It's true; much of what I know is wrong. I'm pretty sure of this, and suspect it's a valuable insight. We all want to believe true things, and in a perfect world we would. But reliable intelligence is hard to come by, misinformation is plentiful, self-deception is unavoidable, and the waters are always to some extent muddied.

The insight is also maddeningly nonspecific. I don't know which of my beliefs are bogus. Anyone who wants to get on with the business of living a life has to maintain a set of working hypotheses and be ready, whenever experience dictates, to modify them. This is what we call sanity.

I've been rambling on here since April 2007 about a an attempt to wean myself from glasses. Traditional optometry maintains that it's impossible to fix your eyes, and among those espousing natural vision improvement (NVI) there is a great deal of uncertainty and misinformation. Put bluntly, I don't think anyone really knows what is going on. I certainly don't. None of what I've read quite fits my experience so far, so I consider myself on a largely undocumented path.

The rest of this page contains, first, a list of hypotheses – the truth as I see it today, subject to an arbitrary amount of revision tomorrow – followed by a series of diary entries documenting what I was thinking, and attempting, at various points in time. I hope the latter will be read charitably, as it is full of misconceptions and contradictions over time and makes me look rather foolish to myself.

I'm early in the process of trying to correct my own myopia. That's nearsightedness, to anyone who isn't familiar with the term — except it has other connotations having to do with personality and one's general outlook on the world.

Where did this all start?

For some time I've had a vague itch in the back of my head about the idea of vision correction. If you take a moment to think about it, "correction" is a loaded word. We talk about glasses, contact lenses, and various surgical options as corrective, because they immediately correct our vision. Yet there's good reason to refer them as merely compensatory: while they make our vision clearer, they must also make it harder for our eyes to correct themselves, since they obviously take away whatever feedback our brain would need to initiate the correction if that were possible. Their effect may in fact be anticorrective.

We should be able to agree on this much, at least: conventional vision correction is a good thing if and only if human eyes are incapable of correcting their own errors over time, either by themselves or with a little therapeutic nudge. But within that "if and only if" lies controversy. The optometric industry largely maintains that eyes simply cannot correct themselves once they become nearsighted. A small but growing chorus of scattered voices is saying otherwise. At this point I honestly don't know who is right, though you probably already know I wouldn't be trying — or writing all this — if I didn't have some pretty strong suspicions at the outset.

So I've decided to experiment, gently, on myself. I don't know if it's 100% safe, but I'm fed up with wearing compensating lenses, and what I have in mind has got to be safer than having somebody cut on my eyes — those irreplaceable windows to my soul — with a laser or any other sharp thing.

My degree of myopia is moderate, reflected by a glasses prescription as of the last exam (a year ago) calling for -2.25 diopters in the left eye, -1.50 in the right. I've been wearing glasses for the last 33 years. I also have a contact lens prescription that is slightly less severe (-2.25/-1.00), to allow for some monovision; in my case the left eye is expected to specialize in distance and the right in close work. The left eye, the one that is more myopic, happens to be the dominant one.

One week ago (April 1, 2007), I stopped wearing my glasses and contacts. I didn't throw them away — yet. A couple of days later I purchased a pair of +1.50 diopter reading glasses off the shelf from a drugstore, to use at work and whenever I anticipate sitting in front of a computer screen, book, or crossword puzzle for an extended period; those are on my nose right now. To keep from feeling too incapacitated in daily life, I've been wearing my right contact in my left eye, which at worst ought to limit my nearsightedness to just over 1 diopter in both eyes.

This is where I'll occasionally document my progress, or lack thereof, and reflect on some theory. Stay tuned.

One thing I'm not going to do here yet is post a bunch of links to sites about vision improvement. Sure, there's plenty being said. Some of it sounds like hucksterism, some like mysticism; some seems to approach sober science. There's certainly plenty of shrill argument to be enjoyed, if you enjoy that. But this is a personal journey.

In some sense, I don't care how eyes really work. They are so nearly part of the brain that it might be misguided to even call them separate organs. But to proceed toward my goal I'd like some kind of handle on the situation, a direction that makes sense to me. And toward that end I propose a crude mechanical model of the visual system, concentrating just on how focusing (not other aspects of image processing) might work. This model will be at best greatly oversimplified. It may have precious little basis in biological reality. That doesn't concern me; its usefulness as a model hinges entirely on whether it leads to effective therapy.

Picture a sort of bellows camera. It has a lens plate in the front, a film plate in the back, and an accordion-like structure in between. The bellows can be expanded or contracted to change the distance between the lens and film plates, and the lens too can be adjusted somewhat on its plate. Between them, the two adjustments focus the camera.

The lens doesn't have nearly the range of adjustment that the bellows does, but within that limited range, the lens can adjust much more quickly than the bellows can. So we would like the lens adjustment to be used mostly for moment to moment focusing and the bellows length to be manipulated more sparingly for long-term calibration.

Now we add two sensors and two motors.

A focus sensor (FS) goes in the center of the film plate. Like the rangefinder prism in an old camera viewfinder, it detects whether it is seeing an image that is in focus; if the image is slightly out of focus, the sensor can tell which direction it's off. The FS returns a positive or negative value, which we can think of as a voltage or just a number, depending on what it perceives as the direction and amount of focus error. Zero means it's seeing an image either in focus or so far out of focus that it doesn't know which direction would fix it.

A lens sensor (LS) is attached to the lens adjustment mechanism. It returns a positive or negative value reflecting how far the lens is from the middle of its adjustment; zero means it is centered.

There is a high-speed lens motor (LM), and a very low-speed bellows motor (BM).

Finally there is some simple deterministic logic tying these components together:

1. The output of FS, which reflects focus error, is applied to LM.
2. The output of LS, which in the long term might reflect miscalibration, is applied to BM.
   

That second bit of wiring is the crucial one to understand, because our model camera was not given a sensor to tell it the distance between the film and lens plates. It doesn't know how long the bellows is at any given moment. It also doesn't know the scale of the world it is looking at. But over time, it's generally going to be able to adjust itself to whatever seeing is most often called upon to do, unless the bellows ever somehow gets thrown so far out of whack that FS stops producing a signal.

