#176 session

I'm making pretty good progress with my current regimen.  It's usually these three things--five minutes of Columns, five minutes of Bouncy with a six diopter prism on the left eye with the base facing to the right, another five minutes of Bouncy without a prism, five minutes of clown saccades, and 40 minutes of light tube movement exercises with an anode on the Oz region and cathode on the back of my neck at two milliamperes.

I did notice quite a bit more information today.  The double vision has gone wayyy down.  Now it's just that I have some ghosting, meaning that the image produced by the lazy eye isn't quite at the same speed as the regular eye, so it sort of trails behind it.

I got my Chattanooga Ionto device today.  It was sort of a bitch to figure out because there are no instructions.  I was wondering why it kept beeping at me when I turned it on.  It's because it senses whether it has the proper conductance before it passes current.

This turns out to be a very handy feature.  About midway through the session it started beeping at me.  I figured this had something to do with conductance, so I pressed the sponge electrodes a little on the head to get the saline to soak in more.  That did the trick.  It's just that I needed more saline.  Of course, you don't want to use too much saline, because then it can trickle down from the Oz position down to the neck creating a path for the electrons to follow over the skin--not what you want.  You want the electricity to bury in from the anode, under the skull, travel through the brain, and come back out through the cathode.  That's actually why it's recommended that you have at least eight centimeters of space between the anode and cathode.  Anyway, the impedance detector helps tell you whether you're doing it right.  I'm glad I got that device.

#174 session: sensory fusion driving motor fusion

I hadn't used too much tDCS this week since I got freaked out by the tdcs-kit putting out 322 mA. But my digital multimeter just came in and I found out that it's providing the correct amperage.  So I'll be doing that until the Ionto device comes in the mail.

Despite the fact that I haven't done tDCS for four days, I'd still been seeing continual changes in my vision which seem to be a result of the increased brain plasticity from the prior tDCS sessions.

Last night, for instance, I noticed something new while I was driving to see The Octopus Project.  There is a normal tendency, when I am paying attention to something (in this case driving) for my lazy eye to move off in a different direction and for it to do its own thing.  In other words, in order for my eyes to gaze correctly, attention is required.  What seems to have happened is that my suppression has decreased to the point that when I divert my attention to a different task and my lazy eye begins to wander, the resulting visual conflict grabs my attention back to the eye and then I must gaze correctly.  Otherwise, I get really annoying double vision.  So in this case, sensory fusion is driving motor fusion.  It's sort of like the brain is saying to the eye 'Hey, you can't just go off and do whatever you want now.  You're part of a team.'

It's interesting.  I talked a while back in this video about how motor fusion and sensory fusion go hand in hand with one another.  I mentioned how I would notice that sometimes, if I had a particularly good vision therapy exercise which exercised my motor ability, that the next day I would notice more information pouring in as a result: more depth, more detail, and all that good stuff.  That's an example of motor fusion driving sensory fusion.  So it seems that motor and sensory fusion can drive each other in both directions.  Interesting!

There's no turning back now.  He's officially joined the team.  It's just a matter of increasing the power and increasing the precision.

The point where I'm at right now reminds me of Fixing My Gaze where Susan talks about the point just before she gained stereopsis.  (It's weird how many things I'm able to recall about that book.)  She said that it gets a little confusing because the suppression is at a very low level--just about to go away completely--and yet the fusion isn't quite stable.  So things can get a little, I don't know, shaky, maybe is the word.  It's really exciting to finally be where I'm at and be able to document and articulate and understand what's going on.  I really had doubts that I would ever get here.  Man!

Reddit discussion

For those who may be interested in discussion about tDCS, I started a thread in the tDCS subreddit about using tDCS in combination with vision therapy.

Here it is, yo.

http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/1s7ji3/using_tdcs_in_combination_with_vision_therapy/

#171 session

I'll start making posts more frequently because now more interesting things are beginning to happen; there are more things on my mind; and I'm excited and need an outlet.

