On discovering stereopsis - part two

Do you know those people who live and, it seems, not notice, what is important in life? We all know them. There are so many books and movies about it. People worried about money, about power, about their reputation, or about how many people they slept with, or whatever. If you also come from the Western civilization, you know what I am talking about. Wise people will tell you: to understand what's important, thing what will be your thoughts in the end of your life. Did I love well? Did I let go?..

How many people never notice the beauty that surrounds them?

This is where the discovery of stereopsis starts; at least, this is how it was for me.

You are one of those people who do not notice the beauty that surrounds them. The three-dimensional world is out there, you just have to notice it.


Of course, if noticing beauty were easy, all those hardworking men would have noticed their wives and children, and how much their love was needed. You have probably already noticed all those things that were easy to notice. It may be easy to notice when your shirt is not very clean. It is much more difficult to notice that you are never on time, or that you are never listening to other people and are always interrupting them to say what you think, or that desperately need attention and understanding. When you meet a new person, you first notice superficial details such as appearance, manners, accent. Later you begin to see in-depth, and sometimes you begin to notice depth in the person. If you are looking to discover stereopsis, you will have to notice depth in the world around it. I would have called it "conscious depth perception", but this concept was already coined by Peter Grunwald to denote something much deeper than merely seeing. Even if you do have binocular vision with stereopsis, there are still a lot of things around you to notice, still a lot of depth. It is just more subtle. So many people can see 3d, yet they are still not seeing beauty, they are still not seeing depth in some deeper sense. I think this is what Peter had in mind. Either way, this combination of words, "conscious depth perception", certainly influenced my thinking about gaining stereopsis.

Discovering stereopsis does not have to start with two eyes, or with eyes at all. Normal people can somewhat perceive depth and receive a lot of spatial information through hearing. I only became able to do that after gaining binocular vision. I think that previously my sense of hearing interfered with my sense of seeing. When I went into St. Patrick's Cathedral and saw it with stereopsis for the first time, I immediately sensed how its height was related to the sounds, how the sounds communicated height. Previously I never saw height, and I would not allow myself to hear height.

Stereopsis is about perceiving the three-dimensionality of the world with all senses. When vision as the central sense lacks stereopsis, it breaks the integration of vision with other senses, and it does not allow other senses to be used for depth perception. This was not my approach, but one could probably start from the other senses, such as hearing, and to learn to hear the three-dimensionality of the world. Notice how the steps of a person sound when the person is coming closer or moving away. Notice how steps sound on different surfaces, and if you can hear an echo. Sense the space in the sounds of the cars. Lack of binocular vision is disorienting because the three-dimensionality of the world is not properly inferred from or perceived through the senses.

Coming back to the vision, I suspect that most people have a little bit of stereopsis, even with one eye. Discover where it happens for you. Maybe there is a tree where you can see a little more air between the branches than with all other trees. Maybe you have a cup, and strangely enough, you always feel there is some alive space inside this cup. Maybe there is a building or a statue that is very familiar to you, and you can create its three-dimensional image in your mind, and you can even rotate it in your mind, yet you can hardly do it with any other object. Maybe every time you add cream to coffee you see how the white color penetrates deeply inside the cup, not just on the surface, and then raises back up in a cloud. I personally had not noticed that the cream goes into the depth of the coffee until a few days ago. Whatever it is where you can notice some signs of stereopsis, where you can sense the three-dimensionality of the world, develop this sense. If this is a tree, keep examining this tree from different corners and at different distances. Try to find another one where you can also sense some air between the branches. If it is coffee, keep adding cream to coffee, then take another cup, then another. Perhaps try with hot chocolate. Keep repeating the stimulus, and keep expanding your awareness. Remember that the change happens right now or, more technically, your brain is rewiring right now. If you do not make your sense of stereopsis stronger, it will get weaker. Tomorrow you may take this cup with coffee and only see the cream spread flatly on the surface, so don't stop.

Alexander Technique taught me that when changing my habits, it is best to watch myself all the time I am awake. After I discovered how to look at the surface of the objects (instead of seeing the whole two-dimensional picture with this object or looking at a point),  after I noticed that it made my eyes converge, I would try to look at the surface of every single object. I understood that every time I looked at any object in the old way, I was coming back to the old habits, losing any positive changes that were taking place.


Think about racial segregation. Seeing and treating people as belonging to this or that race is a habit. This habit is difficult to notice, difficult to recognize that it is merely a habit. A person who supports racial segregation can still say that they understand that those other people are also humans, that they have feeling, human dignity, and so on. "But..." - they say - and you see that their so-called understanding is not worth much.

Seeing things without stereopsis is somewhat similar. Of course, there is nothing unethical about seeing without stereopsis, that's not what I have in mind. The idea is: you see things the way you see them, and you think that your way is correct, and you interpret everything else to support your worldview. Yet you may not realize, just how wrong and unnatural your worldview is.

How can a person without stereopsis understand that something is wrong? After all, if we are in a closed system of thought, how can we move beyond this system. Actually, we can. We can show that the system is inconsistent, even from the inside. We can find contradictions. (If you know what I am talking about, think about Russell's paradox.) This means, if you are seeing without stereopsis, you may be able to notice things that are just logically wrong. Understand that what you think you see is what your brain shows you. You are not seeing things upside down, even though this is how the light falls on the retina. If you recall my post about spherical mirrors, it impressed me greatly when I realized that the retina was spherical, yet I was seeing straight trees, straight roads, rectangular buildings. I started to view everything as a little bit curved, and I started to notice empty space almost immediately. I am not sure exactly which image I used. Maybe I imagined that I was inside a ball, and that everything that I was seeing was drawn on the inside surface of this ball. Of course, there were separate balls for the right and the left eye. Maybe I imagined the whole three-dimensional content of those balls by creating little copies of all objects inside my eye. Maybe I sensed how things I was seeing were just impressions on the spherical retina. It doesn't really matter. However, I had a very clear sensation that the things that I was seeing were just my perception. They were just artifacts of the way my visual system works, not the way the world really is. Peter certainly communicated this idea to me in the context of unclear sight: "the grass does not know that it is blurry, and the trees do not know that they are blurry".