously reestablish its right for center.


I noticed being more tired and annoyed with the right eye being in the center. Also, since the right eye since much worse, I saw blur instead of faces at a certain distance. The left eye went so much to the side it couldn't help. The balance was bad too, and and the mind not at peace.


I also found that my right eye doesn't have enough good habits to manage on its own. Sometimes it would underfocus and stop looking at anything, and then I would get both eyes pointing in different directions, neither looking at anything. In fact, I had to consciously direct the right eye to look and see things. Usually it is very used to trying to follow right eye.


There were more interesting effects than usually now that the deviating eye was much stronger than the centered one.  The input from the left eye wasn't really suppressed, but instead the two eyes covered an even larger area with peripheral vision.


I focused with my right eye on something at the table. Then I took a coffee cup and put it to the left, right outside the part of the table accessible to the right eye. It happened to be almost directly in front of the left eye, which was pushed all the way to the side. So the left eye inevitably saw the cup, and quite clearly so, with some of its neighborhood. Yet the right eye saw the table with other objects. Somehow the two eyes managed to fuse the table in between, since the table is everywhere the same, and the light is fairly uniform, so patches of the table can be fused virtually regardless of location.

In effect, I saw one continuous table with objects left and right, but some objects were seen with the left eye, some with the right eye, thus they were at different angles. This certainly gives information about space and volume. I observed many variations of this effect when the eyes being in different halves of the picture, and then it gets glued together at some angle. It creates a stereo effect, and at least I can memorize this effect. Also, it gets the two eyes to work together to create some picture, and this should help to create some neural pathways.

Later I tried to went back to the left eye leading, for cosmetic reasons, and the right eye was much more awake and provided more input to help the left one. Will see...

More on stereoscopy

Yesterday I had all those nice little semi-stereo experiences when the left eye was leading, and the right eye was passive, but almost aligned with the left. It occasionally helped the left eye by looking at the same object, so that the object could be seen a little better than the background. The most remarkable thing that I noticed is that the expression "look into the eyes" has a literal meaning - that is, that the eyes are located below the surface of the face, I guess, for protection. I also noticed that some people have deep facial features while others have shallow. Now I can have this experience even with one eye closed, and after looking at a person from the side, if the person is in motion (so the angle is changing), I can imagine what the face looks en face by mentally continuing to change the angle, again, even if I am looking with my eye.

It is already clear to me that I am now able to recognize and remember faces much better than I was yesterday, even when looking with one eye. I suspect that this is the essence of remembering and recognizing faces - creating an appropriate model of the surface in the visual cortex. Furthermore, now I can recall some of my relatives whom I have seen many times from different angles and, by recalling two views at different angles, mentally combine those views into a single view. That is, it now seems that I can see a person from two angles, and then later recognize on a photo taken from a third angle.

This obviously has to do with appropriate training of the visual cortex rather than how exactly it interacts with the eyes. You can read or hear statements that if you close one eye, the mind will use "visual cues" such as shadows, backgrounds, etc. to perceive depth. However, any cues necessarily relate to previous experiences. Yes, now that I am thinking about it, when I see a shadow from an object, I feel it is a cue for the spatial orientation of the object. However, it takes learning to translate such cues into depth perception.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Flat sreen - part two

In fact, I can relate to what I just described about a flat screen. Indeed, it only took me a minute to see things flat, meaning I should be very familiar with this mode.

I was walking somewhere in the building and there was a man walking in the opposite direction. I noticed that I suddenly became somewhat anxious and tense as he was coming close. The next moment I realized I was tense because I felt he was going to come too close or block the way where I was walking and I will have to slow down or squeeze near him. Yet after a split second I saw him with (some) perception or perspective and realized that, first of all, there was enough room near him to pass and, secondly, he was walking straight and was not going to cross my path.


