#95 session

Columns saw some pretty good improvement over last time.  I'm learning that this exercise is good for a number of different things.  It's good for building motor control, integrating input from each eye into a bigger picture, and more recently, building peripheral vision--something which is really important for developing stereopsis.  Lately I've been doing five or six go-throughs with the regular columns sheet, and then I go to sheet with the symbols making a cross and diagonal pattern.

Then I saccade from one side to another on a rhythm switching from one eye to another.  As the diagonal lines meet up at the middle, I become more aware of each side while I fix on the one of the sides.  The other side that I'm not fixing with, tends to drift a little.  So when I'm looking at 'A' on the left-hand side, 'Q' on the right-hand side drifts a little and will move out of alignment a little.  And when I fix on 'Q', 'A' on the other side will start to drift a little, and it will come in a little fuzzy.  Of course, even though it drifts a little, I do have some conscious control of it, and I can make it stay where it should be.  So I've been practicing this, just going back and forth, fixing on one side and then fixing on the other, while simultaneously trying to keep the corresponding side where it should be.  Then I move upward where the columns move farther away from one another.  It gets a little harder here.  It really works your peripheral vision, and it's challenging.

Special Tetris was different.  I used some of my new filters which have the colored sheets in the different sides, so that now my lazy eye is seeing the stacked pieces and the fixing eye is seeing the falling pieces.  This actually made it much tougher than the other way around, so I decided to go with it.  After all, a binocularly normal person shouldn't have a preference one way or another.  I figure if I can get good at the game using the filters either way, then I can begin to perceive things more in line with the way that a binocularly normal person does--which is the whole point of me doing vision therapy.

It was actually pretty blurry--both the falling pieces and the stacked pieces.  I don't know why.  And also, I noticed quite a lot of suppression, since I'm now looking at the stacked pieces with the lazy eye.  So when the stacked pieces build up, there's quite a lot for my suppressing lazy eye to see.  And so when the falling piece comes by, a huge chunk of the stacked pieces fade away.  Interesting.  It's not completely unexpected, but it's still good feedback.

The light tube went well.  It was pretty brutal actually.  I was back at it again, fighting the hypertropia.  I hadn't had those days in a week or so, it feels like.  It's interesting because the last time I looked at myself in the eye, I had very little hypertropia remaining.  So I'm definitely engaging the lazy eye to an unprecedented level.

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