That's it — a closed model, which for now I'll consider complete enough to work with. Again, I don't care if it's biologically sensible, only whether thinking of eyes this way is likely to suggest effective therapy.

Yes, sometime in the future I might get around to drawing up some diagrams for this model.

I haven't given any of the promised "progress or lack thereof" reports yet.

Subjectively, things are good. I've been enjoying my uncorrected vision. Nothing has changed overnight, but in sacrificing some distance clarity I've gained a better view of things close up than in recent memory — really, in any memory. Details of things I'm working on are sharper, everything has more depth, and even colors are better than they used to be.

An eye doctor would probably tell me this means I need bifocals, and that may very well be what I end up doing. But not yet. I want to give this exploration some time before going in for an exam.

Distance vision has certainly improved, but to what extent I can't say. An eye exam now might show little or no change, because the improvement I'm experiencing has been oddly selective so far. I see organic things better than artificial things. People, trees, clouds. Road signs and other bits of distant print seem just about as blurry at the same distances as they were when I started.

How can this be?

I can think of a few possible explanations that aren't quite mutually exclusive, and what they have in common is the assumption that the recognition of natural things, especially faces, goes very deep in the way our vision system is wired. Well, that's not much of an assumption; I think that point is pretty well researched. So,

1. Maybe the prospect of locking on to a distant organic object persuades the brain to make a brief extra effort, changing the shape of the eyes to allow moments of longer focus.
2. Or maybe the trick is strictly perceptual; the visual cortex does a slick interpolation job, filling in false details when it is fairly sure it knows what it is looking at and wants the rest of the brain to pay attention: pretty girl at 12 o'clock, range 100 feet! (sorry, dear.)
3. Or maybe the visual cortex does a quick monovision switch now and then, completely turning off the signal from the out-of-focus eye to maximize clarity at the expense of depth perception.

The last explanation would be supported by this observation: when I pick up my old manual-focus Pentax SLR camera, I find I can't use the viewfinder with my dominant left eye, regardless of whether the thing I'm trying to focus on is a face or anything else. Everything is a consistent frustrating blur.

My friend Luke has loaned me an even older 35mm Yashica rangefinder camera for a while. That's a little easier for a myope to use; depth of field through the viewfinder window is huge, everything looks clear, and you adjust the camera by triangulation, turning the focus ring until two superimposed images line up with each other.

One other note:

Since the beginning of this experiment a little over two weeks ago, I've usually been wearing one contact lens when driving. I would take it out once at work if that were convenient, but it isn't — so I end up wearing that one lens through the work day and taking it out once back home. But today for the first time in about a month, weather allowed me to bicycle to work. At these lower cycling speeds I feel perfectly safe with no compensating lenses, and I can stay that way all day.

This evening brought the first significant blow to my resolve: I can't play softball without my contacts. Well, I can hit passably well, but can't play the field safely. There's a nice big bruise inside my left elbow that might not be there if I'd seen that grounder clearly a little farther away from me. True, it was a hard hit ball and a bad hop, and might have clobbered me in any event, but I didn't feel very secure out there.

*sigh*

I may have to put the whole experiment on hold till the end of the summer. Anybody who knows me at all will understand. I won't decide this minute though.

Yesterday, for no good reason other than curiosity, I tried wearing just my right contact lens for a day. This brought the right eye to nearly full compensation, leaving the left at -2.25 or so (assuming no significant self-correction has occurred yet).

That took some getting used to, and I could almost make it work, but the large difference between the focal ranges of the eyes, combined with my middle-age presbyopia, meant I couldn't focus on objects between about 2 and 3 feet away. My left eye could lock in on objects 2 feet away or closer; my right eye could take over at 3 feet. Between those, there was a bit of mush. Lacking an overlap area, stereo vision couldn't possibly have worked, and I thought I did notice subtle problems with depth perception. Also I managed to induce a mild headache for the first time. In the afternoon I put the contact back in the left eye, to approximate -1.00 undercorrection in both; that's a lot more pleasant and gives reasonably sharp vision overall.

The experience suggests that even in the seemingly best-case scenario of eventually correcting both eyes for perfect distance vision, I wouldn't be able to avoid the need for reading glasses. My lenses just don't adjust far enough to cover the full range of macro to infinity, and according to the model I'm working from, the lenses alone are responsible for short-term focus adjustments. The muscles governing eyeball shape can't be expected to keep up on a moment by moment basis.

But good natural monovision, with a range from about 1 foot to infinity with a little overlap in what each eye handles, is an outcome I wouldn't mind at all.

Something interesting happened to me yesterday. While outdoors, wearing no contacts or glasses, I felt something give just a little bit around my eyes. It was as if my face were exhaling gently with its own little lungs. And at the same time, my vision cleared perceptibly for a moment.

After the clarity left, I tried to get it back, and failed.

Not having anywhere to go in any hurry, I started consciously experimenting with facial muscles, trying to relax my jaw, scalp, ears, neck. Within a minute or two I briefly felt the same unfamiliar letting go, and had the same improved distance vision. It never stays long, but it's been back several times since.

Hmmm.

I don't want to draw conclusions too quickly here, but I begin to wonder if that old quack Dr. Bates was on to something. For those who don't know, the Bates Method refers to a suite of techniques designed mostly to get certain muscles around the eyes to relax. Basically, Dr. Bates believed that the shape of the eyeball was under voluntary or semi-voluntary muscular control, and that myopic elongation was a result not of improper growth but of chronic muscle tension. If you managed to relax the muscles around your eyes, they could not help but find their intended shape, and then voila: good distance vision was yours.

Back at the beginning of this experiment I pretty much wrote Bates off, for a couple of reasons. One was that the tone of his arguments smacked of Christian Science, or good old garden variety faith healing. Another was that he made claims about people in his office restoring their vision almost immediately, and that was just too hard for me to swallow. Still is, actually.

And who knows, maybe I'm deluding myself with this new development, imagining the whole thing. It wouldn't be the first time. We humans have a wonderful talent for self-deception. As with all else here, only time will tell. Watch this space.