If I understood Peter correctly (which may not be the case), the limbic brain receives an image from the cornea that can be used for survival mechanisms before a clear image from the retina is delivered. Thus, with farsightedness the limbic brain sees "Oh! Large bear! Danger!" even though  the bear is not that big, but everything appears bigger. Then, in the case I am talking about, there is a distinction between binocular vision at the corneal level as seen in the limbic brain and binocular vision at the retinal level as seen in the visual cortex. This means that I sensed danger because I perceived an object moving in my direction. It was not really in my direction, but at least subconsciously I was not using stereovision, and the conscious interpretation of the background or, in this case, conscious switching to depth perception, was too late, after I was already tense. This then would explain why lack of binocular vision is sometimes associated with anxiety.

On a positive note, I discovered that indeed the very act of looking in the mirror disconnects my eyes. I was actually trying to focus on a point in front of the eye I was trying to look at, instead of looking at the actual eye I was trying to examine, which is somewhat deep in the face, not on the surface. As long as I am thinking of looking at the surface of my face as I am looking at the mirror, the eyes seem to stay together. Same with small objects. I have a lot of difficulty seeing small objects with two eyes, since precision is needed so one eye doesn't slide away from the small object to something else. Currently I learned to look at the objects about the size of a coffee cup while keeping the eyes together; however, I have to consciously look at the surface of the object, even if it is irregular. Previously, it only worked with cars, people, street crossings, trees, and buildings, and by accident, rather than through some conscious action.

Actually, them more I can look at a coffee cup with both eyes, the more relaxing it becomes. I think the issue is that I have never learned to accommodate the eyes properly, since I couldn't get the concept of "looking at" something. The eyes probably tend to accommodate at the same time and to the same distance. Probably, when the eyes are looking in different directions, they may get confused as to what is the right distance for accommodation. It may also have to do with eccentric fixation... I am not really sure, but the fact is, right now when I look at something with both eyes, I relax, but if I close one eye, I feel tension.

Flat screen

I read in the Internet how people who hadn't had but later acquired binocular vision are describing what lack of binocular vision feels like, by sentences like things stacked on top of each other, indiscernible mess of objects, etc.  I couldn't recall having any such experiences, yet my vision and vision perception has changed so much in the last month I wasn't sure about anything.

So I tried, consciously, to switch to an entirely flat perception, and just to project everything onto a flat screen. At first it didn't quite work - light, shade, empty spaces, movement didn't want to fit on a screen. However, after a minute or so I succeeded. This was very impressive, and didn't feel normal for me.

The carpet became like a vertical wall or a background. People standing further away became literally smaller, and were arranged as cards on a table. I believe I could still feel a change of muscle tension in the eyes as I looked at objects farther from me and closer to me. It was difficult to have a sense that one person was the same person all the time, as people had different size depending on where they were on the carpet.

At the point when the effect of 2-dimensionality was the strongest, I saw a woman who came and front and, as it seemed at that moment, above me. She dropped something on the floor, and as this object was flying down, I expected it would fall near my feet, since it was dropped "directly above" my feet, and was moving down. Yet it stopped at a point somewhat above my feet, where apparently it met the floor, and she leaned down to pick it up. Then, to switch back to what is my default mode, I just had to look at some empty space suspended in the air, in an appropriate location where I can notice it.

This difference doesn't even seem to depend on whether I am using one eye or both. Rather, it should be the visual cortex interpreting things in different ways. Even when my eyes are misaligned, I don't usually see such a flat screen as I experienced in this case. It seems that to see a flat screen, the visual cortex needs to (a) suppress one eye, and (b) disengage from the past experiences where it combined input from both eyes, including the experiences of seeing an object with one eye and the background with the other eye, fusing the background but seeing two copies of the object, and countless other combinations. There is something about the patters of light and shade that creates a feeling of empty space if both eyes are perceiving them, even if incoherently, and to see a flat screen one needs to somehow disengage from these pattern of light and shade, to just ignore them as a blur.

