Another major change

Not quite a breakthrough.  But I have noticed at particular times, especially when watching TV or using my computer at mid-distance, that my diplopia is no longer annoying.  Also, my eyes look straighter than ever, and I'm seeing significantly more depth in VR games. I'm not sure what the difference is.  I suspect that it's just time, continuous mindfulness about using binocular posture, and using VR to provide a hyper-binocular stimulus.

Haven't been doing Brock string or anything like that.  Just VR, and trying as much as possible to be aware of the use of both eyes.  I'm also careful to use both eyes when reading, using the reading technique prescribed in previous entries. 

It's getting easier and easier to internally conceptualize what it's like to use both eyes.   Holy crap, VR beginning to get intense as I lose the suppression. 

I'm more confident than ever that I'm going to achieve my goals if I keep going. 

Beginning to see space

I've noticed quite a bit of improvement in the past few days.  I'm noticing my eyes are coming together, and it's increasingly the case that my double images are on top of each other and that this has practical benefits: it makes reading and watching TV more enjoyable and less distracting.

I'm not doing 'vision therapy' and haven't been for a number of months now.  The reason is because I think I've learned the important lessons from vision therapy and I'm able to use what I've learned from those lessons all of the time now.

One training technique I've been using a lot lately is actually reading books on my iPad.  I use a reading technique that I learned from Tim Ferriss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwEquW_Yij0

In this video, Tim Ferriss explains how to speed read.  And actually he says  that most people are never taught how to read properly, which is a bit bold, but I think he has a good point.  The key to speed reading (and reading properly) is to minimize the number of saccades (or jumps) of the eye while reading by skipping the margins.  The fewer saccades you make, the faster you read.

This can be demonstrated with a program called 'Spreeder'.  The idea is that the program flashes words at you in the same spot, one word after another, really quickly.  This way, you don't have to move your eyes at all.  Automatically you find yourself reading much more quickly than at your base rate--all by eliminating saccades. 

Tim explains that the way that you decrease the number of saccades you make per line of text is by training your peripheral vision.  Don't begin each line at the beginning.  Start an inch to the right of the margin.  Also don't finish the line of text at the end.  Stop an inch to the left of the end. Over time, Tim explains that you can skip more and more of the margins (up to two inches from each side) to further reduce the number of saccades. 

I found this awkward at first because my peripheral vision isn't so great.  This is particularly true for my left eye because that's my weak eye.  It was slow and awkward at first because I would deliberately be looking around the periphery to build the strength in the eye.  So I was actually reading slower than my normal method (which involves the use of only one eye, actually).

But the more I practiced reading this way, alternating eyes from left to right, and trying to minimize my saccades (I can do about two per line now), and really feeling around my periphery, I've gotten quite a bit quicker.  And my left eye seems to have gotten quite a bit stronger, and the peripheral vision better.

 Today I had a weird sensation that things suddenly looked really, really big and bright with that eye--much more than usual.  That is still the case.  I also suddenly noticed space between my couch and the side table.  It was pretty cool.  I also noticed quite a bit more space while playing VR today.

So things are looking peachy.  I still don't have stereopsis (some sort of low-level stereopsis).  But it seems like the eye is really beginning to come online, and it has a lot to do with the fact that I've been really training my peripheral vision with both eyes with this new reading technique.  I still have double vision, but it's not that distracting.

At this point, I would say that vision therapy has been a success.  It seems I've jumped the hurdle when vision therapy caused my eye to significantly decrease suppression without having full control over the eye.  This is an awkward phase in vision therapy as I've learned because it's like you're stuck with what can be crippling double vision.  At least before vision therapy, I didn't have bad double vision because I was suppressing so much.  But there can be a phase when the suppression significantly decreases without the control and so you're stuck with really distracting double vision.  I seem to have gotten over that.  I have sufficient control of the eyes so that fact that the eyes are both really turned on now means it isn't such a problem that it was. 

Lessons I've learned through vision therapy

What have I learned through vision therapy?  I thought of this question because I was planning on, at some point, maybe writing a book or ebook on the topic, and thought it might not be a bad idea to consolidate and think about what I've learned, as in most recent days progress seems to have been going well.

