#9 session

It turns out that I wasn't following the prescription properly.  I'm supposed to be doing 20 minutes twice a day, or 40 minutes once a day.  I confirmed this with both Michael and Heather, so it looks like I will be bumping up the load.  But I'll still be journaling once a day.

Today was a good session.  One of the things that was a little different from yesterday is that it took much less time to lower the suppression and see the intense green which is a result of the brain adding together the input of both eyes.  It was almost immediate today.  It was an unusual, but strangely welcoming feeling, like I'm getting this extra information that I'm just barely able to intercept.  But I can feel it, and it feels pretty good.

That extra input seems to be becoming a more solid and permanent feature of my vision without me asking it to be there.  I still have diplopia and it's becoming more pronounced because my brain's preference for the right eye input over the lazy eye input is diminishing.  I believe this is because the lazy eye is getting stronger, and its integration into my brain is getting stronger as well.  The intensifying of diplopia is something one should logically expect as both eye input channels get stronger and eye control isn't yet perfect.  Indeed, this is one of the things that Susan Barry said happened to her.  So I'm not worried.

I am noticing the intense green coming into the left side and I'm encouraging it, and trying to enhance it with my mind.  In the past few entries I'd been talking quite a bit about visualization.  Visualization is a technique that's been known about for a long time.  Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about it in his body building encyclopedia.  He talks about visualizing the muscle fibers contracting as you pump iron.  Cicero used visualization to help him memorize the different points he would talk about during speeches which would last three hours long.  Arthur Rubenstein, a holocaust survivor and concert pianist, never forgot how to play the piano, and seems to have barely lost any skill at all while he was in the prison camps, because he would constantly visualize himself playing the piano.

I'm not sure why visualization works, but it does.  It may be because vision is so tightly connected with our thinking.  It may be because the visual cortex is such a large part of our brain.  Maybe we're such visual creatures because the visual cortex was a giant proportion of our brains when we were monkey-like animals swinging from tree to tree.  After that, the prefrontal cortex grew and developed tight integration with the already existing visual system.  Maybe that's why visual information is so stimulating to us.

I want to say that when I use Syntonics, even though I'm staring at filtered light for twenty minutes, the key is to make it engaging, and think about what you're doing.  If you're looking at it with no mental activity, while multitasking or listening to music, the workout won't be as successful as it could be.  The more you can engage your brain and be focused on what you're doing, the better.  That's what I'm doing with visualization, because visualization is one of the most effective ways to engage the brain.  Non-passivity is key.