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...

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