It feels like my sight is improving in fits and starts. I'm getting a few hours a day of significantly better vision, a change I'd estimate at a little under 1.0 diopter in each eye.

I don't experience that improvement all the time, for reasons I can only guess at right now.

The odd "exhaling" sensations behind my eyes, which I mentioned in the last post, have continued, sometimes occurring several times a minute. At first I had been consciously trying to produce the effect by relaxing facial muscles, but before long it had become mostly automatic. Playing softball yesterday I was occasionally aware of an slow, almost pleasant thrum... thrum... thrumming back there.

(Note: yes, playing softball without my contacts! I was in the outfield yesterday, and could see the batter clearly and make good judgments on fly balls. Plus I went five-for-six hitting including a home run. No more insecurity about playing ball naked, eyeball-wise-speaking.)

I don't know whether what I was feeling really was a simple relaxation, or more like the reverse: a sense of exertion, or possibly the letting go after an exertion. I bring this up because Saturday night, after a two-hour stretch of particularly good clarity, my eyes felt tired — tired in the muscular sense. It's a familiar sensation elsewhere in the body but I can't remember ever having felt it there before. My guess is that the muscles which for over thirty years had just the relatively easy task of rotating the eyes in the sockets are finally being asked to regulate their shape again, and they're not very strong yet; the visual cortex is starting to give them the right commands, and they're complying as best they can in their atrophied state, then getting tired and letting go. The letting-go part might be what I'm noticing. It's like setting the weights back down after an attempted bench press.

If this is true, there will probably be continued improvement in the next few days resulting from simple muscle tone gains.

And why, you may ask, was the visual cortex not giving the right commands for the last 30+ years? Because I was wearing glasses all that time, of course! Glasses necessarily disrupt whatever focus-related feedback there is between eyes and brain. Once my eyes had assumed an incorrect shape based on some unknown behavioral or developmental cause, and lenses had been fitted to restore focus based on that shape, there was no longer any reason to continue the feedback. Or if the feedback did continue, it was guaranteed to be inaccurate: the misshaping of the eyes had to be maintained in order to keep focus. So, at best, corrective lenses perpetuated the problem.

I think we modern folk are much too lazy about disgintuishing between the treatment of symptoms and the treatment of causes. The two concepts are not the same. Here, they seem to me to be in direct conflict.

Even while I try to claim more conscious control of whatever that is I feel behind my eyes, it's hard to say exactly what's going on.

I can be at my office desk, pick out a binder on a shelf a few feet away, and isolate some small print on it, something that's barely out of my focal reach. Then I start to do that thing behind my eyes, and wait. My best description of the effect right now is that of a deliberate vertical widening of the eye sockets.

Are the eye sockets were statically shaped, like cast iron? Have you ever burst a blood vessel in your eye during a coughing fit from a cold or flu? I have. Someone who knows anatomy better can explain what's moving; I doubt the skull can flex much there, so it's got to involve some sort of soft tissue change. What's between the bone and the eye?

Whether that widening reflects a relaxing of some muscle group or the flexing of some other, or both simultaneously, is not something I can tell easily. It's not an arm or leg muscle that I can look at from the outside and so confidently describe its action. The sum effect seems mostly relaxing though; I can make that fit, but it's almost more of a metaphor than a straightforward description.

Now while that seeming widening is going on, the lettering on the edge of the binder gradually clears. If I'm patient, the clearing is fairly perceptible, and then after a while I feel the little "give" sensation I first described a couple of weeks ago, and the clearing is complete; or at least, as good as it's going to get for a little while. In fact, it gradually slips away as the habitual tension reasserts itself. Or, is it the habitual relaxation?

Tentative conclusion: score another point for Dr. Bates. I expect I'm changing my eye shape somewhat, and getting visual benefit from it. But is this exercise acting on the eyes indirectly (by changing shapes around them), or directly by the muscles attached to them, or both? And regardless of the answer to that, is the eye shape that I've been used to for years really natural by way of my bodily growth, such that no amount of practice will let me keep the change without repeated conscious effort?

About the "is it flexing or relaxing?" question from last time: the answer is, probably, both.

There is further progress to report today. My uncorrected vision reached a new best: for a couple of hours this morning I could make out line 9 on this eye chart from approximately 6 feet away. There was an unfamiliar physical sensation around my eyes, centered around the bridge of my nose and now fading a little, and it was not so much one of relaxation, but of strength: some new shaping force seems to have engaged. It's as if once I had learned to finally relax one muscle group, another was free to start to work at taking shape — as if a very old tension and a corresponding atrophy have begun to resolve themselves.

This follows an evening of playing softball, one game in the evening sun and a second under the lights, during which I wore a pair of undercorrecting contacts. The contacts leave an amount of nearsightedness which at this point in my exercises seems to be just within reach. After several weeks of almost continuous deprivation from compensating lenses, I allowed my eyes to focus almost to infinity outdoors, and they jumped at the chance to make up the difference. I could feel a lot of mostly-involuntary muscular activity going on while enjoying that little luxury, and this morning, wearing no correction again, the world seems to be displaying a little bit of new bloom. Still, as before, fatigue sets in after a while.

I'm about to take my family on a tour of a few minor league baseball parks in Iowa, a trip to last four days. I'll probably wear the contacts for the first game, leave them out for the second, and see how it goes.

I haven't written anything here for a couple of weeks, but those weeks have been interesting, so here comes a long post.

A few days now past the 3-month point, I've changed my mind about a few things, but I don't intend to go back to edit or delete my earlier somewhat misinformed posts, because the sequence of ideas is properly part of the journey. Maybe when it's all over I'll write something that's coherent from beginning to end and reads less like a diary.

Up front I'll say that I still expect to see this through at least for one year, until April 1, 2008, in hopes that by then I should be needing very little or no correction. I can hardly write that sentence without reiterating how I mistrust the word correction in the context of vision — correcting lenses don't correct! although they compensate, they can have the opposite effect from correction in the long run — but having expressed that, I'll keep using the term in its presumptuous sense here.

As hoped, our family vacation touring Iowa minor league baseball parks was not only a nice break from work, but another learning experience in vision.

