#91 session

Wow... I'm getting close to session #100.

There was nothing really notable about the light tube exercise.  It's going well, but there's still quite a bit of missing detail from the lazy eye, although I expect some changes pretty soon.

Special Tetris went exceedingly well.   The effort required to do it was very little.  I didn't really get tired, and all of the indicators that I normally look for indicate a lot of good progress.  For example, there was very little driftage.  It's as if my lazy eye is very quickly on its way to being a fixing eye.  This time around there was no misalignment issues at all.  And when the falling pieces slid past the stacked pieces, I could tell that the grid lines lined up almost perfectly.  It's not yet quite there, but it's very close.  There was very little perceived cyclodeviation.  There was very little suppression when the falling pieces slide past the stacked pieces.  One thing that would often happen before is that when a falling piece would slide past a stacked piece, the stacked pieces would fade away a little.  This is the type of thing that I have come to expect when I do antisuppression exercises, but it's almost gone now.

Then I did Columns.  This time it wasn't nearly as stressful/painful as it normally is.  It's still uncomfortable.  I am noticing changes in the way that I'm doing it already.  The whole scene is becoming more solid, as if my two eyes are one, even though their input is completely separated by the divider.

Heather told me 'it's as if the brain needs to know what it's like for the lazy eye to move'.  She said she likes this exercise because she can feel her eyes moving and working.   In my own mind, yes, I suppose.  But your brain knows how that eye feels when it does work.  I don't think the exercise is effective expressly because it shows your brain what it's like for that eye to do work.  Because I can alternate with that eye and use it as a fixing eye all I want, but it's not going to make the two eyes work together.

I think the effectiveness of the exercise has something to do with the fact that you're constantly alternating between the two eyes on a rhythm.  Not only are you training motor control, but I can feel a lot of work being done with accommodation, especially with the lazy eye.  Then if you combine this with a powerful antisupression exercise, such as light tube and Special Tetris, you've got a killer combination.  Columns gives you good eye control, so that when you look around the world, you experience less diplopia and less visual conflict.  Then you do antisuppression exercises, and then the brain just lets the information in because the visual conflict that it's experiencing is becoming less and less.  I think that's why those two exercises were so powerful for Heather.  Maybe the sensory training had a bit to do with it as well.

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