Achieving your goals: end-gaining, inhibition, and pseudo-goals

1. End-gaining.

F.M.Alexander wrote extensively about the distinction between what he called end-gaining and means-whereby. Quoting from his 1946 book, "The Universal Constant In Living",

These terms stand for two different, nay, opposite conceptions and for two different procedures. According to the first or end-gaining conception, all that is necessary when an end is desired is to proceed to employ the different parts of the organism in the manner which our feeling dictates as necessary for the carrying out of the movements required for gaining the end, irrespective of any harmful effects due to misuse of the self during the process; a conception which implies the subordination of the thinking and reasoning self to the vagaries of the instinctive guidance and control of the self in carrying out the activities necessary to achieve the end.
It will be seen therefore that end-gaining involves the conception and procedure of going direct for an endwithout consideration as to whether the "means-whereby" to be employed are the best for the purpose, or as to whether there should be substituted for these, new and improved "means-whereby" which, in their employment, would necessarily involve change in the manner of use of the self.

One famous example that he gave was that of a stutterer. A stutterer is trying not to stutter, but once that bad habit has already been established, the more he tries, the worse it gets. At this point he has to stop trying, inhibit the habitual response, and instead reason out the best means-whereby for accomplishing his end. (Compare this to focal dystonia.) Another example was that of the Alexander himself. When he was trying to solve his voice troubles, he thought it was enough to just "try harder" in order to change the way in which he was speaking. Eventually he had to resort to an indirect procedure that started from inhibiting his habitual response, then substituting new and improved means by projecting the appropriate directions, while continuing to inhibit the old response.

The concept of "end-gaining" then naturally evolved to include various kinds of irrational behavior characterized by excessive preoccupation with the end to be gained which, ironically, is often counterproductive and defeats its own purpose. A manager at a company is under pressure to save money and, in a hurried decision, he does it by laying off several key employees. While the end has been gained, the long-term consequences have not been taking into account. The company ends up losing so much more. As another example, a woman becomes obsessed with the idea that she needs to become more attractive, even though her friends may be telling her otherwise. She works really hard saving money for a plastic surgery, then chooses a clinic for the operation based on a luring commercial, and ends up with less-than-satisfactory result. In this case she did not consider if the means that she chose for achieving her goals were the best ones --- such as using this particular clinic, and doing plastic surgery in the first place. She also did not consider if the goals, in fact, were what she wanted to pursue. Perhaps her deeper goal was getting married, and acting on the instinct --- even the first step of deciding to increase her attractiveness --- proved very inefficient and, in fact, counterproductive.

My teacher Mark pointed out on numerous occasions that end-gaining is different from having goals. After all, the manager could reasonably want to save money, or the woman could want to get married, or to become more attractive. It is the way the go after these goals --- the direct way, without consideration of the consequences and without reasoning out the best means-whereby --- that makes their actions end-gaining. But how do we recognize this distinction? How do we know if we are end-gaining, or if we are actually moving towards our goals? (A million-dollar question worth a front-page publication in Forbes.)

Here is my answer. First of all, the ability to set goals is uniquely human (maybe except for a few monkeys; I believe that dogs and cats and birds and fish don't have such an ability). Whenever we are setting goals, especially consciously formulated goals, we are using some higher-level mental mechanisms. For now just keep it in mind.


2. Inhibition.

Next, because we are, after all, animals, we have our wonderful animal heritage. We have this incredible instinctive process of doing things, of reacting to the environment. A healthy human can do a lot of things without really thinking. (Here I view it as a blessing.) If you are hungry, you naturally do something to alleviate that, whatever you learned to do, or your parents or your TV program taught you to do. If you are tired, you naturally do something to alleviate that, which may involve going to sleep or going to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for another cup of coffee. As you may have guessed, the latter may be considered end-gaining, if you have a habit of getting coffee whenever you are tired. This may serve you well if you are an analyst on Wall street, but so long as you are going directly for the end, acting on instinct, this still qualified as end-gaining, which is not the same as carefully considering the available options, then still deciding to go get a coffee.

It is possible to go through much of our lives acting "by feeling", by relying on this instinctive process of doing things. You will be learning from your own mistakes, though not from the mistakes of others. If you drink too much coffee and end up getting sick, then next time the very sight of coffee would be disgusting, so you'd drink less. If you don't end up getting sick, or if you don't draw a connection between not feeling well and substituting coffee for sleep, then you will not learn, and maintain the same behavior. The connection has to be well imprinted for the instinctive mechanism to work: getting in a car accident because of drinking too much may be enough of a shock to stop drinking; merely worrying won't be enough.