Today I saw more depth, more detail, and more information.  It's exciting.  So many things are going through my mind right now: I'm going to have stereopsis soon; it's going to be awesome; I'm going to be able to move on with my life--but with a life that's significantly improved.  Fuck yeah.

I've said those things before.  More depth, detail, and information--but now it's different.  My eyes are now pointing where they're supposed to point.  It's almost as if before the other eye was somewhere else.  It was right there; I could see it, but somehow it was in a different universe.  But that's changed.  Now when I put my attention on that eye, it's right there; there's very little adjustment needed.  The attention can be on the eye almost uninterrupted--which I suppose is the whole point of all of those exercises.  Now, it's almost like I can reach out and grab my eye with one of my hands and have its command.

I can see what people are talking about when they say that it's very stimulating.  Normally I'm a very fearless and reckless person, but I could see that changing when I have stereopsis.  When I was playing XCOM: Enemy Within, there are cutscenes with aliens running around after you've completed your turn.  Before it was nothing.  But now--and I'm just beginning to have stereopsis--I'm getting sort of freaked out by the aliens.  Before they were just a thing--a painting on a wall.  But now it's like FUCK it's in my face!  Jesus shit!  It's going to take some getting used to for sure.  Jesus Christ... Fuck.

#170 session: tDCS works very well

It took at least a few sessions to get the electrode positions right.  I initially had the anodes too high up, relative to the inion--the part of the occipital lobe distinguished by a bone that sticks out a little.  But then I looked at the map again and realized that the o1 and o2 regions are on the same latitude lines.  It's just that one needs to be to the right and the other to the left.  I also kept with using the two anodes instead of one on the right side of the head (to integrate the left eye).  Further research indicates that each hemisphere processes each eye (probably for redundancy), so it makes sense to stimulate the visual system on both hemispheres.

Anyway--holy crap.  tDCS works.  It definitely works.  I'm pretty sure it's not just my imagination.  Objects appear bigger and clearer.  I thought, when looking at the text on my computer screen, that I had increased the size of the rendering on my browser, but then I realized that as I looked around the screen that even the task bar looked bigger.  And everything looks better, and I'm getting more 'pop' when playing games in stereo.

There's quite a bit more that I want to say about tDCS and its effects, but it's still early and I don't want to regret saying stuff.  But its effects seem to be wide-ranging.  And the reason I think for this is because brain tissue is very resource-hungry.  For example, it's often cited that the brain is three pounds, or two percent of the body's weight, but it uses around 25% of the body's metabolic energy.  If you can make the brain work more efficiently by powering it with a 9-volt battery, then those resources which would normally get broken down and eaten by the brain are free to be used by other body processes.  Anyway, that's just some interesting speculation on my part.

I'm pretty sure that tDCS is helping bring me closer to my goals at a much accelerated rate.  It's very exciting.  Of course, it's important that you know what you're doing, and that you don't apply more than two milliamperes of current to your noggin.  I recommend that you have at least have a working knowledge of Ohm's Law to be safe.  But as long as you apply current within the correct parameters, tDCS is safe, at least according to the research.  Before you begin applying current to your noggin, do your research.  But it is extremely exciting stuff.  Hah...

Edit:

There's something I want to add.  Every time before you begin a tDCS session you should test the current with a digital multimeter--even if your tDCS device has a current indicator.  The reason for this?  The tDCS kit that I bought ($40) malfunctioned and I think that instead of putting out the normal 2 milliamperes, it started putting out 340 milliamperes.  When I plugged in the battery I got a jolt that was somewhat jarring.  It was like a static shock, but the area around the cathode was feeling the current in a strong way which was very uncomfortable.

