Summary of this week

Progress is accelerating, and I think it will continue to accelerate until I'm done.  

There was a day during the middle of the week when I had a sudden realization of how much my vision has improved.  I notice it generally when looking around, and with increased brightness, and field of vision.  But now that I think of it, it's also the stuff that I'm not really looking at as well.  When I notice my peripheral vision.  I can see my arms and the double images of them are coming together.  

And then, most of all, it's my feet.  The discrepancy of the distance of the double images varies depending on where I'm looking.  My feet, in particular, have always worried me, because the distance of the double images of my feet were always so far apart.  I think it was yesterday that I looked down at my feet and the double images have come together so much.  It is shocking how much improvement I've seen here.  This is an objective marker of improvement.  And bear in mind, I haven't been doing vision therapy.  This progress is a result of me figuring out how to practice proper binocular posture, knowing when I'm pressing down on the muscle, and when I'm not, and then making a conscious decision to do it when I have the available mental bandwidth. 

So that's how I do 'vision therapy'.  And increasingly I'm able to do it for longer and longer periods of the day.  When playing VR games, or watching TV, or going out for walks.  And holy crap, is my vision improving as a result.

And what's crazy is how fast this progress has occurred.  It really feels like it has happened suddenly--like--as in the past four weeks or so.  Really seems to coincide with the improved grasp on my vision which I seem to have only very recently developed.  Very excited to see what improvement happens in the coming weeks.  The eyes really are really a freaking amazing organ/organ system--how tied in they are with the brain, and with thinking, and how malleable it all is, and what is possible with training.  It truly is bananas.

Had another massive quantum leap today. Things are getting real now.

 This train ain't stopping.  

Today has probably been the biggest leap in vision quality I've seen, ever--especially if you're talking about changes seen/noticed within a single day.  Truly massive.  

It's hard to describe.  It's just better.  Noticing more and more, larger field of vision, the feeling of using and directing both eyes.  Things are brighter.  It's also the way it feels now--using both eyes.  It's a combination of all of these things. 

Could possibly coincide with a few changes I've made. I've gotten stricter with my ketogenic diet.  Basically, I have one carb-laden meal a week in order to avoid keto toxicity.  Also, I do about 60 miles of cycling over the weekend--30 miles each day.  That is a way of depleting glycogen, and getting the body ready to burn fat.  I've talked in previous entries about how keto helps with vision therapy.  Basically, keto is great for brain performance.  Vision is all about the brain.  I've found keto helps vision, as well as mental activities, as well as mood.  

Another big change in lifestyle--and this may be huge--I'm now getting up and going to sleep at the same time every day, regardless of whether it's the weekend.  I've realized, and it's hard to deny it now, that sleep is extremely important, and that I've been fucking myself over whenever I sleep in on the weekends.  It basically screws up my sleeping for the entire week.  So if I want to stay up late, fine, but I still get up early.  I just sleep less.  Doing this has made a massive difference.  So far, so good.  It's already made a massive improvement in the quality of life. 

It seems I'm now noticing weekly qualitative improvements in vision

 Still no idea of when it's coming, but it does seem like things are accelerating.  I am noticing more stereo in VR.  I am also noticing quite a bit of improvement and, indeed, some stereo cues in real life.  These changes seem to be happening on a weekly basis now.  I know what I'm doing now, and this, no doubt, seems to have accelerated progress a lot.   The keto diet thing too... on days when I'm in strong ketosis, yeah.  Things really pop out--not as in stereo yet--but as in things are bigger, brighter, and clearer.  There are times when things get so bright that it's overwhelming.  It almost feels as though someone is turning up the power on the dimmer in the room. 

My grasp on my vision is growing

 My grasp on my vision is something I've been talking about a lot lately.  But my grasp on my vision  continues to improve.  

It seems there are two aspects to my vision quality now.  There's the quality of the state my eyes are in when I am not applying effort or attention.  Then there's the quality of the state my eyes are in when I am  applying effort or attention.