In order to choose some other response, one that is not instinctive, the first step is inhibition. Our animal heritage, this instinctive method of doing things, is so robust, so strong, serves us so well, that we absolutely have to inhibit the instinctive action before we can do something else. Here the word "inhibit" can be taken in the regular biological sense. If one action is already, automatically, under way, in order to do something else we have to override it with another, stronger intention and/or deliberately inhibit the original impulse by making it weaker. For example, the manager from the example above can take a couple of days to think the matters through very thoroughly. This will weaken the end-gaining desire to save money at any cost and, consequently, will also weaken the automatic response --- the layoff --- allowing for other solutions to be considered. Note that there is often a clear moment of inhibition, when the manager has to almost force himself to not do anything at the moment.


3. Pseudo-goals.

Finally, the reason we need to inhibit early and to inhibit often, is that the mind likes to create pseudo-goals. Remember that goal-creation is a high-level activity? Well, the instinctive process is a low-level activity, and it is generally unsuitable for reaching sophisticated goals. End-gaining is unsuitable for reaching goals, in principle. Our animal heritage, our subconscious mind, is just not smart enough to figure out the best way to lose weight, or to get a job, or to get married. It just isn't; the task is way too complicated. What, I believe, happens instead, is that the instinct is to pursue a pseudo-goal, derived from the original goal. The pseudo-goal is to feel that we are getting closer to the original goal.

The manager wants to save money. The intent he puts into his own organism is so strong, that the organism is really trying to make him feel that he is saving money, that he is moving towards saving money. Thus, he is engaging in an irrational behavior of laying off his key employees, because this is the closest way to making him feel like he is saving money. Without conscious control, without engaging higher-level thinking facilities, this is the best he can do for moving towards this goal. End-gaining does not work satisfactorily for such sophisticated goals; only conscious control does. The woman in the example feels that she is moving towards becoming more attractive by saving money for plastic surgery. Again, her mind substituted "feeling that she is moving towards becoming more attractive" for "becoming more attractive". This pseudo-goal is, upon closer consideration, not worth pursuing. It is only because she never stops for this closer consideration and keeps relying on instinctive "feeling" that she fails to realize that her efforts are misdirected.


4. The awakening.

A great deal of all human behavior is irrational, and for the same reason: people trying to achieve their goals in an end-gaining way, instinctively, without reasoning out the means, and pseudo-goals are getting substituted for goals. Countless industries have been built around this fact. People buy fast food to satisfy hunger and to save time, and even beggars asking for money would often go and get a meal at Mc'Donalds, even though soda and fries are hardly a wise way to apply their hard-earned money. People play computer games on their phone because they want to relax after sitting in front of a computer all day long. People clip coupons, feeling they need to save money, but end up buying more and thus spending more. The story of "Febreeze", presented in "The power of habit" by Charles Duhigg, is a very compelling example. It turns out that, when people are cleaning, they don't want the house to be clean as much as the want the house to feel clean, or to feel that it became cleaner.

End-gaining works: people eat their fries and they get fed; they spray their houses with "Febreeze" and... well, at least they get motivated to clean more often. But you are paying the price: you get out of shape because of all this junk food, you have no time for anything or anyone important because you are so busy pursuing your pseudo-goals, most of your spare money goes towards the things you think you need, which are often again pseudo-goals, and so forth. Also, more often than not, end-gaining does not lead you to achieving the actual goals. People quit diets, quit exercise programs, forget resolutions, and stay at bad jobs and in bad relationships.

The only way is to use our higher-level mental facilities. USE YOUR BRAIN! In Alexander's terms, the first step is awareness. I already wrote about it in the post on computer middleware. You have the ability to notice the impulses, to notice how your life is governed by your habits and by the pursuit of pseudo-goals. Develop this ability. Second, apply the inhibition to stop the end-gaining response and to consider the best means for achieving the goal, and whether the goal is worth it in the first place. It is essential to understand that this is a different mode of thinking than simply going with the flow. Even one minute, even 10 seconds of reflection can make all the difference, because a different, a higher level mental process is involved. Stop for 10 seconds and consider if you like your life, your job, the relationship you are in, and so forth, and what you can rationally do about it. Lastly, the third step is direction. After inhibiting the instinctive response and reasoning out the best means for the goal, and also the best goal to pursue in the first place, you now need to project these new directions while continuing to inhibit the habitual response. This is also a higher-level activity. If you want to stay committed to pursuing your goal, you need to keep using higher-level mental processes. Otherwise, the old, habitual responses will take over.

When applied to long-term personal goals, the exact same ideas were formulated by Alan Lakein, most famous for "What is the best use of my time right now?" Notice that this is a very high-level question involving high-level mental processes and a great deal of awareness and inhibition. His methods, such as writing down  short-, medium-, and long-term goals, follow the exact same principles: constantly inhibiting the instinctive desire to just go with the flow of life, and instead constantly using higher-level mental processes for bringing yourself back on track, as well as regularly using your high-level thinking and planning capabilities for setting and resetting goals.

