Accommodation and eyeball motor control

If there's anything that's been on my mind lately about vision therapy and my experience of what vision therapy has been, it's the link between accommodation and ability to accurately direct the eyeballs with facility.

It's been on my mind that as my ability to synchronize accommodation across both eyes has improved, actually controlling the direction of the lazy eye has become a viable option.  It's like... when the eyes aren't synced together, the eye that's out of focus might as well not even be a part of your anatomy.  You don't really have any kind of control of that eye.  Or at least that's been my experience.

So it's sort of funny to me when vision therapists say stuff like 'try to use both eyes at the same time with everyday activity'.  Well, when my lazy eye wasn't a part of my body that didn't even make sense.  Did not compute.  It's sort of like a miracle worker saying to someone who had his limb amputated 'Just have another arm.'  That doesn't even make sense.

I know they mean well and are trying to do their best.  And while they're educated in the eye and binocular vision, they do not know everything.  There's probably quite a bit about visual system mechanics that most vision therapists don't know.  And then on top of that, they're trying to understand what's going on with your visual system based on their measurements and based on what you're reporting to them about your visual system.  They have to do their best with incomplete and sometimes shoddy information.  I recognize that their job is hard, and that the field of vision therapy therapy is itself often seen through skeptical and or disdainful eyes.  I completely understand and do not begrudge.  I am incredibly thankful to their existence, especially to qualified vision therapists.

Ironically something happened when Tuan got me training on synchronizing my accommodation by essentially saying 'just do it'.  Wiggle your big toe.  And that got me on the path to fixing my accommodation issues.  And only in the past couple of days has 'control your lazy eye with everyday activity' begun to make any kind of sense.  When doing the Brock String, or sometimes when my attention shifts from my current task to what is around me, I notice that I'm seeing through both eyes.  It's particularly noticeable when doing the Brock String.  And I notice that my control is much finer, and controlling it as a new thing, a new part of my life that is there, is starting to make intuitive sense.  It's bizarre, miraculous, and very exciting.  And this new skill seems to directly coincide with my ability to get both circles sharp as I move the fixation card closer and farther away.

I've talked about it before... I've said stuff about the link between attention and accommodation and motor control, and not being able to pay attention through an unaccommodated eye.  Not sure whether it's true for anyone else, but it definitely is true in my case.  It makes sense, and my success with synchronizing accommodation (not done yet!) appears to be a vindication of this line of reasoning.