The good thing about this experiment is that I learned that tDCS is not bullshit, but an incredibly useful tool.  Because it's extremely useful, I decided to invest in a real tDCS device.
http://www.amazon.com/Chattanooga-IontoTM-Channel-Delivery-Phoresor/dp/B00B8EEJ72

It's expensive ($340), but I've already spent something like $7,500 on vision therapy, so whatever.  This, at least, is something I know which works.  I also bought this multimeter that I'm going to use to test the current before every session.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastech-MS8268-Digital-Manual-Multimeter/dp/B0050LVFS0/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1386111676&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=digital+multimeter

#167 session: tDCS with syntonics

I've been interested in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) ever since I'd heard about its apparent legitimacy.  Basically how it works is you pass current through your brain via anode (positive electrode) and cathode (negative electrode).  The current passes through the body, completing the circuit and if the electrodes are set up properly, the current should pass through the brain.  Whatever brain region is directly under the anode becomes depolarized (positively charged).  This brings neurons closer to the firing threshold, so they fire a lot easier since now you're injecting energy from an outside source (9-volt battery in this case), instead of relying on the body's metabolism to provide the resources to continually pump ions in and out of the neuron.  You basically release a lot of burden from the body to make the neurons work by having a 9-volt battery do the work.  And it makes the excited region of the brain work much more efficiently, and a lot of interesting consequences come from this.

There are a lot of interesting studies about how tDCS has an incredible number of potential applications.  It's known to help people with depression, recover from brain injuries, and it can also supercharge the brain so that you think better.  The military uses it to cut down on the time that it takes to train drone pilots.

Since tDCS can apparently increase neural plasticity, and since vision therapy relies on neural plasticity, it seems like these two should, in theory, be a natural pair.  So I Googled 'tDCS' and 'vision therapy'.  Sure enough, there are articles about combining vision therapy with tDCS which indicate that people who use tDCS with vision therapy recover stereopsis quicker than people who don't.  So the theory makes sense, and there are data to back it up.

I recently bought a kit for $40 from tdcs-kit.com and tested it with a digital multimeter.  Sure enough, it provided the correct 2 milliamperes.  I did my normal vision therapy exercises, and then when it came to the light tube, I saturated the electrodes with some saline that I made, put the two anodes on the o1 and o2 positions on the occipital lobe, put the cathode on my right shoulder, and then plugged in the 9-volt battery.

After about five minutes I could feel some tingling.  I didn't think I would feel it because I had split the anode (so it should be 1 ampere per anode), but it was there.  It was only mildly irritating.  I had it on for about 25 minutes while I did my circular movement light tube exercise.  Then I turned it off and the tingling stopped.

It did seem to make my vision a little better while I was on it.  When I looked at my monitor from across the room it looked bigger and clearer, but it could just be my imagination.  The next day, I did notice significant improvement, especially when playing XCOM.  Things were much more 'there' during the cutscenes.

That's just with one tDCS session.  I'm going to keep using it to see what happens.  Today I think I'm going to only use one anode and place it on the o2 (right occipital lobe) region.  According to the studies, tDCS is particularly effective for getting rid of suppression.  The left eye's vision is what I want to have integrated, so that's why I'm going to concentrate the full two milliamperes on the o2 position.

Thoughts on the circular movement light tube exercise

This exercise seems to be perfect for fixing the last problem that I have: the driftage problem of the lazy eye.  I finally understand what that driftage problem was.  I can move the lazy eye fine--it's just that the motor control that the brain has over that eye is too low resolution.  Coarse movements work pretty well, but small, delicate and precise movements, which are necessary for proper stereopsis still suck quite a bit.  That's what's going on, and that's what the circular movement light tube exercise addresses.

While doing the exercise just a few minutes ago, I noticed that there are a few things that help make the exercise effective.

1. I fix with the normal eye as always, but then I pay special attention to the lazy-eye image. 
2. I try to make the scene as bright as possible. 
3. I pay attention to the way the muscles in the lazy eye feel and then I pay attention to the way that the feeling of the muscles relates to the movements of the lazy-eye image.  I put as much focus as possible on that relationship.  

By doing these things, particularly number 3, I've found that I can substantially cut down on the amount of defusing that's normally seen with this exercise.