Whatever method you use is not important. Use whatever works for you --- Alexander technique, Lakein's time management, mindfulness meditation. Perhaps your parents taught you some similar skills; perhaps you found these insights in your religion. But do use something. As a self-test, you should be well familiar with the feeling when you have an impulse to do one thing, and then you override this impulse or let it pass and, under careful consideration, choose to do another thing. This is the beginning of awakening.

On free will and determinism

Moving off on a tangent, this post will be about philosophy.

I have never really worried much about the question of determinism. After first hearing the idea, I dismissed it as rather simplistic. Upon revisiting, I would always merely assume that we, as human beings, had in us that little something that allowed us to make decisions regardless of all other causes.

However, through my meditation practices I started to see how what I thought were my decisions are hardly decisions at all. Quite a few times I have witnessed a situation (inside myself) whereas I would be trying to make a choice between two alternatives, and I would quite literally feel two stimuli competing inside myself. For example, today I was out in the city and was trying to choose between going home and staying to do something else. I could feel the two possibilities inside myself trying to overpower one another. As I brought my attention to different aspects of the situation, I could feel those stimuli change in intensity so one or the other would seem to be winning. External factors also influenced the situation: yet another drop of rain falling on my head made me imagine myself again being sick and miserable, and suddenly I felt that the decision was made.

It is a disturbing thing to observe in oneself, for then I witness how my own choice falls apart into its many constituents: my own earlier thoughts and memories, events happening at the moment, the state of my body, etc. My choice can be entirely explained and, given enough information, predicted without ascribing any freedom to me at all. Of course, I have a line of defense against this possibility: meditation --- and the Alexander Techniques --- gives us the tools for coming to the present moment. As my teacher says, Alexander Technique is ultimately about freedom to do what you want (so that you are not just in control of your habits). True, with those sophisticated tools I seem to be able to make better decisions; but I suspect that this is not much more than a more sophisticated decision-making process, much like using several chess computers to make the next move: you can use the fastest one, or you can use a slightly slower, but much better one.

When, for example, I am creating a new computer program, I am understanding the situation and taking all the consideration inside myself, and then some design decisions to make suddenly become clear. I am not really choosing anything; I am just using myself, so to say, my own experience, my own neural circuits to make the decision, much as I would consult an expert or a computer program. If computer programming is too complicated, think about ordering food. I am looking at each item in the menu, and --- at my current level of awareness --- I can often feel the image of this food item, and some thoughts that accompany it about the item's healthiness, about my plans for the next hour or two that may affect the choice, and so forth. The process seems complex, but there is no room for causality.

This is, actually, rather disturbing, being able to witness (what seems as) my own lack of free will. Even if I come to the presence, inhibit immediate impulses, and do all those wonderful things that I have learned to do, even though my mind clears and (it seems that) I am able to make much better choices, I still cannot hide from the awareness of how those choices originate. As far as I can tell with my current level of awareness, even at those clearer periods of consciousness, I can still see the same kind of impulses in favor of one and the other option floating in my mind and competing with each other in intensity. I can still sense how the time of the time, the temperature in the room, the state of my body (seems to) affect my choices. I still notice how I still do things out of habit, even if this habit is inhibiting other impulses. For example, I may notice a thought to stand up and do something, as I am sitting, and in the next instant I notice another impulse to inhibit the previous thought --- as I have trained myself to do over and over and over again --- and so I end up not going anywhere. Both things happen so quickly that I can hardly talk about any free choice on my part.

That is all I can say at the moment. If you are interested in the subject, you can start by reading Immanuel Kant's reflections on the subject (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousKant.htm) and then proceed to the modern discussion in the neuroscience community (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-death-of-free-will).

Alexander Technique, meditation, vision therapy, and computer middleware

Today was another insightful Alexander Technique lesson with Mark. I will try to develop some of the insights in this post --- I don't really have a better place to put it.

Technical introduction. When web programmers write software for a sophisticated website, they would often think about it in three layers: the front end, the middle layer, and the back end. The front end includes developing whatever the user will see in the browser, the back end involves things like storing user's information in the database, and middleware is everything in between. Computer programmers like to separate software into different parts because then it is easier to make sense of the whole design. The problems with computer software are almost the same as the problems with human beings: there are too many moving parts, and everything is interconnected. You touch one thing, but everything gets affected. Thus, many software developers favor a design with many small, manageable, independent components that are loosely coupled with each other, as opposed to one big, monolithic chunk of code. I am really not sure, how to explain it in simple terms so that everyone could understand...

When people are designing a robust, scalable, reusable software architecture consisting of many independent, loosely coupled pieces, they would try to make it flexible, to add "hooks" to different layers, at different levels, so that future pieces of software integrated into this architecture could be included in many different ways, allowing, so to say, for many ways to fit the puzzle, depending on the particular future, yet unpredictable circumstances.