Strabismus, peripheral vision, and central fixation

The more peripheral vision there is, the more difficult it is for one eye to suppress the other. The reason is, the suppressed eye gets stimulated by the periphery, and is more likely to stop underfocusing and wake up. This seems to agree with my experience that the eyes tend to align better where the peripheral vision is stimulated, particularly outside with open sides filled with buildings, cars, people, and all kind of movement. As people come into the periphery of the suppressed eye and keep moving across the visual field, it has a natural tendency to start following and become more aligned, up to the point of suppressing the other eye. It can be viewed as two eyes competing with each other, but the one that is losing has its periphery way to the side that only this eye can see, but not the other. If something sufficiently unusual comes into this side of the visual field, it gets noticed and this eye gets more of the mind's attention. Conversely, when the vision is statically overfocused on a small area covered by both eyes, such as a cellphone screen, and there is little movement in the periphery, the suppressed eye is hopelessly losing to the other one.

When the suppressed eye is deviating far enough to the side, there is sometimes a feeling similar to what Bates described as eccentric fixation. That is, I may be able to see some object on the side better than what's in front of me. I guess, this can only happen if the deviating eye is strong enough, end if the deviation is outside, and not across the other eye. This is accompanied by a feeling of strain in the deviating eye, same as the usual feeling of strain accompanying eccetric fixation with both eyes. (This can be experienced even if both eyes are looking at different things, fixation can be away from both centers.) I tried palming just the deviating eye, but for the palming to work I have to center it to see black, and this often makes the open eye deviate, and shifts the mental focus from whatever the other eye was seeing to seeing black. Otherwise, I indeed cannot see much black by just closing the deviating eye, if it stays deviated when closed. It feels underfocused and difficult to access. However, I think this asymmetric palming may be useful with sufficient experience.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Eyes as spherical mirrors

This weekend I explored the idea of perceiving the eyes as spherical mirrors.

I find thinking of eyes as mirrors somewhat relaxing. This frees me from the need to grab with the eyes or even to observe. Just feel like the eyes are reflecting whatever comes in. Doesn't matter in which sense and whether the reflection is on the inside or on the outside. Also, I found it very helpful to imagine that the eyes are spherical mirrors, concave or convex or both at the same time, whatever that means, but not flat.

The reason I tried it is because I started to feel that the flat look of the objects is somewhat artificial and transitory. Then I realized that I should really think of spheres. The brain probably does some adjustment for the convexity/concavity so that the image appears flat, or maybe it doesn't do anything and I simply think of the image as flat because of the analogy with TV and computer screens. When I think of spherical seeing, things closer to the center appears larger, and they shrink as they move to the periphery. Besides, this way I am less worried when every object appears to change shape when I simply shift the direction of my eyes. Furthermore, it expands the peripheral vision, since the TV/monitor screen analogy suggests to only cut an inscribed square from the visual field.

How did I come up with the idea of mirrors? I have heard of spherical mirrors (not much, though), so when I think of a spherical glass, spherical mirrors come to my mind. Also, the English "The eyes are the windows to the soul" has an analog in Russian that is translated as "The eyes are the mirrors of the soul".

Eyes can be viewed as reflecting on the outside (cornea) or on the inside of the cornea, or on the outside of the retina - it doesn't really matter, and I am  not quite sure I can make the distinction. However, I found it most helpful to think of huge mirrors, taking in up to half of the height of a typical skyscraper. I also found it helpful reminding myself these are curved mirrors, so that the images should be constantly changing as I am moving or as the objects are moving.
Here is approximately what I had in mind:

It also helped me to think of the eyes reflecting the whole 3-dimensional volume. That is, not only does the surface of the eye reflect the surface of the objects, but eye as a 3-dimensional sphere contains little 3-dimensional images of the outside world, such as little people walking inside the eye. Even if I turn away, those little reflections will live in my eye a fraction of a second longer. This image was of limited use, though, since I got overfocused on tracing the reflected objects inside of my eye, and so took my attention away from the environment to my image of what the environment was a second ago.