One of the ways I know that my vision is continually improving is what my eyes do when I am not applying effort or attention to my visual system.  That is, after all, what this is all about: training my visual system to the point where proper binocular vision occurs automatically and without effort.  

So two things are happening, which occur as my mental representations of my visual system get stronger.  One is that binocular posture requires less and less effort to maintain.  The other is that my default (no effort) produces much better vision and less visual conflict.

Indeed, I am noticing this because maintaining binocular posture is becoming so easy for me that I'm almost able to do it while I'm doing other things, like walking around, doing work, and playing video games, or watching TV.

And this is coinciding with improvement in vision as I play games in VR (stereo cues are very strong in VR--moreso than in real life).  I am getting more and more glimpses of what stereopsis is going to be like: especially with objects that are close up (such as the iron sights I use in a game I play called Pavlov VR).  The impression that I'm getting is that it will be: a. overwhelming, and b. completely nuts.  I have no idea how people with normal stereo vision are able to go about their lives not thinking to themselves 'HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT'. 

With the mental representations I've dutifully built over time, there is less mental tax on squashing my vision down while I'm doing other things.  So now I can do both, and I'm able to do 'vision therapy' for much larger portions of my day than before.  It's just nuts that even now that I know what I'm doing, it's still requiring as much work as it is.  

 What else... I was also thinking... one of the questions I've had a long time ago is now being answered.  The visual system doesn't 'click-in' with vision therapy--as in, mechanically.  When hearing stories about people fixing their vision, you hear about a moment when 3d suddenly pops in. Basically, what happens is a gestalt shift.  A shift in the perception of the Necker cube.  Their visual input improves to the point where the brain is now able to interpret the input as 3d, instead of as flat pictures.  I think that has no correspondence to an actual sudden mechanical clicking in.  I think what's going to happen is that my visual system will experience a smooth improvement in mechanics for the entire duration of vision therapy.  THEN...at some point where the visual input is at a certain point, there may be a moment when the brain suddenly flips.  And based on my reading of the accounts of others, it may flip back and forth a bit.  Also, even after it's flipped, it will continue to improve.  

So yeah, this is a very exciting time in my life. 

I saw a quantum leap in vision quality over the weeknd

 Pretty substantial changes, particularly on the periphery.  Also, beginning to notice more depth with upclose objects.  The VR experience is getting more intense as well.  VR is becoming great practice, and I really know how to adjust things in realtime.  There is quite a bit work remaining, but I know exactly what I'm doing now, and I feel like the last legs of this journey are going to go very fast.  There are some things that I did over the weekend that I can't talk about yet, but which I may eventually reveal, but which I think may be valuable in stereopsis recovery.  It's an extremely exciting time. I'm getting so close.  I'm surprised to experience so much improvement in vision before actually achieving my goals.  It is a bit frightening to think about how intense my vision may eventually become. 

I really know what I'm doing now.

 I'm not there yet. I said about a month ago that I might have stereopsis in a few weeks.  I was excited. But I kinda knew that it would be more than that.  But man.  I really, really know what I'm doing now.  So much it hurts.  I really know the hell out of what I'm doing--in terms of looking around, and using my eyes properly.  People: it does happen, eventually.  If you stay with it long enough (and your eyes are decent, overall, and you do the right things), you'll eventually understand what it is that you're doing, and it will kind of make sense.

  I was looking at my eyes in the mirror a few minutes ago... so good.  My eyes look so straight, and so ... BIG--well, comparatively.  I remember growing up, one kid, Dan April (Real name.  Fucked up, I know) used to playfully tease me by calling me 'Japan man' due to my squint.  Dude is lucky he said it 30 years ago.  Otherwise that mofo would have been canceled.  My cosmetics... now that I think of it... has changed a lot.  I don't really think about my appearance that much.  But it has.  Nice.

Still improving

It's still improving.  It's even better than it was last week.

Crazy things can be achieved with ramps (not to denigrate giving up).

I was just out for a walk in my neighborhood, looking around, astonished with delight in the knowledge that this is actually going to happen.  It is happening.  After all of this time. 