For example, if you have a web application, you may want to protect it from "CSRF", a common attack used by hackers (search for "cross-site request forgery"). You may manually inspect each page of your website and, if appropriate, add some code to protect from CSRF. The problem is, your application may have a lot of pages, and even if you secure all of them, care should be taken each and every time you are adding a new page. This is painful and unreliable. However, if your design is flexible enough, you may be able to instead add a CSRF protection middleware. It will then intercept each and every request to your website and make sure that it is appropriately protected. In this way, you can keep working on your website without any worries, and the protection will be added "under the covers". Note that the web framework you are using has to be flexible enough to allow you to insert middleware in the middle of the processing.

Now, let's extend the analogy. For the vision, you can think of the eyes as the front end. Once the signal enters through the cornea, retina, optic nerve, etc., it goes through various middle layers, and then you can think of the visual cortex as the backend --- or, perhaps, the visual cortex is yet another middle layer, and the backend would involve parts of the brain forming our physical and emotional reaction to what is seen. There are many different layers or levels of processing for the inputs from all senses, including proprioception.

Remember, as I have just explained, that a well-designed software system is decoupled: it contains different parts that are not too interrelated. This is also desirable for different parts of a human beings, and many different techniques have been invented for this end. In dance, for example, it is desirable to be able to move one's leg without moving one's arm, or vice versa. In politics, we want to talk without changing our facial expression. When playing piano, we want to move different fingers independently. In vision therapy, we are making sure that the new, desirable visual habits function independently, not just in a certain context; this dependency on the context is an obstacle for any change-of-habit type of endeavor. Isolation or separation are words commonly used to describe this desirable property.

It turns out that "our" software or hardware, our brain and our body, is better than we think. This is not a new idea. You may have heard the idea of not reacting from your amygdala, but allowing the inputs to be processed in the neocortex. That is, we, humans, have developed a better version of "hardware", or "software", depending on how you look at it, than what certain lower animals had. (The popular analogy is "hardware", but I personally like to think of parts of the brain as "software", because, well, software is "softer" and thus easier to change.) I am going to make a similar yet different point.

I believe that the design of a human's perceptual system is a good design. That it includes some "hooks" that allow for certain middleware to be installed. That is, the nervous system has connections in the middle of the signal processing that allow us to potentially do certain things with a signal or an impulse in the middle. The essence of the Alexander Technique is, then, developing and installing such middleware. Repeated practice strengthens one's ability to interrupt the signals in the middle and to allow for custom things to be done. All three key principles of the Alexander Technique --- awareness, inhibition, direction --- can be viewed in this light, inhibition being the most obvious one. Similarly, the direction "I wish to free my neck" is done at the middle level, if it is to be done properly: by monitoring all passing signals and filtering out those that tighten my neck, I am able to free my neck "out of being, instead of out of doing".

This is why the Alexander Technique may be considered a "pre-technique": because this is a technique for and of installing middleware in our processing. (I don't really think it is about perception processing, it may be more about processing one's impulses towards doing something. I am really unclear on this distinction between perceiving something and doing something.)  This is why, according to Mark, a really advanced private class in Alexander Technique may still focus on foundations such as freeing one's neck, whereas this would not be the case for a really advanced music class: world-class musicians probably wouldn't be spending hours practicing the C major scale, exceptions notwithstanding.

Not all meditation practices or yoga practices involve this installation of middleware. For example, it is possible to mediate on loving kindness, spend some time cultivating this new feeling, and then allowing the effects to spill into other parts of one's life. This could lead to permanent changes in one's outlook on life, rewiring of the brain, etc.etc. However, there is no middleware mechanism involved. On the other hand,the practice of mindfulness, the Zen are about the installation of middleware so that on every impulse, something can be done in the middle, before it has been completed. I am struggling to make a distinction here between merely controlling or not acting on strong impulses and some other, deeper quality.

Not all processing in humans allows for an easy installation of such middleware. As I know from vision therapy, low-level vision processing functions best when its undisturbed by conscious thinking. That is, it is certainly possible to interfere with low-level visual processing, consciously and subconsciously, but the result is inferior, and is not recommended. Middle-level processing can be useful during therapy, to help break old visual habits and start forming new ones. However, in order to integrate new visual habits, the middleware layer has to be eventually disabled, so that information can flow freely, at the maximum available bandwidth.

Lesson in Alexander Technique: inhibition and not allowing

This will be a highly technical post about the Alexander Technique, not about eyes. I've just had yet another great lesson with Mark and wanted to start sharing some insights. A significant background in Alexander Technique or something similar is recommended for reading it. Also note: Mark Josefsberg is my Alexander Technique teacher (his website).


I am sitting on a chair. Mark points out that my spine looks a little bit compressed. We are discussing what would be "the Alexander way" of dealing with it. Of course, "just sitting up straight" is out of question, since "just doing" is not what we are after, and trying to sit up straight has undesirable consequences. Stretching the arms up could work to decompress the spine, but again, this is not "the Alexander way". I tried just applying directions to free my neck, etc., and it made sitting there a little bit more comfortable, but I still stayed in this mini-slump.