Sometimes only one eye or neither eye agreed to work as a spherical mirror. In this case I used the usual instructions. I moved the vitreous humor forward and up, back and down, and as usual, it is much easier to move it on the overextended side. By the way, I found it very difficult to not accelerate it on the overextended side as I start thinking about a washing machine. On the contracted side I have to move it slowly, otherwise I cannot access it at all. Then the optic nerve is the second easiest thing for me to sense, after the vitreous humor, even easier than the cornea, so I also practiced seeing through the optic nerve. I tried to pull through the optic nerve on the overextended side to bring it to center, but this doesn't seem to work very well. I guess I only need an intent for center. I don't feel the iris at all so I cannot start seeing through it. On the contracted side I also have some success releasing the retinal membrane.

When I did all these things, it invariably became much easier to engage each and both eyes as spherical mirrors. However, I had to really do these things with internal engagement. The tendency for me is to simply pronounce these instructions, internally, and to imagine the pictures of e.g. the vitreous humor moving, instead of trying to access the actual vitreous humor. For example, when I imagine the optic nerves, I see them at the top of my head or even above, where as when I am trying to access them, I perceive them on the same level as the eyes,  and going directly back from each eye. Well, a little laterally on the overextended side.

When I was successful with that, I did have some illusion of stereoscopic vision. I am saying "illusion" because seeing one image with two eyes is, in a sense, always an illusion. I am not quite sure if and when it worked and if it was the way it is supposed to be in other people or if I just imagined everything. However, the impression was that we are taking two magnifying (or just distorting) glasses and then overlapping them in the middle, and the area of different vision is the intersection of two circles or spheres:



I assume that I had some success because of my experience that things inside the red region looked differently from the rest of the vision area. Prior to that it never occurred to me that the region for binocular vision could have such an irregular shape, I just saw two huge spheres overlapping in the center, with the intersection being markedly different from the rest. However, now it seems to make perfect sense.

Ironically, the presence or absence of these effects seems to have no correlation with whether my eyes feel together or look together in the mirror. I think one of the reasons is that when I look into the mirror, I get overfocused on checking the look of the eyes, and switch to some older patterns

Friday, July 22, 2011

Sleep deprivation, vision and other matters

I haven't slept enough once again and consequently did not feel so great in the morning. My attempts to bring the eyes together were mostly unsuccessful, as were my attempts to come to presence. I came to work still feeling quite bad. You have probably header what lack of sleep does to you - lack of coordination, slow reaction, blurry vision, and so on. That was not too severe, but I felt I was not in my best shape.

As I was walking somewhere in the building, some though about the Alexander Technique crossed my mind. I tried to walk more effortlessly, and found an unusually high amount of tension in the body. Walking became effortless, though I still felt bad.

Then I found an appropriate place and tried to do some palming. I could see more grey than black; however, I recalled the other method I read in the original book by Bates. The method is: while palming, imagine a perfectly white sheet of paper (or anything else), one that is not too big. If the sheet is perfectly white, its background will be perfectly black.

In this case I succeeded fairly quickly with imagining a white sheet. The background became blacker and the sheet disappeared and got replaced by the background. I reimagined the sheet, it disappeared once again, but the background became even blacker. I tried to recreate the sheet continuously, and the background started to get blacker just as continuously. After less than a minute, perhaps even less than 30 seconds, I got a sudden feeling of relaxation. I am familiar with this feeling. It feels like pulsating waves in the head. I know that when I want to sleep in the morning or in the afternoon, and then I go get a nap, sometimes I feel those waves. Also, after I get a full body massage, I may suddenly experience such waves at random moments during the next several days.

After I was not getting much more relaxation, I stopped palming. I was feeling much better, not perfectly great, but more or less as usual. My eyes felt very relaxed. Now that I was more focused, I was able to notice and undo something else that I was doing to the eyes (not sure what it was), and they came a little more together. I did not try to measure it, but I am sure that my reaction time improved.


I conclude that many negative effects attributed to the lack of sleep probably do not come from the lack of sleep itself, but from the resulting tension.

Another idea that came to me: how do people usually justify that you "intrinsically" need to sleep 7 or 8 hours? They take a group of volunteers, leave them in a stress-free environment, alone or in groups, indoors where they cannot see sunlight or outside, and without any clocks. Then they see how long people will tend sleep after a few weeks. Alternatively, researchers make people sleep for different times every night - one group for 6, another for 7, another for 8, - and then measure the differences.