This week I have seen a tremendous quantum leap in vision quality in all aspects of vision: looking around, noticing that I'm able to get distant double images to overlap.  This is new.  But then I look down at my hands, and again: single.  Look back off into the distance.  I'm able to instantly adjust, almost without thinking, and look up and off into the distance without visual conflict. 

I find my mind flooding with thoughts about what's possible with the human mind: what ordinary people can do if they mold their minds with deliberation and purpose: purposefully leveraging their neuroplasticity in order to maximize potential and achieve self-actualization.  I'm coming to believe that ordinary people are capable of doing crazy things.  It's just that they typically don't. 

It is a really weird aspect of this universe that we live in: that ramps are everywhere.  That I can go from being born, living my entire life, effectively half-blind, to fully developing my binocular vision at the age of 37 after 11 years of continuous work.

I have distant, faint memories of being a child (probably 3-4 years old), looking up into the sky, and noticing a weak fleeting double image of clouds that were separate from my main vision.  It would be decades later that I would understand what I was seeing.  Those faint images was the input from my suppressing eye.  As a child, my suppression was so complete, that I barely ever noticed double vision.  My brain adapted extremely well to strabismus.  It nearly entirely shut off the lazy eye's input.

Only later, when I was 22, would I open a New Scientist magazine and read an article about Susan Barry's story and suddenly apprehend how my vision was different from everyone else's.  I learned about her story, and how it matched up with mine, entirely.  She was born cross-eyed, had three childhood surgeries in order to straighten them out.  The surgery, in both our cases, did mostly straighten out the eyes, but did not result in binocular vision.  Then later, at the age of 50, she did vision therapy for a year and quickly gained full binocular vision.  She then wrote a book about her story, Fixing My Gaze, which inspired many people, including yours truly. 

I thought to myself 'man, I'm going to have to do that someday when I have the money in order to get a vision therapist.'.  So vision therapy was put on hold for five years until I had a job which allowed me to afford a vision therapist.  I was 27.  Many things have happened from then to now.  I had a vision therapist for about a year.  I stopped, because it was too expensive (though I continued vision therapy on my own).  I started this blog.  I got involved with various vision therapy groups on the Internet, got to know lots of people, and learned a lot of their stories.   I learned a lot about the visual system.  I bought a ColorBoy (light tube for Syntonics) from Belgium (which I recently gave to someone in Scotland).   I got to meet and know James Blaha and Tuan Tran (creators of Vivid Vision--vision training software made for virtual reality headsets).  I did vision therapy exercises with a rudimentary Oculus Rift developer kit while dripping with saline from cathodes carefully placed on my occipital lobes.  I certainly did a lot of risky, crazy shit.  But that's me.  Life is too short to not take risks and do interesting things. 

Vision therapy has been an incredibly long, interesting, time-consuming, and pain-in-the ass ramp.  When spending 45 minutes a day doing vision therapy sessions, and hundreds of hours a year doing vision therapy (I've probably logged several thousands of hours), I kept thinking to myself 'I am really unusual to be able to spend so much time and effort in doing this.  Anyone else would have given up a long time ago, or even have the attention span or temperament to do vision therapy to begin with.'. 

But the reality is, is while vision therapy was indeed a giant pain in the ass, I also kind of enjoyed it.  A lot.  I am indeed an unusual person.  I have no problems with admitting that.  I've had a girlfriend once tell me that.  She said 'You're a really unusual person.  That's both a good thing, and a bad thing.'.  Heh.  I was, frankly, fascinated by my visual system, and by learning about it, experiencing it firsthand, staring into the double-imaged circles  of the light tube for 45 minutes at a time.  I enjoyed looking at the finger monster switching from my dominant eye, over to the suppressing eye, and noticing how it would escape my attention when it moved right in front of my suppressing eye.  I am a naturally curious person, and this, no doubt, worked to my advantage.  

