Today and last night's sessions were some of the most work-intensive yet. The lazy eye light is still getting more robust and permanent and although it is still soft, as I said before, I can fudge it and make it almost as sharp as the other non-lazy eye light.
Progress is still occurring rapidly, and last night in particular I noticed the changes when playing XCOM. The simplest way to put it is that the stereo effects are gradually getting more and more powerful as the brain turns the other eye on. Things seem much more invasive, and up close and personal. The scary thing is that even with as powerful as these effects are right now, I know that they're nowhere near where they're going to be, because even with the stereo effects, I still have diplopia, which means the brain isn't yet fusing. As I progress, I feel as though I get a better and better idea of what Heather and others mean when they say that gaining stereopsis is overwhelming.
Saccades were good, considering how bad my sleep was last night. Jumping to the bottom right was easier than it was yesterday. Jumping to the other places was pretty easy, although they weren't perfect. I expect that I'll see improvement in the next few sessions.
I guess there is something else I want to talk about. It's how strabismus relates to mental and emotional health. A few months ago I joined a Facebook group that's centered around vision therapy. It's a group of about 15 people, about eight or nine of whom are active members. There was recently an eccentric young man named Matan, who joined the group and started asking the group personal questions about whether any members of the group have psychological issues. I shied away because the questions were too personal. But others were less bashful. Before I knew it, everyone had confessed to having had anxiety, depression, and mood problems for all their lives. This would apply to me as well.
There was a whole discussion about how these psychological issues might relate to strabismus and vision problems. Could it be a coincidence that we're all strabismic and also a bunch of sad basketcases? One has to be careful. It's true that both of my parents have a long history of depression and neither are strabismic or stereoblind, so at least for me it's possible that vision has nothing to do with it. It is known that these psychological problems have a large genetic component.
But anyway, vision is a huge part of the human animal and if it's very significantly impaired, then it seems likely that there will be a lot of potential side effects. Sort of like--let's say that a person has hypertension and extreme lethargy at certain times of the day. Let's also say that the person is 500 lbs. A doctor worth his salt won't give him hypertension medication and Adderall and call it a day. He will tell him to lose weight or he's going to die. If the person is 500 lbs and he's having any problem at all, it's the weight. That may be a bad analogy. But the idea is that if something about you is very abnormal, the body's imbalances will potentially express themselves in many different ways.
The visual cortex is a pretty big part of the brain, and I believe that's largely because our vision is very good. Humans evolved to constantly process two streams of high-resolution visual input in 3d. All of our different systems evolved with each other, so they're going to have a tight relationship with one another. If one system is significantly weakened, it seems likely that it will affect other systems.
It seems likely to me that there should be a relationship between the strabismus and psychological issues, especially considering how tightly connected thinking and vision are. I know that there are a number of studies currently going on with strabismus. Maybe they will shed light on this. Perhaps they will show that there are more reasons to treat strabismus than simply better vision. If I fix my vision, I may have something to say about this. I'll be one of the relative few who's lived in both worlds.
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