Those are valuable approaches, but if you take a group of people from the Western society and put them in the forest even for a few months, do you think that they will all walk straight by the end of the period? Natural and habitual are different things. Why do we expect that a few weeks in some "natural" environment will expose anything but our sleeping habit? Similarly, if you are used to sleep for 8 hours and then you are sleeping for 6 in an experiment, of course, it will affect your physical, mental, and emotional state.




Thursday, July 21, 2011

Waking up in the morning

Every day I would work to bring the two sides together, particularly the two eyes, particularly before going to bed, and every morning everything will fall apart. Why?

The obvious explanation is that the mental processing that goes on in the night introduces changes, so in the morning the whole system needs recalibrating. A second explanation is that during the days the eyes get plenty of opportunities to look at different things and in doing so come more together. However, there is also something to be said about underfocusing in the morning.

Today when I was putting something in the microwave oven, I realized I was not looking at anything. As I tried to start looking at something, I felt I had to engage more and to spend more mental and physical energy, just as you need to spend some energy to sit or walk straight, particularly if you are not used to it. I clearly wanted to sleep more, so the consciousness, so to say, resisted going up and was gradually sliding down, perhaps along the reptilian brain, even as I tried to lift it up. However, after I managed to get a little more present or engaged, the eyes also got somewhat closer together. Not as close as I'd like them to, but markedly closer than before.

This illustrates the connection between under- or overfocusing for the eyes and for the mind. Recall how these concepts are introduces in the Eyebody book: people are often using more or less mental energy than is necessary to see clearly. In my case, I was using an inappropriate amount of mental energy to bring the two sides together, as well as to wake up and to get more present. The last two are really the same thing: I suspect that underfocusing has just as much to do with rest and sleeping as with freezing for survival. Perhaps, we can think of a bear sleeping to survive a long and cold winter. The function of underfocusing may be to put as back to sleep as soon as possible, without entirely stopping the processes that have been going on while we were sleeping. This somewhat contradicts the idea that underfocusing spends a lot of energy to block the sensory inputs.

Underfocusing sure does block the sensory inputs. Think about the last time an alarm clock failed to wake you up. Sometimes I would set an alarm clock for too early, because I think I intend to get up earlier and do something, but I will wake up exactly when I need to wake up to be on time wherever I need to be on time. I would also routinely wake up a few minutes before the alarm clock on normal days. A natural conclusion would be that alarm clocks are largely unnecessary. They are probably interfering with some natural tendencies of our mind or our brain, and definitely start our day with either under- or overfocusing. I am not perfect either: I have three alarm clocks.



The Eyebody method and classical dance - direction of the eyes

Let me quote from the classics by Agrippina Vaganova, "Basic principles of classical ballet" (in English translation),
Port de bras is the foundation of the great science of the use of arms in classical ballet. The arms, legs and body are developed separately through special exercises. But only the ability to find the proper position for her arms lends a finesse to the artistic expression of the dancer, and renders full harmony to her dance. The head gives it the finishing touch, adds beauty to the entire design. The look, the glance, the eyes, crown it all. The turn of the head, the direction of the eyes, play decisive roles in the expression of every arabesque, attitude - in fact, of all other poses.
I think that the order described is only the order of learning or the order of complexity. In case of interior design, "the finishing touch" can technically change just one small thing, but affect the perception of the whole. In case of a dancer, however, it is obvious that the position of the head and the direction of the eyes will inevitably influence the rest of the body. At the least, it will change the patterns of muscular engagement in the rest of the body so that the subsequent movement will be different, even if we assume that in a static pose head can be moved without moving the rest of the body, and without creating tension to hold the rest of the body. Of course, we rarely see a true "static pose" in the sense of zero movement except maybe breathing and a little natural swaying, in dance or anything else.
At first when I saw a teacher demonstrating various ballet positions, I sometimes thought of certain head positions as habitual, that is, that what the teacher is really trying to show are the legs, the arms, and the torso, and that it had become a habit to combine it with a certain head position after years of practice. For example, a teacher may say "don't look in the mirror in this position as it pulls you out of alignment". Later I understood that the position of the head is just as much a part of a pose, so the quote above can be expanded as "don't look in the mirror in this position as first of all, to look in the mirror you have to turn the head which technically changes the position to a different one, and not a classical one, and secondly, because it also pulls the rest of the body out of alignment, reinforcing muscular habits and patters that we do not want to reinforce".