Something strange happened the first day of the trip: the apparent reshaping mentioned in the previous post, which I had thought might be a one-time experience, returned with a alarming surge. Movements around the eyes were accompanied by repeated cracking sensations, nasal cavities seeming to open, and a pronounced tingling around the mouth and nose as if a set of nerves was being jostled and didn't know where to go. This latter sensation lasted just over a day; the tingling subsided, but a slight clamping sensation around the upper jaw and nose remains, especially that feeling of lateral stretching near the top of the nose. I'm not sure what to make of the episode; it may be something unrelated to all this, but it was new to me, and the timing of it makes me think it's some part of the work the visual cortex is doing.

Also I should note that looking in the mirror, I see no blatant outward change, nothing to turn me into an elephant man or a Dick Tracy villain. Whew! If not for the day of nerve effects, I'd write it off to imagination or allergies or something. Anyway, back to baseball.

The first game (Iowa Cubs) made it plain that wearing -1.00 lenses in each eye was sufficient without any effort to see into the far distance with detail, as well as to focus close-up when writing on my scorecard.

According to plan, I went naked-eyed to the second game (Cedar Rapids Kernels). Here I was not entirely happy with the result. There were flashes of clarity, but they didn't come involuntarily; it was a night of mind games and conscious relaxation, of coaxing the muscles around the eyes to unclench, breathe, let go. Whenever I forgot that and started watching baseball, distance vision would blur again.

For the other two games (Clinton Lumber Kings, Davenport Swing) I alternated and found the same results: the -1.00 lenses yielded good vision, but going without them demanded my attention and was ultimately distracting from other experiences.

In a fit of stubbornness I decided to leave my contacts out for the four-hour trip home from the Quad Cities, and that produced an unexpected revelation. Unable to relax consistently for such a long stretch, I ended up straining in exactly the wrong way, and reached home with a pounding headache. The next morning I still had some pain, but interestingly, I also had the best uncorrected vision yet. The reason was seemingly obvious and almost comical: it positively hurt to do anything but see right. Any stress renewed the pain from those complaining muscles, so I had to relax. It was a lovely morning, vision-wise. But later in the day those muscles stopped complaining and resumed their habitual attitude, and the benefit of having strained them slipped away.

The conclusion is that at least for me, a "throw down your crutches and walk" approach is going to be too frustrating to pursue. I can make myself see reasonably well without correction these days, but it takes conscious effort and so can't be maintained. I suspect however that my weeks of working consciously on vision will prove to be of benefit, because the new skills can probably be handed off to the visual cortex; they constitute an expanded muscular repertoire. My current working theory is that the visual cortex can effectively retake control of all aspects of vision if it doesn't have a lot of difference to make up. I think it can correct for a small amount of out-of-reach focus, probably a half diopter or less, using an array of tools including the musculature of the eyes and skull; if focus is much farther out of reach than that, it doesn't seem to try.

So progressive undercorrection seems to be the way to go: just keep that sharp distance vision right around the edge of what can be achieved without effort. The question is how to acquire the hardware to do it. Although what I'd like best is a box of -0.75, -0.50 and -0.25 diopter contact lenses, several of each so I can step myself down with time, I don't expect help from my optometrist in an enterprise whose success can only lose him a customer, and, let's face it, discredit his profession.

But I do have some reading glasses, a collection of unopened full-correction contacts, and the knowledge that the diopter values of lenses are roughly additive when you stack them.

Yesterday for the first time I assembled a -0.75 combination by putting my left-eye lenses (-2.25) in both eyes and wearing reading glasses (+1.50) over them. The math is straightforward enough — the correction might not be exactly -0.75, but it's close. To test this setup I went, where else, to a minor league baseball game. I also picked up a pair of +1.75 reading glasses at K-mart and had them along. Around the fourth inning I decided that my vision was pretty good at -0.75, and switched to the stronger reading glasses to get an effective -0.50. This was enough to let me keep enjoying the game but not enough to provide completely consistent sharp distance vision.

After the previous novella I reconsidered one point, and called to ask my optometrist for a box of -0.75 diopter contact lenses and another box of -0.50. He agreed, merely warning me that if I got them without paying for another office exam and they weren't what I wanted, then the sale would be final. That's fine with me.

Another office visit would have been pointless now anyway. He already made his position plain to me during an earlier conversation: eyes do not ever improve, ever, and I'm wasting my effort. It's the standard industry line, delivered with glib compassion. Eyesight is officially allowed only to deteriorate, and thereby to require the administration of carefully determined increasing compensation from duly anointed members of his profession, from childhood to the grave, amen.

From one perspective though, it makes some sense that he'd sell me lenses on these terms. He probably fares better in his capacity as a lens dealer than he does from exams; the HMO bean counters will have seen to that by negotiating the exam fees down as low as possible. So what could be better than to sell over the phone to a foolish customer who agrees to absolve him of any responsibility for that foolishness?

Since ordering the new contacts a week ago, I've been fairly consistently wearing -1.00 lenses in each eye to give me a sense of a stable baseline, and to let my visual cortex feel confident, so to speak, at that level of compensation. As noted in reference to the vacation trip, my vision at -1.00/-1.00 is quite sharp, with a comfortable amount of monovision; the right eye specializes in distance.

Today I took a tiny step on the undercorrection schedule, reducing the power in the right eye only by a quarter diopter: so now it's -1.00 left, -0.75 right.

I bicycled to work and have been carrying on without giving much thought to eyesight. But five hours into the day, I can say that quarter diopter makes a significant difference. I don't have crystal clear distance vision. But encouragingly, there are already occasional clicking sensations in my head as things seem to be trying to move around to allow the right eye to find a better shape and regain its previous clarity.

I could be hard on myself and see whether it's possible to train myself down to nothing in a few days, but what's the hurry? It seems there is physiological work to do that might not involve the eyes directly, and it makes some sense to just let that happen at a leisurely pace. There are enough lenses in my supply to keep this amount of compensation in place a while, and I might not step it down until I run out of -1.00 lenses, even if my vision locks in nice and tight in the meantime. No need to be in a rush and end up pinching nerves around my nose again, or whatever it was I felt happening just before vacation.

