What vision therapy has taught me (pt 2)

Things are still going really well.  I feel like I'm now coasting my way to victory.  There may be things I can do to make this go faster, but improvement is now a self-reinforcing thing.  Binocular posture is now my default, and correcting my gaze is pretty much automatic.

I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and he had a guest on who is a neuroscientist named Andrew Hubberman.  They talked quite a bit about neuroplasticity and the visual system, which is relevant to my interests. 

At one point in the podcast he was talking about the difference in neuroplasticity between children and adults, and the implications of these differences.  For instance, we have neuroplasticity throughout our lives.  If we didn't, our brains wouldn't work, period.  But children have much greater neuroplasticity.  This is why children can be much more easily molded than adults.

He makes the general point that you can't really change an adult's opinion about something.  If an adult is going to change his opinion about something, he's the one who is going to drive the change.

That actually corresponds pretty well to the development of one's visual system.

Children who have vision problems can often very easily fix their vision with simple vision therapy.  And it's often been said it would happen with very little effort or time investment.  On the other hand, for adults, it's usually a very different matter entirely.

Adults brains are plastic, and adults can change themselves in profound ways ways that defy intuition.  Not even young adults, but adults in their 60's and up.  It's just that they're not as plastic as children (although there is undoubtedly variability in neuroplasticity among adults).

Adults who want to change themselves have to deliberately leverage their neuroplasticity.  They have to work constantly to mold their brains in the direction they want to move it.  They have to know that it's not going to happen all at once.  But if they know about their neuroplasticity and work with it consistently, deliberately, and in a mindful way, then over time (maybe not even that much time), they can make huge changes to themselves and their lives.   

If my current trajectory eventually results in me being able to resolve auto-stereograms (Magic Eye--sort of a conclusive test of proper stereoscopic vision), then that will be personal proof that an adult can change himself in profound ways.

“Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.” --
Santiago Ramón y Cajal

What an incredibly empowering lesson to learn--even if--it's somewhat late in life (I am 36 years old--okay, maybe not too too bad).  Let's say I achieve my goals in one year.  It will have taken me 10 years of deliberate work to rewire my brain and eyes to work properly.  That is a huge overhaul in how the brain works.  There are big difference in what the brain does for someone who has stereopsis vs someone who is stereo-blind.  I won't go into them, but it is a massive difference, and Susan Barry has talked about other changes she's noticed in her cognition after she gained permanent stereopsis at the age of 50. Given the magnitude of the change, you should expect other changes as well.

And if this is true that I can make massive material changes in my brain, then what else can I do?  I can probably get good at guitar and learn how to sing and play simultaneously (something I've always struggled with).  Vision therapy has taught me grit.  I've always been a naturally gritty, hardworking, and conscientious person.  But this journey has given me special insight in what it means to learn new skills, and what it means in concrete, material terms in the brain.  I don't freak out, or get disillusioned.  I don't expect immediate results.  I watch continually for improvement and indicators that I'm moving in the right direction.  I partition a part of myself from the process.  A part of me is watching the process from above, monitoring, and making sure I'm on track.

This 'meta-cognition'--this ability to partition myself, to apply grit and stoicism, and to understand the learning process, and to think about learning in terms of molding my brain and leveraging my neuroplasticity, has applications to literally everything.  I suspect that's why it's good to do difficult things.  Doing difficult things forces you to learn lots of little 'sub'-skills--such as the ones I've mentioned--and that these sub-skills can be applied to lots of things.  I have learned a lot of these little sub-skills and it really does pay off to learn them.  They really help with a bunch of apparently unrelated things you'll encounter in life. 

Anyhiz, that's all I wanted to say about that.  I'd been mulling of that every since I'd heard that podcast.  Another thing I've noticed is how I think virtual reality is helpful with stereopsis recovery.   Some of these mini-games in Half Life: Alyx are great in that you do indeed get stereo cues, but in order to solve the puzzles, you have to navigate through space, meaning that it's not totally visual.  These games incorporate your proprioception (your body's sense of knowing where it is in space), which is a very important aspect of vision.

There's a little gif of the mini-game I'm talking about.  I remember solving the game and being tripped out by how it was triggering my binocular neurons and how weird it felt.  But then also, I could kind of feel new mappings occurring as I had to move my control through space to connect the different colored nodes to one another.  I could kind of feel that connection happening in real time as my visual system and proprioception systems were sort of talking with one another.  

Yeah.  VR is pretty nuts.  And it's only going to get better, along with its utility to vision therapy.