So I contemplate the problem: I want to lengthen my spine without "just doing it", by following "the Alexander way". It suddenly occurs to me that I want to lengthen my spine a bit too much, and that an Alexander way would be to give up trying to lengthen my spine altogether. Mark agrees. He says: "You could choose to lengthen your spine, or you could make a choice to keep your spine compressed."

I: I make a choice to keep your spine compressed.
Mark: Fine, since you've just made that choice, you can stay where you are.

I keep sitting. The awareness that I am in a slight slump comes back, and feel that I don't really want to stay there, that I am just doing it in the spirit of contradiction, because I'd been trying to inhibit. Thus, I feel that this was not a "real" choice, to stay in the slump, and I don't want to be responsible for the consequences (perhaps slight, fleeting stiffness in the back, as a result). I explain this to Mark, and he suggests that I find a way to actually come out of the slight slump, but still following the principles, instead of abandoning my plan altogether.

Then I suddenly remember something that I read, that change happens in the movement. I immediately propose this theory to Mark: that it is much easier to lengthen my spine if I were moving around, doing something else, while applying the Alexander directions, instead of just sitting there in a stiff, fixed position, trying to free my neck and lengthen my spine. He agrees; so I stand up, do something, and sit back down; of course, it helps. However, Mark then asks me to go deeper and to find a way to lengthen my spine without actually standing up.

This really puzzled me. Even though I have surely done similar things before, here I was sitting there, trying to come out of the slump, but finding no good way other than "just doing it" or "standing up and moving around, while applying the directions". The Alexander directions themselves were too weak to completely take me out of the slump; I'd say, they only helped about 5%. However, I recalled this example that Mark always gives. He had a student in the past, a bright, intelligent guy, let's call him Jeff. So Jeff would be sitting in a slump and "just thinking the directions without doing them", and nothing would happen. According to Mark, Jeff misinterpreted the "just thinking part", as "just thinking" doesn't mean that nothing actually happens; just the opposite. In fact, Jeff didn't allow himself to come out of the slump, probably because he subconsciously misinterpreted the word "just" in "just thinking".

So I once again recalled this example and started looking for a way to apply the directions to actually come up. At that moment Mark reminded me that the so that part in the primary directions was so important: free my neck SO THAT my head would move forward and up... I was not doing the "so that" part: I was freeing my neck, but not allowing any movement to happen. Suddenly I found it! I first applied the directions a little bit, to easy up the slump, and then... then I found some other direction (*), perhaps some other neural pathway, in which I could get from weakly issuing directions to actually lifting my self out of the slump, without actually actively telling myself to do it. Instead of starting down the path of taking myself out of the slump, I start down the path of just letting go a bit and applying the directions, and then was able to continue this path to taking myself out of the slump in some other way.

As soon as I did it, I immediately realized that I had done it in the past, yet just a few minutes ago this "some other direction" still seemed impossible. However, it was not clear if Mark noticed all the change that has just happened or how he interpreted it. He pointed out that I allowed to come out of the slump. This was weird. After all, I still had to do something to come out of the slump. I am not referring to the physical things that I had to do, but I had to play with my nervous system to make it issue a certain signal to come out of the slump in a particular, peculiar, nonhabitual way. Yet here he was, talking about "allowing".

Of course, I know that "allow" in this context often just means "soften", "don't end-gain too much", etc. Yet at this moment I took it literally, and it just seemed wrong. It's not like I was trying to come out of the slump and, at the same time, not allowing it to happen. It was more like I was trying to come out of the slump and, at the same time, at first was not able to make it happen in the desirable way. However, when I tried to reproduce the experience a couple of times, I started to notice the "not allowing". I would slightly slump, issue the directions "weakly', reproduce the experience of being unable to come out of the slump without just actually doing it (but not use "some other direction" (*) described above); and then I would observe, what prevented me from actually coming up. Suddenly I started to "see" inside myself this very my own "not allowing". It had a flavor of this idea that you should inhibit, you shouldn't just do things the direct way. By targeting this "not allowing" directly I was able to come out of the slump in yet another, subtly different way (**, different from "the other direction" described above). As I kept working on this one, after a few dozen seconds I started to come out of the slump really, really quickly, almost instantly, as soon as I deactivated this "not allowing". I immediately recalled what I read, I think, in Walter Carrington's lectures: "The right thing does itself, the right things does itself, the right thing does itself!"

It was peculiar that this "not allowing" felt very much like the classical "Alexandrian inhibition". After all, the former is supposed to be bad, whereas the latter is supposed to be good. I conjectured for a minute that the two were, in some sense, the same: inhibition = "not allowing". However, they still felt subtly different: the "not allowing" felt like a black net spread over something; inhibition doesn't feel like that at all. Yet they shared the same pause with nothing happening.

