Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Holy carp, Zeno's paradox

Vision is still improving a lot lately.  It's just amazing how much work I find there is remaining.  As much progress as I make, it seems I am always underestimating how much work there is to do.

 I had an interesting and somewhat anxiety-inducing experience the other day when driving home from yoga.  As I was driving from the service road onto the highway I had the sensation of my vision closing in on me.  Yes, it's partly that the double images are coming closer to one another, but it was more than that.  It was the way they were coming together.  It was effortless.  It wasn't just the double image, but the whole field--including the periphery of the lazy eye--was coming in.  

That's another crazy thing about our vision... is the peripheral vision, and all the work (particularly the overlap of the peripheral vision of each eye--which I suspect is the essence of stereopsis) does for us.  I remember that's one thing Susan Barry talked about when she recovered stereopsis: was that one of the breakthrough exercises she did was one which involved developing her peripheral vision.

Compared to her... I'm really just winging it.  It's hard to compare the two.  It took her one year, god bless her.  It took me 12 years.  She had a world-renowned vision therapist.  She's also a very well connected academic and neuroscientist (and most likely she's a genius--I'm neither of those things).  I had few vision therapists here and there, and I found myself dubious about their claims of their abilities to help my situation.

At this point, I can't really say that I'm winging it.  It really took me about ten years to figure out what the hell I was doing.  That's kind of how long it took me.  

It was an extremely long journey, and I'm glad I never gave up, because it wasn't ever really just about vision.  I wanted to know if I could do it, and I wanted to learn about the learning process, because I'm a giant nerd.  In doing so, I've learned a lot about learning.  And this has undoubtedly changed the way I approach problems and learning new skills generally.  We really are moist robots (maybe some more than others).  I think if you think of yourself that way and really know the truth of this, and really try to stage your meat machine in the right way, you'll be greatly empowered to live a life that you're happy and satisfied with.