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. 

Holy carp

Still making a lot of progress.

The reason I'm making this post here is because I had a pretty eventful week in terms of vision.

Four days earlier in the week, I pounded down some veggie smoothies that a friend recommended.  It's based on a veggie smoothie that Dr. Rhonda Patrick recommends.  You can find it here.  It's got a bunch of veggies and healthy stuff that makes sense.  It's a way of pounding a lot extremely nutrition-dense food down the hatch quickly and easily.  The ingredients, if you're curious?  Rainbow chard, spinach, kale, chaga (type of mushroom), cinnamon, creatine, garlic cloves, turmeric, avocado, blueberries, tomato, carrots, chia seeds, flax milk, and cayenne pepper.

In the site linked, Rhonda goes into detail about each food, why they're in the shake, and what they do for you.  One that particularly piqued my interest was the one about blueberries and carrots, and the impact they can have on the eyes.

Anyway.  I want to, as usual, use caution when attempting to make any causal connections.  But holy shit, this smoothie had a powerful effect on me, and it's not evident that it was a wholly positive effect.  Possibly a mix.

First I want to mention that I more or less eat the same foods every day.  Three scrambled eggs with cheese, cooked in two tablespoons of coconut oil (you can't notice it), one liter of green tea.  Then dinner, which consists of nuts, steak, and salad with a bunch of high-quality extra virgin olive oil.  That's every day.  Then one day every week or two, I drink a lot of beer and otherwise pig out on carbs.

This cyclical-ketogenic diet works very well for me.  It gives me a lot of mental energy, keeps me lean, lowers my heart rate, and oxygen requirement.  It also reduces my need for sleep.  When in ketosis, I only need seven hours of sleep instead of eight.  As a result of my extremely regular diet, I have a very good idea of what my baseline is.  By doing this, I can make small tweaks to my diet and lifestyle and more easily make plausible connections, i.e., 'I introduced this new food, and I feel this.  It's probably this that caused it.'.  By then accumulating knowledge about my body in this way, I can slowly optimize its functionality.  As far as I know, this is the only way to do it.  Everyone's body is different, so one must experiment.

Long aside aside (heh), I feel fairly certain that it was the shake.  What did it do to me?  The most obvious thing that it did to me this past week is make me really stupid for about four days after slurping down the last smoothie.  I had the worst case of brain fog that I can recall for a long time.  I was completely useless at work.  Probably should have stayed home.  It is a truly odd sensation to be looking at stuff you're used to working with and be completely ineffective at it.  It was almost a complete shutdown.  It's only today (Friday), that it appears that the fog has lifted.  wft.

I also noticed increased loudness of ringing in my ears.  I think everyone has low-level tinnitus.  Mine just got louder.  In a book I read called Brain Bugs, the author/neuroscientist explained what tinnitus is, and compared it to phantom leg syndrome.  Basically, what causes both is the feature of our neuroanatomy known as neuroplasticity.  Damaging your hearing hardware can cause tinnitus by depriving the auditory cortex of its expected signaling normally provided by that hardware.  When that happens, the area of the auditory cortex doesn't suddenly go silent.  Surrounding neurons begin creeping in.  However, the higher-level architecture doesn't remap the function of that area of the auditory cortex.  So the stimulation is misinterpreted by the higher levels, and that misinterpretation is perceived as noise, or more commonly said, ringing.  Same deal with phantom leg.   Those neurons which deal with sensing the leg don't suddenly go away.  Other surrounding neurons creep up on that area of the cortex, and give the subject the sensation of having a phantom leg.

But it did appear to have a good, positive impact on vision.  I am really starting to get powerful stereo effects, and I really feel like I'm begining to get a sense of what real feels like, and the feeling of being in the world, particularly when playing VR.  My sense of control over both of the eyes is greatly increased.  Overall, it really feels like my brain is undergoing a significant wiring overhaul.  Perhaps the ringing and severe brain fog reflect that change.

How is VT like meditation?

Think I noticed a similarity between vision therapy and meditation.  And the similarity is this: vision therapy teaches you how you're supposed to use your eyes, and meditation teaches you how you're supposed to use your consciousness.

The interesting consequence of this is that once you've properly assimilated the lessons that vision therapy has to offer, you kind of don't need to do it anymore.  You're now doing it all of the time, and it can no longer be considered therapy.  The newer, and better way of using your eyes becomes absorbed in who you are, and you don't have to manually do Brock String, or fixation card exercises.

Same with meditation.  Once you really know what meditation teaches you, you can do it anytime.  You don't have to be sitting on a cushion.  Sometimes I will think to myself 'shit, I didn't meditate today.'.  But then I realize, why can't I just maintain the mindfulness anyway?  When I have that realization, I can have a normal amazing day which normally happens on days that begin with a good meditation session.  You can meditate all of the time.  When you've absorbed the lessons, it becomes a part of who you are.

Sort of reminds me of a story I heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He mentioned in a podcast with Tim Ferriss that he used to do Transcendental Meditation, got a lot out of it, but then stopped.  But the positive effects of having learned it continue to this current day.  TM permanently changed him.  It was like firmware upgrade, which probably has a fair amount to do with how much of a badass he is.

Not dead. Still here. Still making progress.

Haven't been blogging because I honestly haven't been doing much explicit vision therapy.  But I have been making substantive progress.

I have been trying to do virtual reality somewhat regularly, which I do believe helps.  But the main reason I think that my vision is still improving is from all of those months of learning and experimenting with the fixation cards execises, playing with the eyes, and pressing down on the binocular button as much as consciously possible.

Those exercises have provided me with the feedback I needed, teaching me, even though I could never fuse, which direction to go in.  Once I learned that, I was able to use that information. So even though I'm not doing actual vision therapy exercises, I am moving myself in the correct direction, and therefore, I'm still making progress.

When am I going to get it?  I don't know.  Maybe I won't.  But I'm going to keep marching in the direction that I'm going in, because why not?  There's nothing to lose.  I'm not spending any time doing vision therapy.  I'm coasting.

Maybe it was unrealistic to expect changes so fast. 

Still making progress

I've taken about two weeks off from vision therapy.  I've still been doing quite a bit of virtual reality stuff, however.  Man, I'm seeing quite a bit of progress through that time.  It's weird how I notice such improvement even when I'm not doing vision therapy.  

Couple things I've noticed as of late.  

One is that it's becoming quite a bit easier to use and pay attention through both eyes.  Still no full control, but my control is getting quite good.  The tracking and coordination is getting quite good.  

The other is that I'm able to read all day if I want, and my eyes don't get into this sticky mode where they want to stay converged (reading books requires quite a bit of convergence).  There is a little stickiness, but it goes away pretty quickly.  

I am finally noticing longlasting changes to my eyes.  

I still don't when my goals will be achieved, but I don't care.  Taking it one week, one month, one year at a time.  It's not taking up that much time with my current regimen.  I'll get it soon, or not.  I'm good either way. 

A fun ride

Last couple of weeks have been pretty fun, I have to admit.  Watching the vision progress lot, regress a little on tired days, and then progress a ton more.  Last couple of times I played Vivid Vision, I've noticed quite a bit more depth each time.

I'm excited to see what vision is like tomorrow (tomorrow is a VT day).  I am currently doing vision therapy (about 45 minute sessions) three days a week.  Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday.  Weekends tend to be good days because I'm more rested on those days.  Wednesday is good because it's smack in the middle of the week. 

It's fun, because it feels like I finally figured out what's works and the progress is undeniable.  It's a matter of staying on course and staying focused.