After a quick discussion with Mark I became clear on this one. Inhibition, in the Alexander Technique, is consciously preventing something that would otherwise (habitually) happen. Allowing, in the Alexander Technique, is consciously making something happen that would otherwise (habitually) not happen. They are very much the same thing; the key is conscious control.

Now that I think about it, though, I see that there are two different ways to allow things, but only one way to inhibit. When I sense the stimulus inside myself that is going to lead to some action, I can weaken it (or "let it pass"), and this is inhibition. (I am not sure if there is a difference between weakening and ignoring.) However, if I feel a stimulus that is too weak, such as the stimulus to come out of the slump, I can either strengthen it to allow (allow=make it possible) it to happen. This is what I described above as "some  other direction" (*). I can also notice what other stimulus is inhibiting the desirable stimulus, what I described above as "the black net", and inhibit the inhibiting stimulus to eventually allow the desirable stimulus to happen. This is what I described above as "yet another, subtly different way" (**) to come out of the slump. (There are lots of other ways to come out of the slump without "actually doing it", such as using imagery or somewhat related approaches of "using the breath".)

Motion parallax (March - October, 2012)

So, I started therapy with Dr. Richard Kavner. I kept coming for sessions two or even three times a week, though later I reduced it to once a week for financial reasons. When given exercises, I diligently did them at home, but with considerably less enthusiasm than I did during my own experiments. This, by the way, was a huge mistake. I notice over and over how essential can be quantity.

Even though it looked like there was a little bit of improvement, gradually I lost even more enthusiasm. The first 20-30 sessions passed, I decided to continue therapy, and there was no end in sight. My vision was O.K.; however, now, I was "blessed" with double vision, which became a very pronounced issue after an initial period of VT. My right eye was more thoroughly unsuppressed and was actively fighting with my left eye. At the same time, perceptually everything was about the same. It looked like we were just doing a little bit of "polishing"; fundamentally, the "3D" was the same as before.

Whenever I did exercises with various stereograms "hanging in space", I would often receive instructions to sway my body left and right and to see, if the imaginary stereogram were moving "the same direction" or "the opposite direction". I did my best, although this always seemed to me a stupid exercises, as "obviously", if you sway right, everything would move to the left, and vice versa. Gradually, though, I became better at doing those exercises, and recognized, that sometimes the image would move "in the same direction", and sometimes --- "in the opposite".

Then one day, probably in September-October, 2012, I was walking down the street in Brooklyn. There were cars parked along both sides of the street. I was walking and, as usual, looking at the street, the cars, the trees, notice the depth, the distances, and so forth. Now, since I was walking, so to say, forward, the cars were perceptually moving back for me, much like if you look out of a train window, everything will be moving back relative to you. At some point I looked at a car parked on my side of the road, and noticed in the periphery, that the cars on the opposite side were moving forward. They were moving in the wrong direction!

This made no sense. The cars on the opposite side of the road seemed to be moving forward when I was going forward, so long as I looked on the cars parked on my side of the road. However, if I looked further away, perhaps at the buildings on the other side, then all cars seemed to be moving backward, relative to my movement. That is, it mattered where I was looking.

This was an entirely new phenomenon. Prior to that, the direction of my gaze had never made much difference. Of course, if I turned my head or my body, I could look at other things. However, it my no difference, which particular object I was looking at; it was much like moving a mouse pointer on a computer screen: "visual focus" simply meant "attention". Yet in this situation, shifting my gaze while moving changed the direction in which the cars (that I saw in the peripheral vision) were "moving": from backward to forward. It really mattered, what I was looking it; and, in fact, I received immediate feedback as to what I was looking it. Of course, at first it was not easy to trigger this parallax effect: it had to keep looking at a particular car or object for 5-10 seconds before the effect kicked in. But I immediately went for a walk, and after 1-2 hours I was able to reduce the time to less than a second. That is, if I started looking at some object while walking, after about 1 second I felt that the parallax effect started working somewhere in my visual system, and lots of objects in the periphery suddenly started moving, one way or another. On the following days this parallax effect only got stronger; and it has been with me ever since. Now I can hardly imagine, what I "saw" prior to that. The best explanation I have is that prior to discovering this new "parallax effect" I had never been looking at anything, or at least not consistently. True, I had written in this blog about "binocular focus", but I think that I had been very imprecise with my focus, sometimes looking a little in front of an object, sometimes a little behind, and easily loosing focus when either I or the object was moving.

Of all the changes that I have so far experienced in vision therapy, that was perhaps the most significant one. It was almost as surprising as the original discovery of stereopsis. Almost all of the other changes during my vision therapy have been relatively minor, incremental; this one was radical, black-and-white kind of change, after which the new mode of seeing quickly and completely replaced the old one.