Another issue is with the direction of the eyes. In an arabesque it is common to hear things like that: that one should look along the arm, to the infinity, but also seeing the hand. The problem is, if one looks along one's arm, there is usually nothing interesting there. Try it yourself: stretch your arm in some random direction, then look there and see if there is anything interesting in that direction. Interesting things are interesting for a reason: that they are somehow different from everything else. If you look in a random direction, chances are that you will see "everything else" rather than something interesting. Here we can apply the principle "vision leads; eyes, brain, and body follow". That is, first look or intend to look in some direction, then the stretched arm will also end up pointing there. As I understand, the word "vision" in the mentioned Eyebody principle should be understood in a broader sense, not merely looking. However, this is precisely why the direction of the eyes is of such importance of classical dance: because it communicates vision (intent, hope, promise) to the audience. That is, the audience is not really interested in seeing someone looking in some direction anyway.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Strabismus - part two: it is not just about confusion

Peter is writing in the Eyebody book that for the mixed type (one side contracted, the other overextended) the problem is confusion, because the mind doesn't quite know, what to choose. However, in my experience it is not just confusion, but there is fear, there is insecurity, there is loss of direction.

When I struggled with my new eye patters on Monday, I noticed a tendency that I know I sometimes have. When I walk and there are a lot of people around me, sometimes I get very annoyed. This time I noticed what happens. I walk forward and I see with my peripheral vision that someone is walking at an angle to my trajectory. However, I am not quite sure what exactly is their direction, nor whether they are going to cross in front or behind me. I am not sure if I have to accelerate or slow down. In this case one of my tendencies is to tense and to move my eye to the side and to try really hard to see, what is going on there. Another tendency is to look away and to walk at some average pace, which will often cause this other person to stop and wait until I pass. Sometimes I would literally want to run into them not only to make them suffer for everything that I am experiencing, but probably also to finally figure out, where both of us are located in space. There is usually a lot of anxiety and insecurity in such moments, and a desire to be left alone. This is particularly annoying when I am crossing the street (and it is my light), yet there is a car turning at the same time. I often found myself unable to understand, what exactly is going on, if I should keep walking, if it is better to wait, or whatever, unless I directly look at this car. Of course, when I am crossing a street I do not want to stare at a particular car, so I would sometimes try to wait until all the cars complete their turns, which takes forever, and then perhaps end up crossing on the red light.


Another problem is postural imbalances. I have quite a few of those, and because of that, my dancing and related skills have suffered quite a lot. One of the problems, as I now see, is relying on my vision too much. Unless and until we learn to do otherwise, it is natural to rely on one's vision to check one's alignment, in the mirror or directly. The problem with that is, what one eye suppresses the other, what is straight does not seem straight. One can try to take it into account and to reinterpret the visual input to still use it to check the alignment, but in my case sometimes it was the left eye that was suppressed, and at other times the right eye.

The importance of the squint for postural imbalances should be fairly easy to check if we ask someone with a marked postural imbalance to do some movement with the eyes closed.

However, it seems, a deeper problem lies in the eye-body connections. Thus, the eyes are integrated if and only if the sides of the body are integrated. Disintegrated eyes should be  constantly disintegrating the two sides of the body via the eye-body connections in the brain.