• Meditation can be a powerful tool to help with vision therapy. In fact, I think meditation can be a powerful tool for learning any new skill. Because that's precisely what proper stereoscopic vision is: a skill.  Just one that is normally learned automatically during one's development. 
  
  Meditation is concentrated mind training: paying special, concerted attention to the mind in order to hone it; to sharpen it.  Reminds me about a story I had heard about a Jew in a concentration camp who was a concert pianist.  Obviously, he couldn't practice with a real piano in the concentration camp, but he practiced playing in his mind.  And here's the weird thing.  When he was set free years later, he could still play the piano just as well as he could before.
  
  A big part of success with vision therapy is practicing binocular posture, continually, and integrating it into your daily routine.  Meditation is particularly useful for this.  The mindfulness one develops with meditation is helpful with this integration as well as focus.
    
• Get a good, qualified vision therapist.  I had a vision therapist a long time ago, but she wasn't particularly helpful.  She wasn't very experienced.  And the impression that I got from interacting with others on various Internet groups is that this is a common experience and that switching to an experienced and qualified vision therapist is paramount. 
  
  One woman I know, Heather, in particular, had this experience.  She had a vision therapist, wasn't making good progress with him/her, got the impression that the vision therapist wasn't good, and then made the switch.  Once she made the switch, it was a matter of weeks or so until she achieved her goals.
  
  I don't have a vision therapist because I'm a bit jaded from my prior experience, and a little skeptical about some of the claims made by some of the vision therapists I've talked to in the recent past.  Plus, I think I may achieve my goals on my own pretty soon.
• Physical health.  Take good care of yourself.  Sleep a lot, eat well, exercise.  Effective vision training requires a lot of mental energy.  You can optimize your mental energy by optimizing health generally.
• Ketogenic diets are interesting, in my experience.  I've noticed that, generally, in my third day of doing keto, I will literally feel my body switch to using ketones instead of glucose.  It usually happens in the afternoon.  The way I would describe it is as a cool, calmness washing over me.  I notice that I find concentration, reading, and working significantly easier when in ketosis.  I also notice that performance improves quite a bit during vision therapy exercises.  It seems like mental energy and visual energy are interchangeable.  A ketogenic diet can provide one with more mental, as well as visual energy.  At least that's been my experience.  I'd be curious to know what other people have experienced.
  
  One of the things that a lot of people report when doing vision training is that it is mentally exhausting.  I would recommend that everyone, regardless of whether they're doing vision therapy, to experiment with ketogenic diets.  There's a lot of useful aspects to them, like weight management, they can help you manage appetite (you don't really experience hunger in the same way when you're keto-adapted), and of course, the cognitive/mood benefits associated with ketosis. 
  
  Keto is not everyone, and I think it's important to use caution when experimenting with it.  Particularly in my case, you want to make sure you don't stay in ketosis for too long.  I've heard that some people can stay in ketosis indefinitely, but for some reason, I can get really sick.  So when I do ketosis, I try to cycle every two to three days (cycling with carbohydrate). 
   
• Getting a grip on what you're doing can be very hard.  Gaining stereopsis and eye teaming is sort of like gaining control of an organ that you didn't even know you had.  I'm not sure why, but I find it useful to think of the visual system as a single organ.  It's the stereoscopic vision organ.  The two eyes, the muscles, the brain.  All of it is one thing, and you need to slowly develop mental representations for how to get all of the components working together as one and so that they do so automatically.
  
  So you have to develop that set of mental representations, but before you do that, you have to claim all of your equipment.  If you have strabismus/amblyopia, you probably don't have any independent control over one of your eyes.  So obviously, you have to develop control of both of your eyes independently, and then incorporate them into the larger system, build a sense of what binocular vision feels like so that it can become your default.
  
  At first, you won't have any mental representations for good binocular posture.  You have to develop it slowly from a small grain of rice into something much larger.  Then you just keep building, practicing, focusing on building the binocular muscle.  It's really a weird and trippy thing to so deliberately build your own brain in this way.  That is essentially what you're doing.