Saturday, October 25, 2014

So I tried playing Diplopia while undergoing transcranial direct current stimulation...

... with positive results.  It was inevitable for me to try this.

The Bricks game is generally very difficult for me.  But this time I did extremely well.

It's hard to say whether I'm getting better at the game because I'm learning how to interpret what I'm seeing in the game, or whether it's because my vision is improving.  Likely, it's both.  Usually with Bricks, I'm pretty bad, especially when the ball comes at me on the left side (my suppressing side) and in the mid-left side.  My judgement really stinks in that area.  But this time I did extraordinarily well.  I have never got past the second level.  This time, I got past the fourth level.  My judgement just seemed to be very good.  Is it because of improved vision?  I don't know.

Putting on the electrodes was a pain in the ass (like always), but particularly so because I have to situate them around the HMD.  I guess what gave me the idea to try Diplopia with tDCS is because tDCS is known to help with fatigue.  One of the things that I've learned in my vision therapy journey is to take breaks, especially if you have high-intensity workouts.  A friend had visited for a few days and during those days I did not play Diplopia.  Those days I saw visual improvement.  So I think I'm going to do a two day off, two day on schedule.  However, this is the third day, but I figured that I could get through it if I combine it with tDCS since it's known to help with fatigue.  But since I can do it with tDCS, I may as well do Diplopia with tDCS since tDCS is also known to help with vision therapy exercises that focus on breaking through suppression.

The Diplopia workouts are definitely good even without tDCS, so I may mix and match sessions with and without, but if I had to guess, they do combine quite nicely.  I'll be doing this in future sessions for sure.

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