If I take off the contact lens on my eye, the fusion get much worse, and the parallax effect does not work that well. But this is still not the same as it was in the past. Now the parallax effect makes complete sense. I could even draw a diagram. Of course, if I am walking along the street and looking on the car on this side, perceptually the cars and the buildings on the other side would be moving in the same direction. Yet a little more than a year ago this was virtually beyond my imagination.

Update: October, 2011 - March, 2012

Many people have asked me to continue my blog, so here is an update.

After the events described in this blog I stopped regular work on my eyes, as I didn't have the enthusiasm to devote to it several hours every day without any clear direction. Gradually my vision deteriorated a little bit. The stereopsis stayed, but it became somewhat weirder, somewhat more unfocused. I went for an evaluation at New York Eye and Ear. First of all, they prescribed me contact lenses as my right eye was a bit nearsighted. They gave me -1.75 for the right eye and also temporarily 0.50 for the left, normal, eye, just to help to recover the balance between the eyes. After a few weeks they still checked my vision and concluded that my right eye was "beyond training" and that I needed an operation for strabismus to recover. They also checked for fusion with a prism, to straighten the right eye, and -- indeed -- I was able to see a stereogram in this case. So they concluded that the strabismus operation was likely to be effective. I asked about the risks. The doctor (Christopher Seebruck, MD) said that the risk was comparable to that of being hit by a lightning; though, on the Internet I found out that even the chance of death from a strabismus operation was rather high, much higher than that of being hit by a lightning. But, anyway, in February, 2012, the congress of doctors told me that I needed an operation, and that I should make an appointment if/when I made this choice. For some reason they really stressed that I had some "pseudostrabismus", so that even after an operation, my eyes wouldn't be cosmetically 100% straight. This didn't really bother me that much; I was more worried that an operation could cause some irreparable damage; and, besides, after my own experiences of discovering stereopsis, I couldn't believe that my right eye was "beyond" training: after all, I saw 3D around me, and they tried to judge it by some tiny stereogram that, probably, required much higher stereoacuity. By the way, the doctors were not terribly interested in my story about acquiring binocular vision. Only one very old and experienced doctor, who at one point came to check my eyes, seemed to attach some credibility to my explanation. Also, they discussed it all with me on a very basic level: eye in the center, eye on the side, etc. At times I felt I knew more about stereopsis than they did.

In the meantime, I made an appointment with Dr. Kavner, a vision therapist recommended to me by somebody from Peter Grunwald's retreat. He made an initial evaluation and said that he should be able to make my eyes to converge at a relatively close distance --- I forgot, perhaps a foot --- after 20-30 sessions, if I remember correctly. He was not that interested in my own story either, but I didn't try to push it after the way it was received at NYEE. After that visit I didn't really have an opinion, but I did notice that my vision somewhat improved just after this 30-minute evaluation; and I wondered, how beneficial should be the actual therapy.

During the winter of 2011-2012 I went home to Russia and decided to get a third opinion. I went to "Eksimer", a top, fancy, dedicated vision clinic in St. Petersburg, and paid for a complete evaluation.  I was evaluated by two doctors: one --- a very experienced opthalmologist with decades of experience; the other --- specifically an expert on strabismus. Now, recall that, in addition to strabismus, I had imperfect vision in my right eye: a lens for -1.75. The first thing they told me: I needed laser correction. That was the first step, and then they had to make the decision about strabismus operation. I mentioned the opinion I received in New York --- one by NYEE, the other by Dr. Kavner. Both opinions were dismissed; they said something like "We here [in St. Petersburg, Russia] know what we are doing; they don't know very much [there, in New York]". But wait... On top of that they offered me a 10% discount on laser correction if I did it TOMORROW. This was not an easy decision to make, but eventually I convinced myself to decline this option, as clearly they didn't have my best interest in mind. Furthermore, my mother argued that, should I have any issues, I'd have to travel back to Russia to see a doctor.

Back in New York, I still had to decided what to do. Eventually I decided to give vision therapy a try --- after all, I was promised some specific results after 20-30 sessions --- and, thus, not to risk going for an operation right away. I was also very curious about VT, and it was much more in line with my philosophy. Though, I admit, it was tempting to just go and schedule an operation, so that --- it seemed --- all my problems would go away in just a few weeks.

So I started vision therapy with Dr. Richard Kavner. This was in spring, 2012...

Visual experiences of 3d: the Museum of Modern Art

In the museum I've got an interesting new feeling that it is a space full of people that came to see art. I already wrote about this phenomenon. Before it was about me going to a museum and seeing art that's over there. Now it is a place full of people, and I am one of them, wandering around in between pieces of art.

Let me write about good things. First of all, Kandinsky. I am not sure if I have seen this painting today at MoMA, but you get the idea, what kind of paintings by Kandinsky I am talking about.

If we take it for granted that Kandinsky had synesthesia, then it's so simple. No more worries trying to understand his pictures. You know how people look at his pictures trying to figure out what he meant? Picking up lines, circles, splashes. That's how I had been looking at the "Magic Eye" pictures, trying to discover something in the patterns, hoping that it will suddenly show me that hidden picture. I still cannot see them, by the way, but now I can look through, and at least I see that it is possible to see something else, not just whatever is printed on the page.