It turns out that I do have an unusual ability to force myself to do boring, painful, and unpleasant things for long periods of time, if I successfully convinced myself that it will be worth it in the end.   I can chew through walls if I've convinced myself that it's worth it.  Well, it turns out that I was right.  I'm not done yet.  But it's already been worth it, and it will be even more worth it once I'm able to resolve hidden auto-stereograms, which may be very soon.  

I never gave up.   At no point during those 11 years was giving up on the table.  Why didn't I give up?  

Well, it's not because I'm a badass or anything.  Really, it's because I saw steady improvement, basically that entire time.  I was just focused on improving every day.  I've given up on virtually everything I've pursued in life.  Karate (as a kid), baseball (understandable, given my vision condition), roofing, every job I've had until now.  Granted, I never really gave a shit about those things.  Some things worth giving up on.  The key is in being able to distinguish between those things.

But as said, vision therapy was a bit different, because there was never a reason to stop improving.  Also I just had/have an extreme desire to have a visual system that works as it's supposed to.  I'm still pretty young, but if I can have vision that works properly and enjoy having that vision for another 40 or 50 years, then it's worth working my ass off to develop it.  It might be a different story if I were 70 years old, working to develop a visual system I might have for another 5-10 years.  And if I can still enjoy life a bit while working towards this goal, then that's great too.

“Never give up on something that you can't go a day without thinking about.”--Winston Churchill. 

I guess Winston would approve of my persistence with this.  There was never a day during those 11 years, or even hardly a moment, that I didn't think about my vision: where it wasn't near the top of my attention.  Now the journey is finally reaching its terminus, the culmination of all of those years of effort and toil is finally arriving.  Yeah, you can say emotions are running high.

I may have stereopsis in a few weeks

Holy shit, things are happening fast.  I want to document this because I don't want to forget this moment. 

I said I might have it in a few months, but things are now changing so fast.  I
feel like I understand my visual system so much better now.  I am constantly consciously adjusting, but it's taking less and less of a mental toll in order to do so.  

These adjustments I'm making to my visual system--it feels good.  It feels like kind of tucking in your shirt.  But I'm doing it with my eyes.  And it's hard to say exactly what it is I'm doing when I do it.  But it feels like I have conscious control of 'powering on' my eyes--and there's like this attention... this entity that is somewhere between my eyes and he's sort of moving from one eye to another, like a balance board.  And I can kind of use my attention to squash him down right in the flat center of the two eyes.  When I do that, it feels awesome, and I know that this action is wearing in a groove in my circuitry--so that using my eyes in this way becomes habitual, and less demanding of my attention.  

I was thinking of an analogy.  It's a bit like a spinning coin.  When it's about to flatten down, it suddenly becomes violent, loud, and chaotic until it suddenly stops--lying flat.  That violent, loud, and chaotic moment is where I currently reside.

Beginning to get overwhleming

 It's about five o'clock.  I've been noticing differences all day.  It's been on my mind all day.  There's no turning back at this point.  It's beginning to get overwhelming, but in a positive way.  My vision is getting more and more intense.  It's almost difficult to focus on work, I'm so excited.  It's finally happening. 

Still improving. Still accelerating.

 Yeah, things are getting really exciting over here.  

It's just weird to think that this little grain of rice: that little grain of control of my 'riding-along' eye has grown so much: into this giant new thing that never existed before.  What is happening to me right now is really bananas.  I think this is actually going to happen.  It's like... the control, but also the acuity and strength of the image of the weak eye.  The eyes really are an extension of the brain.  You really can do nuts things with the eyes and with vision training.

It feels like I'm on the last stretch

 It definitely feels like things are suddenly really moving at a high speed.  After all this fucking time.  

Just noticing how different things suddenly are.  Make no mistake.  I may be months (or years) away, but all objective markers are at a better place than ever before.  One thing that I noticed, in particular today, is accommodation difference between the eyes for up-close objects--like... when reading text from my phone.  The double images are approaching parity--both in terms of power as well as clarity.  That's freaking nuts.  Gauging now, I think it may be another three months.  But man.  Wow.  Things are great over here.  I'm getting close to no longer having double vision when I read.  