The next step will be either to -0.75/0.75 or to -0.75/-0.50; I'll decide that when the time comes. Essentially it comes down to whether I want to let the left eye remain somewhat myopic for natural monovision. If so, I'll go back to equal compensation in both eyes and let things happen as they will.

Just for the record, the sensation of tingling and tightness around the top of the nose and the sides of the upper jaw came back yesterday, the third day after dialing down contacts power from -1.00/-1.00 to -1.00/-0.75, and it persists now.

It's not terribly uncomfortable, just strange; but it's less worrying than it was last time, and I guess I'll get used to it, if it turns out to be a predictable consequence of each step of adjustment in the amount of undercorrection. If the last episode was any indication, the feeling should be gone by tomorrow night.

As I've written before, the primary physical sensation that has followed from wearing undercorrecting contact lenses has centered in and around the nose: it seems to be pressing outward at the top, especially shortly after changing lens powers.

An added sensation I haven't reported yet is a gentle vertical pull between the tops of the cheekbones, just behind and below the eye sockets, and points some five inches up from there. I don't know the musculature of the skull well enough to assign a name to what is contracting, but maybe a little research will turn that up.

In contrast to the pressure at the top of the nose, this is actually quite pleasant. But it occurs under different circumstances, so far only when I am wearing reading glasses and doing extended close-up viewing. I believe I can thank J. K. Rowlings for helping me realize this; reading the last Harry Potter book in a few long sittings allowed the squeezing to become persistent and strong enough to command some attention.

As I think it likely that this is something beneficial and to be encouraged — surely pleasurable changes should get the benefit of doubt over painful ones — this morning I moved the computer monitor at work closer to me, and am keeping reading glasses on over contacts. These are the +1.50 glasses today, and the contacts are -1.00/-0.75 (left/right), so the resulting compensation is roughly +0.50/+0.75. I don't have a tape measure handy but the distance from eyes to screen is probably around 24 inches.

An observation after four hours of this: I'm very, very encouraged. Not only does working with the reading glasses feel subjectively good, but when I take them off and look at the eye chart across the room, it's tack-sharp all the way to the bottom. This is with the undercorrecting contacts still in, of course.

Also, it appears that as the day has moved along, the squeezing sensation has narrowed slightly: I feel less large scale pull up to the top of the skull, and a little more that seems to be targeted at the back of the eyes themselves. There's no way to be sure, it's just a hunch. I'll have to revisit that observation after a while.

My eyes felt so good last night — relaxed and efficient and almost floaty — that I abandoned the conservative undercorrection schedule (not that I really had a schedule, only a vague idea) and stepped down the power again on the right side. I'm currently wearing -1.00/-0.50 contacts, and working again with the same +1.50 reading glasses as yesterday.

It had been less than a week since I had brought the right contact power down from -1.00 to -0.75.

I'm not reducing power in the left eye yet, as it needs a little more compensation to get it close to good distance focusing. No Eye Left Behind. I haven't yet decided whether I should respect my body's natural monovision, and am not sure what the consequences of equal or unequal correction will be.

I've been mostly just writing down bare observations for a while, but it might be time for a little bit of theorizing again.

Here's what I think. For now. Some of this is well off the beaten track with regard to what people are saying about vision improvement. I have no medical evidence for the below, and present it here as based on a few months' worth of personal experimentation; what I'm describing is at least consistent with my experience, whereas what I hear from my optemetrist is not consistent with my experience. I can only defend my opinions to that small extent.

• The eyeball, being a fluid-filled, malleable organ, does not have an intrinsic shape. It's not quite as floppy as a water balloon, but it flexes easily enough that any talk of eyeball shape being somehow the real cause of myopia is, well, nearsighted. Eyeball shape is, however, certainly the proximal cause of most myopia. The root cause is likely to be either entirely or partly muscular in nature.
• The visual cortex is responsible to some extent for regulating the shape of the eyeball, based on its own evaluation of its focusing performance. In young children it has more tools at its disposal for acting on its internal feedback, including possibly the growth pattern of the eyeball itself (the only tool recognized by mainstream medicine, and one which I suspect actually has approximately zero role), the growth pattern of the skull, and the musculature around the eyes and maybe elsewhere in the head.
• Among adults with normal vision, the cortex continues to regulate eyeball shape, but the rigidity of the skull might be an obstacle once things are very far out of whack. Normal-sighted adults are not aware of the small adjustments the cortex is orchestrating; there is no need to feel them, as they've been in force for their entire lifetimes. They are a novelty only to adults who, once on a path of recovery, begin feeling various involuntary muscular impulses that have been inactive for many years.
• When something happens during childhood or later to disrupt the visual cortex's feedback, and a person becomes myopic, the very worst possible treatment is to immediately prescribe full-correction lenses, because that enforces wrong feedback. It tells the cortex that whatever it's been doing wrong recently is just fine — in fact, that it needs to continue doing that wrong thing in order to maintain focus. Nonetheless, full-correction prescriptions for children are the norm in optometry.
• A well-chosen level of undercorrection is a good thing, at least as a way of keeping you sane (and safe) while doing plus lens therapy, possibly also therapeutic in itself.

I got interrupted while writing the above. I'm off for another week of travel and will flesh this out a bit afterward.

Look, I grew up a religious fundamentalist, and I think it left me prone to the same stupid logical fallacy over and over, which is: if something doesn't happen fast, it must not happen at all.

You know what I'm talking about. Evolution can't be true, because it requires a lot of time, and we all know the world was created in a week.

I know better, but I keep thinking I'm right around the corner on regaining 20/20 vision. Sheesh. So I'll keep repeating: light levels make a huge difference, and it's very easy to be fooled into thinking things are improving quickly when they are not improving, or are improving only very slowly. When your pupils constrict, your depth of field increases. On a bright day you can see forever.