On Tuesday morning as I was going to work I noticed a person in the street. This man seemed quite aligned, that is, the left and right sides of his body seemed to be well integrated. I tried to pick it up into my body and to use this feeling to integrate my eyes and the two sides of my body, and it worked, to a degree. However, then I tried it with lots of other people, and failed miserably, since most people in the street turned out to be twisted and crooked in various ways. Interestingly, those who had a purse or a bag on one side always had this side higher than the other. This is easy to explain, but still unexpected. It is particularly common to see a woman walking out of the building, taking quick, long steps, and leaning away from a purse she is carrying on her arm. It was also interesting to notice how some people stop before crossing the road, shifting weight to the left leg and turning the upper body about 30 degrees to the right, and this turns out to be exactly what I had expected from their walk. 

Is it possible that everyone has a little bit of squint? If both sides of the visual cortex are, say,  contracted, one should be contracted a little bit more than other. Nobody is perfectly symmetric. Perhaps, nobody's eyes are perfectly together, and there is a general connection between anxiety or sense of lost direction and the lack of integration of the left with the right.

Strabismus - part one

Interestingly, even though I recall being aware of my squint at some point long ago, it never occurred to me that this could have any importance other than cosmetic. It is not that I have been even aware of it at all times - in fact, I would forget about it for years, then recall, then forget again, then recall again. I also misinterpreted the concept of a "dominant eye", thinking that the eye is dominant if when I close it, the image shifts.

So here we have two issues. One is fusion, including but not limited to the issue of binocular vision. The other issue is what happens with the mind when it sees two incoherent images.

Last week I tried looking at the "Magic Eye" pictures once again. I have never been able to see anything there but what was plainly seen with each eye in isolation. Last time I tried to look at those pictures was long ago, and of course, I was not thinking about squint, nor about binocular vision. After all, I guess, I didn't really know what binocular vision was, and there were too many other things I couldn't do well (like noticing mushrooms), so I didn't attach much importance to being unable to see the "Magic Eye" pictures.

Anyway, I tried looking through the picture, moving the picture back and forth and changing the angle. I also tried pulling the contents of the picture through my eyes into the upper visual cortex. I did not see what they meant for me to see, but this time (last week) I certainly did see something 3-dimensional. First of all, I found that at some angles the picture became like a surface in space, and I saw shades as if the sun was shining from above. Then, as I kept experimenting, the pattern of the picture started to expand up in space and to form various spacious configurations. As I slowly turned the picture upside down, the configurations also slowly turned, and then started falling down in chunks, into nothingness. It was all objectively seen in the sense that I could stay with the image and it would stay the same, as long as I was not doing anything. I could move a little bit, and the image would change a little bit. Also,I could blink my eyes, focus on the page, and then all constructions would disappear.

I played with these things for a couple of days but couldn't get anything other than weird spatial configurations, and those only from some pictures in the book. Somehow my use patterns were too strong and I had to do something with them.

Then on Sunday evening I was again looking at the Magic Eye pictures. I found a point where my eyes actively started to compete. That is, they started to switch back and forth on their own: left suppressing right, and then right suppressing left. The rate was several times a second, back and forth.  I was only moving the page a little bit and trying to relax the eyes, hoping the visual system would figure it out. I did it for a total of maybe a minute or several minutes, taking a few short breaks.

I slept very well and felt good on Monday morning. However, a little later I started to feel sick and tired. I guess it can be described as fairly strong headache, unclear vision, and some loss of spatial orientation. I also felt overly sensitive to many things, in particular, I picked up tension from other people at work who were worried or nervous. I felt totally uninterested in anything. My squint became really obvious for other people. Particularly, when the right eye was centered (the right eye is usually deviating to the side and the left is usually centered), the left eye would go all the way to the outside of the left eye and stay there.

I tried to get back to the old mode of suppressing the right eye and using only the left one, when I could at least see clearly in the distance, but couldn't find a way. (Note that my right side is overextended and tends to take over when seeing things far away, yet somehow I have been using the left eye for seeing in the distance for quite some time.)  At some point as I was walking somewhere in the building I noticed how my shoulders suddenly collapsed forward without any apparent reason, and at the same time I felt tension in the lower back. I undid both things right away, since I was not really in the mood for self-study. All this time my mind felt messy and full of clutter, and I had no motivation for anything.