Almost kinda miraculous that I'm not a bad reader.  A lot of people are surprised when they find out that I can read alright with double vision.  It's hard to explain.  It's all focus.  It really is a weird, but interesting thing to explore the relationships between vision and consciousness and focus.  The double vision is always there.  Kinda.  But only when I'm not reading/processing the words I'm reading. Like, it kind of goes away when I'm focused on the content of what I'm reading.  But then... suddenly it's back.  Yes, it's nuts.  But interesting. 

Holy crap things are accelerating

 Yep.  More of the same.

Noticing a lot of change in the past day or two.  Holy crap.

**breathes**

I may have hit the knee of the curve

 It seems, lately, that things are moving faster.  I still need work, it may be another few months (or years), but it does feel like I'm in a different place than ever before in regard to vision therapy.  

Vision, as always, is better than ever before.  But when I watch TV, or play VR, it feels like I'm improving my vision in the moment.  It feels like I know my visual system better than ever before.  It is psychedelic.

Because I know my visual system better, I have a better idea of what to do in order to improve.  This will feed back.  

There's a bit of work to do remaining.  But it definitely feels different now.  

Another noticeable improvement

I've noticed quite a bit more improvement in the past few days.  It is definitely an incremental process.  Evolutionary.  It's a weird thought to think that stereopsis may never suddenly pop in, has it has for so many others.  It may simply be a long ramp: a steady series of moments like the one that I'm having now, where I simply notice that my vision is better than it was yesterday.

That's possible, but I don't think that's what's really going to happen.  I think I will get more and more of these moments until it gets really good, and then there will be a sudden moment where there's a shift in perception.

Been a while

 After eight years of doing this, vision is still at the top of my attention for nearly every waking hour of my life.  It's always there.  Vision is how most people navigate through life.  

It's still improving.  Realistically, it'll probably continue to improve for a number of years. 

Getting anxious

But in a good way.

I've seen some some massive major positive changes in the past week.  

Depth is coming in.  Two-eye coordination is becoming much better.  Less and less double-vision.  

In particular, I've noticed a much more powerful sense of immersion and depth while playing Half-Life: Alyx.  I've mentioned before that depth cues seem to come more from things like virtual reality and 3d movies.  I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the stereo depth cues are artificially generated, and are thus, engineered to created an exaggerated sense of depth.  But I'm also noticing more and more depth while navigating the real world, particularly for objects that are up close.

But even now, for objects that are distant, it is now pretty easy to keep them single, or at least keep the double images on top of one another, whereas before, it was difficult to do.  There are also some 'metrics' I've used for a long time to determine how much work there is left for me to do: metrics which are to do with problem areas I have, such as double vision in certain areas of vision, particularly when looking down.  Looking down at my shoes, for instance, there's quite a lot more diplopia (distance between the double images), than there is for when, for instance, I'm looking straight ahead.  Well, going by this metric, I have seen massive improvement, which corresponds to the subjective improvement that I experience: the newly experienced quale of depth. 

It is a bit jarring to get these periodic flashes of depth, particularly from the perspective of knowing that these experiences are only going to get a lot more intense in the coming days. 

And also, I'm no longer worried about the prospect of fucking up my vision.  That was an anxiety I've had a long time ago, which is instilled by a lot of vision therapists: do not do vision therapy on your own, or you will fuck up your vision.  As far as I know, this is a real risk, although, it was a risk I was willing to take.  I was worried, in particular, about developing ARC (anomalous retinal correspondence), and the development of a faux fovea, or false fixation point on one of my retinas--or developing severe double vision as a result of a loss of suppression without yet having full control of my eyes, resulting in massive permanent migraines (although one could technically wear a patch to get around that problem).  I think I'm past that point.  The only anxiety I have now is the knowledge I have that I will soon be launched into another reality: the world of 3d.  And it will be a permanent relocation--or at least until something kills me, or if I get a twig stuck in one of my eyes.