A more sober summary:

• I've been fairly consistent for a while with the undercorrecting contacts, at the more conservative -1.00/-0.75 level. This keeps me able to see fairly well even in twilight.
• I've also been consistent about wearing reading glasses when doing close-up work (crosswords, reading, computing).
• The involunatary muscle activity has continued, especially when reading glasses are on. Generally the sensation is felt around the temples, somewhere (I think) in a layer of deep musculature under the temporalis. I often think I notice a subtle improvement in visual clarity when those muscles begin to tingle and work.
• Occasionally I put some effort into gaining conscious control of those muscles, but am not really sure that is a good idea. More often I think that the best prospect for lasting improvement is to keep adjusting what lenses I wear so as to try to keep vision always reasonably clear while promoting those sensations of muscular adjustment.

The night before last I tried wearing undercorrecting glasses over undercorrecting contacts. This was in fact the rationale under which my optometrist consented to undercorrection in the first place: there had to be a wearable combination that amounted to his actual prescription, although later he allowed me to reduce the strength of the contacts. Since my previous contact lens supply hadn't quite been used up, I have a little bit of room to adjust the combined strength. What I wore two days ago was -1.00/-0.75 contacts and -1.50/-0.50 glasses, effectively -2.50/-1.25.

Of course I'd forgotten what full correction looks and feels like. It looks great (as long as I don't look at anything very close to me) and doesn't feel so good.

I didn't want to leave full correction on all evening, and in fact just gave it a few minutes before pulling the glasses off. I was surprised to find that after an adjustment of just a fraction of a second, my vision snapped back into almost complete clarity, as if the glasses were still on. This lasted for a few minutes before a little blur returned. Might I have imagined that? I'm distrustful, knowing the power of optimism and imagination. But I repeated the experiment several times during the evening and the same thing kept happening.

Yesterday I wore the same contacts/glasses combination when driving to work, left the glasses in the car while there, and put them back on for the trip home. During the evening I experimented with fairly frequent, short alternations with the glasses on and off. I didn't carefully count or time these, but subjectively, I enjoyed great clarity all evening.

An accompanying physical sensation worth reporting: there is something behind both eyes that I think involves some combination of the extraocular muscles. Since one doesn't usually feel those muscles consciously, I think it's impossible for me to categorize the sensation as a flex or a stretch, or a flex of one muscle with a stretch of another. I can best describe it as a little tickling feeling. It's not entirely unfamiliar, as an occasional faint precursor of it has been among the many novel sensations around the face, scalp, ears, etc. that have come and gone in the past few weeks, but last night it became more noticeable and consistent, and this morning it was still there when I rolled out of bed. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, though a touch distracting. For now though, I'll take it as a hopeful sign that the visual cortex has found another control to tweak and will use it to the best of its ability.

Today I'll continue as yesterday, but reducing strength in each eye by 0.25 diopter.

The last couple of days I've continued with the alternating full/undercorrection scheme. Timing has been haphazard, but what I've tried to do mostly is switch whenever I happen to notice the absence of ticking sensations.

Ticking sensations? I think I've mentioned them before. When the visual system's coarse accomodation system is at work, when something is bending and squeezing and moving around the eyes and cheeks and temples, I often experience an almost audible feeling of ticking and crackling. It's rather like what your back or neck might do when you move it around to get comfortable or shed a little accumulated tension. Whenever there is a change in optical correction, the adjustments start; after a while the visual cortex decides it has done the best it could this time, and the snap-crackle-pop subsides.

My hope is that with a lot of practice and repetition, the visual cortex will keep getting better at making effective adjustments. It's too confusing to keep track consciously, and that's okay with me. I don't fully understand how the visual system works, and neither, I'm convinced, does the medical establishment. Triggering adjustments this frequently helps keep the visual cortex properly in charge; I want to let it go on with its business of experimenting, tweaking, trying combinations, taking its own notes. Also this makes it possible for me to sometimes forget what lenses I'm wearing; however obsessive I might be about vision right now, there are other things going on, and life can easily crowd out my consciousness of whether I have glasses on or not. That should help keep me from consciously interfering with adjustments or letting expectations get in the way.

Here's what it all has to do with confusing cats.

Sitting in a restaurant tonight, I pointed out a sign that was visible on a diagonal line across the street and a block or so down. I, wearing my weakest contacts, could read part of it from where we were sitting; my wife, uncorrected, could make out none of it.

Why should this be of such interest to me? Simply because she passed her last vision test without her glasses, and can legally drive without them.

Every now and then I get discouraged because deep down I know nothing will really do except to be rid of my optometric dependency completely, and obviously I'm not there yet. Every morning I get out of bed and look around and feel like it's not happening fast enough — or isn't happening at all! But considering that five months ago I was wearing -2.25/-1.00 contacts, and now -0.50/-0.50 apparently brings me up around legal acuity, there's definitely cause for hope.

I wrote some claptrap earlier about the musculature of the skull that needs to be rethought. If the temporalis muscle is contracting, why isn't any change visible from the outside? Why doesn't something stretch, morph, wrinkle, something?

So I recently talked to an ophthalmologist (not as a client, but just stopped him in the hallway — sometimes it's handy to work in a teaching hospital).

My question for him was about the "posterior extremities" of the extraocular muscles. The anatomical diagrams I've seen are all cutaways that show only where they attach to the eye, but what's at the other end? What do they anchor to? And he replied that they're actually quite short, shorter than most diagrams indicate, and they attach to points on the inside of the orbit, which is the bone of the eye socket.

This would seem to take the mystery out some of the sensations I've been experiencing. It must be the effect of the unaccustomed contraction of certain extraocular muscles. I have been aware of five points around the eye where the sensations seem to originate: three of them are above and to the outside the eye, and I'd been assigning those to the temporal muscle; the other two are near the nose. I won't go so far now as to say, for instance, that I feel this spot because of the superior oblique and that spot because of the medial rectus, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is a straightforward correspondence.

Everything you read about the extraocular muscles will say that their only function is to move the eye; that the rectus muscles, in particular, work in pairs, one contracting while its companion relaxes. But suppose they really work more like the reins of a horse? Sure, if you pull on the right while giving slack on the left, the effect is to steer the horse, but if you pull both at the same time, you're telling the horse to slow or stop. Subtle combinations control speed and direction simultaneously. In the eye, combinations of tension on the six extraoculars may be capable of governing not only orientation but shape (and hence, rough focus calibration and astygmatism adjustments), while the musculature around the lens does the routine and quick focusing we are all familiar with.