After 2 pm I took a break from work for a yoga class (in the same building), as I often do on Mondays. It somewhat relieved the dizziness and the anxiety, and it also brought the eyes much more together (as seen in the mirror), which surprised me. I still felt pretty bad, though, and was often checking my eyes  using my phone as a mirror, but not as often as before the yoga class. (Perhaps, once every 3-5 minutes instead of every minute.) Also, the headache diminished somewhat. (Although, technically, this did not feel like headache, but this is the best term to describe it.)

One positive thing of all that experience was that I was not "trying to look at something", since this was impossible. Basically, I didn't quite know where to look.  Instead of one picture I saw maybe fifteen pieces arranged somehow in space, and I was constantly wrong with respect to how far to move my eyes to see something. This felt like inhibition in Alexander Technique, except that I did not have to inhibit anything. So, I guess, better to say that it felt like repatterning.

A little later I looked at one of the keyboards, at the lowest row of letters with "Z, X, C, ...".
I noticed that when I moved my hand from left to right or from right to left in front of the keyboard, the letters on the keys would change. Thus, instead of Z, X, C, V, ... I would maybe see V, X, B, C, or something like that. The keys were fixed in place, but the letters were moving from place to place, or morphing one into another, or blinking back and forth.

When I looked into my cellphone as a mirror once again, for some reason, I had a pen in my other hand, and I looked at the reflection of the tip of the pen as it moved. Strangely enough, it brought my eyes together very quickly, and I could see it since the reflection of the tip of the pen was fairly close to the reflection of my face. I found it particularly helpful to bring the pen into the visual field from the side of the deviating eye, so the deviating eye gets "picked up" and brought into the center.

That day later I went for my ballet class. Before the class I felt much better than during the day. The eyes were somewhat together, although I felt that this condition was somewhat temporary. Recalling the experience with the reflection of a pen, I "took" my pinky finger and started slowly moving it from the side through the peripheral vision of the right eye and further to the left. My right was solely following the finger until it got to the point where the left eye wanted to take over. I slowed down and tried to keep some tension in the right eye so it does not relax completely. I moved the finger very slowly to the left until something changed, then I stopped and just kept looking at it without changing anything. The right side of the finger remained the same, but the left got illuminated with a white glow. I was not sure if that was a true fusion or not, however, four hours later the eyes remained very much together, as judged by my reflection in a mirror, much more together than during the retreat, so I concluded it was true fusion. I also felt much more focused and much of the anxiety disappeared.


I tried looking at Magic Eye pictures again. This time I didn't really see much there, that is, no weird effects. However, I experienced a certain integration, that is, I felt that both sides actively resisted seeing these weird effects, since it was pulling them apart. I felt a certain amount of muscular tension in the eyes, or muscular work. I also felt more personally engaged in the process, that it was me looking at the picture (and not seeing anything), rather than the picture acting on my eye muscles.



However, I was able to fuse two coins into one. I placed one hand between my eyes to separate the images. In order to check the fusion, I took a pen with the other hand and used it to touch the single coin that I was seeing from both sides. It allowed me to notice when one eye was suppressing the other. In fact, my mind turned out to be very inventive. Recall that I had two coins, on the left and on the right. My mind imagined a third coin to the right from the rightmost one, and then it "fused" the left coin with the imaginary coin into the right coin, thus suppressing one of the eyes, yet giving me what I asked for... However, I am pretty sure that I was able to achieve some kind of fusion, since every time I stopped, I would suddenly see two coins in totally unexpected places. Also, when I rotated one coin a little bit so the images did not quite match, I became virtually unable to see one coin instead of two coins.



Eventually the eyes disconnected, but somehow they acquired a tendency to come together without any apparent reason. That is, one eye would deviate, but then I would just look at several different things, and the eyes would be much more together. It seems that when this tendency is there, many methods such as eye exercises or the vision dance, or just looking around, reinforce this tendency. However, without this tendency you can just keep seeing with one eye.