I can try to understand synesthesia through my understanding of stereopsis. Just like it is virtually impossible to imagine stereopsis unless and until you have it, it should be virtually impossible to imagine synesthesia unless and until you have it. That is, you may be thinking for hours about how sounds can be colored, and not get anywhere. However, I can relate to it by interpreting stereopsis as synesthesia. Then I can project it further and get at least some sense of what seeing sounds or hearing colors may be like. Furthermore, there is the natural smell-taste synesthesia that virtually everyone has but hardly anyone recognizes as synesthesia. In summary, if you want to understand Kandinsky, relax and look at the painting non-habitually.

I also noticed, as I looked at his paintings longer and longer, trying to connect to various parts of the visual system, how sometimes the whole room got darker. At this point the picture would sometimes disassociate into two or three layers, that is, each contour would belong to one of the layers, and sometimes one of the layers would be shifting with respect to the others. The layers were not separated in space, though. Also, at the same time as it got darker, all colors would disappear, and the picture would become brown-grey instead of red-yellow-blue-green-and-who-knows-what-else.


Then, Claude Monet. Look at the lilies. Those are not the ones that are at MoMA, just whatever is easy to find in the Internet.

I don't think I had ever realized that all those paintings showed the surface of the water at an angle. You just have to take my word for that... I had surely realized those were lilies on water. But you can actually see that there is an angle. You can see what angle the surface of the pond makes with the surface of the picture. This is new.

In fact, now as I looked at a huge painting with those lilies, I could easily see how the pond continued outside, from out the picture. I am not sure normal people can do that. I guess, a normal person would need to close one eye in order to suppress the feeling that the canvas is flat and to see the volume. I would assume that Monet himself was able to see volume with both eyes open. I can certainly switch back and forth with both eyes open: to see just the picture or to allow the water to continue out into the space of the gallery, with the lilies.

I tried the same with Picasso - it didn't work quite well, but it seems possible. That is, instead of just conceptualizing, what a cubist painting may be about, one can simply see the space in it as it is, albeit different from our space. I recently had to exercise my ability to see distorted space when I noticed my reflection in the faucet in my bathroom with one eye deviating to the side. As I looked in the regular mirror, however, the eyes were fairly well aligned. I guess, fusing two curved images was still a little bit too much for my brain. However, I was able to improve it, to a degree, by looking into the reflection in the faucet and seeing there the space in the bathroom, but curved. The same technique can be applied to Picasso: look at the painting, perhaps with one eye only, and see the curved space inside it. Not sure if it has to do with the observation that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon actually have strabismus, at least the three of them whose eyes we can clearly see. Of course, their eyes are not the only thing in the painting that can remind me about strabismus: with a moderate stretch of imagination, the whole picture may be seen as the result of switching between the views from two eyes.

After the museum I went to have dinner in a place called Lindy's on 7th avenue. Just a warning if you decide to go there: read the menu and the prices before ordering. The pricing is counterintuitive. I had a great dinner there and paid about $35 including a very generous tip, but once again, the prices are totally random, so you have to choose wisely. One interesting experience with binocular vision was when I went to the bathroom... On my way back I looked at the landscape of the cafe and felt a little bit lost, because the landscape didn't look like anything familiar. However, then I recognized that it didn't look like anything familiar because I was at a different angle, and I still used my old and ineffective navigation habits. Instead, I looked at the structure of what I see, realized what was where, and as I turned to the right, the environment rotated, showing me the familiar picture with my table, just what I was waiting for.

As another interesting experience, after I had my dinner I was thinking what I wanted to drink or if I wanted a desert. I took some time because of the random prices - I spent several minutes reading it over and over. I noticed the waiter in my peripheral vision and thought he was going to ask me if I had finally made some decision. At this time I was drinking water from a glass, so I automatically stopped drinking and barely started moving the glass from my face. Almost simultaneously I noticed that I noticed - that is, I became aware of my very reaction, and started deciding if I wanted to inhibit it, to go back to drinking, put the glass on the table, or something else. Of course, all that took only a split second. Yet at almost the same time the waiter slightly shifted his direction so, as I recognized in my peripheral vision, he was now moving a little more away from me, and said something like "Don't worry. Please, take your time." - and left.

This impressed me so much. This guy noticed my reaction so early that by the time I started inhibiting it or otherwise deciding what to do with it, the glass still an inch or two from my mouth, he had already changed the trajectory of his walk, and was ready to start saying something to me. It was probably an automatic response on his part. In other words, the only possible explanation is that he did what he did subconsciously, as a result of his experience, after having served to many different people and learning to pick up all kinds of signals. Anyway, that's why I left him a tip in excess of 20%.  Good job.