Why would this not appear in the medical literature? Simple: because it would almost never be observable in a patient. Consider that if such a mechanism exists, in myopic eyes we would expect it to be inactive. In normal eyes, correct shape will have already been maintained over an individual's life; we would expect any simultaneous contraction of opposing muscles to be vanishingly gentle. It might be the case that healthy eyes habitually hold just a tiny bit of flex in some or all of the extraoculars, while myopic eyes leave them relatively slack.

Really, the only place you would expect to see the mechanism hard at work would be in subjects whose brains were newly engaging efforts to correct significant shape/focus errors. This select group would include, umm, ... well, maybe me. But any volunteer starting with a similar degree of myopia to mine and using a similar degree of undercorrection would probably start experiencing the same sensations after a while.

When I've worn undercorrecting contacts for the last few days, these sensations have been almost continuous, though just once in a great while (typically in the early morning) requiring me to briefly put on supplementary glasses to get the pump primed again. I've bumped up the strength on the contacts slightly (-1.00/-0.75 usually, -0.75/-0.50 today) to keep sharp focus within reach so the cortex will keep working to maintain it.

I don't know whether it is significant, but this morning in the grocery store — where I bicycled to pick up supplies for a holiday grillout — I simultaneously felt the three main sensations I've come to associate with progress. I was wearing no compensating lenses at the time.

Those three are:

1. A pronounced pull beside the nose,
2. A rather pleasant slight buzzing feeling around the temple, and
3. A rather less pleasant tickle around the back of the eyeball.

For what little it's worth, I now associate the above with, respectively,

1. Unspecified action of the inferior oblique, felt at the end of the muscle that attaches to the nasal part of the skull,
2. Unspecified action of the superior oblique felt at the trochlea, and
3. Gentle stretching of the sheath around the optic nerve.

Whatever the underlying physiology, all of these are familiar sensations; I just haven't felt them at the same time before. I'm taking it as a good sign that the visual cortex is continuing to progress in its understanding of what works.

Regarding the oblique muscles: I say "unspecified" because I think it might be impossible to tell what they are doing, other than simply that something is happening. They might be flexing, or they might be being caused to stretch via combined activity of the rectus muscles. Either of these opposite phenomena, I suspect, would still be felt as exactly the same pull at the same points. Since I have no conscious control of the obliques, there is no reference point, no experiment I can think of to help me distinguish.

In a way though, it doesn't matter whether I understand what is happening. I trust that the visual cortex either knows what it is doing or is blindly (so to speak) figuring it out as it goes along. As with evolution, in the long run nothing succeeds like success. So keep pulling those strings, baby. You'll find the way.

Yesterday I spent the work day with no contacts. Afterward when leaving my office and walking out of the building, I was initially disappointed to see the world seemingly as fuzzy as ever; then over the space of a minute or two while walking down the sidewalk, I felt a series of a dozen or so slow, soft involuntary muscle contractions near the sides of my nose (inferior oblique?), and my vision cleared somewhat, though not to full sharpness.

So what is this, reshaping on demand? I guess there was no need for it during the day when I was sitting at a computer. It might be time to dig out the reading glasses again for computer work. I stopped doing that when I started experimenting with occasional full correction a couple of weeks ago.

I've thought this before, but looking back through the blog now I see I never wrote it down: these repeating muscle behaviors sometimes feel a lot like my throat does when swallowing. No, I can't explain that any better just now.

I've noticed lately that regardless of the level of correction, I seem to do better if the same power is in both eyes; -0.75/-0.75 works better than -0.75/-0.50, but so does -0.50/-0.50! Is this important? It would seem to support my old assumption/prejudice that the body has reasons for a lot of the odd things it does. For me, perhaps the dominant eye really wants to be tuned for close-up work. If nothing else, a benefit of this insight is that I can now better-informedly avoid a stress I'd been feeling in recent years which I now attribute to gross overcorrection of that left eye — mind you, this is relative not to the 20/20 ideal, but to the use the cortex might have been trying to make of that eye.

Our enterprise is past the six-month point now, and today I went back to re-read some of the older entries in this record. They are somewhat amusing to me; I've certainly held had a number of conflicting ideas in my head from time to time. But the bellows-camera model seems to be holding up fairly well, and I'm almost prepared to say that the hypothetical "bellows motor" corresponds exactly to the oblique muscles, inferior and superior, when considered as a pair working together. When the two of them flex simultaneously, I think they act like a belt around the eyeball, stretching it lenghtwise by constricting the middle. Worse, after too much chronic flexing, they probably shrink at the same time that they lose muscle tone, eventually behaving more like too-short tendons than muscles. Since there's no voluntary way to stretch the obliques, their shrinkage might turn out to be the primary obstacle to undoing myopia. No amount of retraining the visual cortex is going to restore those muscles quickly to their correct length and tone.

This is the third straight day wearing no compensation.

Friday I left the contacts out because of simple laziness, and found that the tickling sensation "behind" the eyes, lately common just in the morning, persisted through the day and my vision was subjectively pretty good. That afternoon I had a chance to chat with a pathologist and asked him what exactly was the tissue around the eyeballs, separating them from the orbit but excluding the extraculars, and he said it was mostly simple fat. I wonder if the "ticking" sensations (not "tickling" mind you) are something to do with that. What happens when you knead fatty tissue? Does it act like bubble wrap?

Yesterday (Saturday) again I left the contacts out, and spent some time photographing birds out my back window. As a sort of milestone, I found myself able to use a manual-focus lens with some confidence using the dominant left eye. There is a diopter adjustment on the viewfinder of this particular camera (Pentax *ist DL), which is set all the way to one end, but in the past that hasn't been good enough and I've had to switch to the right eye. The tickling is usually stronger in the left eye, which is encouraging, since that is the one with the worse myopia; maybe correction, if it's happening, is somewhat accelerated on that side. In the evening I went to a movie in a theater, sat toward the front, and enjoyed full clarity. Theater attendance is probably pretty good for your eyes, as I think about it: it keeps your focus out at a longer distance than reading or computer use, and is an involving enough experience to help you forget yourself and let the eyes do their thing, at least if it's a decent movie. This was.

Today there was more of the same tickling for much of the day, along with a return of the pulling sensation in the temple that I associate with the superior oblique muscle and trochlea — again, more strongly in the left eye.

After an encouraging stretch of extended eye-nakedness, I began to feel I was slipping a bit — losing clarity, and experiencing fewer of the pysical marker sensations — so put in a pair of half-diopter contacts for one day (Tuesday, two days ago), and the marker sensations returned immediately. Yesterday, spent naked-eyed again, the correction mechanism seemed to be back hard at work.

Last night I indulged in an hour or so of vegetative time watching television. We have a 51 inch set, and I was seated about 12 feet away. It's another indication of progress that I remember in April being unable to see the screen clearly from that same spot, and now it is about at my frontier of full sharpness. I found it possible last night to focus more or less wilfully — command my eyes to push outward, as it seemed — to bring the image into near focus. The fine adjustments that bring full sharpness are still involuntary, which is probably good, but they are also halting and uncertain. When the scene before me blurred, I could get it almost right by coarse muscular adjustment, but would have to wait, holding that attitude, for fine involuntary adjustments to follow some seconds later.

It's like learning to see, maybe.

Slow but ever more certain progress!

Today I find that line 9 on the eye chart near my desk (see June 26 entry) is not only legible but quite clear, and line 10 is approaching legibility.

The pulling sensation in my temples (believed to indicate stretching of the superior oblique muscles) has been gentle and almost constantly present for three days.

This site needs diagrams. Maybe I'll get around to creating some when I know better which ideas proved right or partly right or just dumb.

I have been giving more thought to natural monovision as a healthy strategy the body employs, rather than as a compromise we should settle for after things have gone wrong. Recall the "equality" post from a month ago, where I noted that better results seemed to follow from using equal compensation in both eyes than from giving extra compensation to the more myopic left eye; if the body really wants monovision, it is unwise to insist giving unequal compensation.

When the vocal ranges of the two eyes are not the same, it seems that the visible world falls into three zones. In my case, where the left eye has the closer range, there is a near zone which the left eye sees more clearly, a far zone which the right eye sees more clearly, and an overlap zone. It is probably a fairly simple task for the visual cortex to ignore the signal from the unsuited eye when processing a view in the near or far zone, and to use both for the purposes of depth perception when operating in the overlap zone.

These musings follow from an observation over the last few days, during which I've neglected wearing reading glasses for computer work, saving them just for reading printed material. When wearing no compensating lenses at all, I've been noticing that there seem to be two focal distances that provoke more intense sensations of muscular activity around the eyes. The longer of these distances, around ten feet, is where the right eye begins to lose sharpness; I've known this for a while. The cortex knows it's close to clarity and starts tugging on extraocular muscles to try to give the lens enough slack to be able to lock in.

The new discovery concerns another correction zone that is only about two feet from my face. Covering my right eye confirms that this is where the more myopic left eye runs out of focus adjustment. I wonder if the the visual cortex knows this and is trying to make a better stereo image.

There are times I become convinced that most of the progress I've experienced and reported over the last seven months has been illusory. How much is just "plasticity" (the cortex getting better at perception, doing more with less)? How much is due to sliding standards (losing track of what sharp vision is like)? How much is real?

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I had spent too much time wearing too little correction, leaving myself prone to these mind games. So I stepped up to -1.00 in both eyes, having one new pair of those contacts left, and started wearing them consistently up until yesterday. Distance vision has been very good over that time, and very close up vision has been acceptable, but some middle distances, including unfortunately the one I use at work to see my computer monitor, have been poor and stressful. Maybe natural monovision isn't such a good goal; I would like more overlap in what my two eyes can see.

Sp last night I did a new thing for just a few hours: wore a -0.5 contact in just the right eye, and put on the undercorrecting glasses (-1.5/-0.5) for approximately -1.5/-1.0 of compensation. Relative to my last prescription this leaves my vision at effectively +0.75/+0.5; the idea is to give the weaker left eye a little boost and thereby to bring stereo distance vision a little closer to my reach.

Wearing this combination to my son's middle school orchestra concert, the main difference I noticed was physical: involuntary muscular adjustments around both eyes were persistent and strong, not quite painful, but impossible to ignore. This went on all evening including during some television viewing before bed. My vision was okay; I don't want to comment much on that, because at this point I almost don't care. Subjective evaluation of sight seems worthless to me right now, and I would rather trust only the physical sensations that I've come to associate with true correction — and the more involuntary, the more trustworthy. And it seems the best way to ensure involuntary activity of this kind is to increase the strength of my compensating lenses. Unfortunately I can't do it with just contacts or just glasses, without a different prescription. Today I'll try wearing last night's configuration of glasses over a single contact all day, and see what effect it has on my ability to use my computer.

Here's today's profound new hypothesis: macro is a discrete mode, not a gradual continuum. I won't elaborate on that now except to say I am questioning whether incremental undercorrection can work; the visual cortex might need to pull an all-at-once switch, click, rather than slowly tweaking a knob.

The plan set out in the previous entry didn't work out well. Before long I found I'd regressed in my ability to read the small lines on my office eye chart. Slight constant undercorrection in both eyes seems to mean that whatever gain (if any) I achieve in distance vision is undone by the overcorrection it produces for close-up work; and I'm a computer programmer by trade, so this is a Bad Thing. Undercorrecting bifocals might work, but using single-vision lenses that way is hereby declared harmful.

Yesterday I went back to a very early strategy: mild undercorrection in one eye only, specifically, -0.75/-0.00, putting me at effectively +1.50/+1.25. Then early this morning, when doing a couple of hours of work at a laptop (very hazardous for eyes!), I left out the contact and put on -0.50 reading glasses. During that extended session my left eye creaked and swayed until something felt almost like it tore happily free. Maybe some little bit of muscle fiber in the superior oblique? Hope springs eternal. I've had something like that tearing sensation a few times before, but nothing nearly this pronounced, nothing worth reporting. I suspect the wise course now is to do my best to keep my eyes out of macro mode entirely for a while, so the formation of any little bit of scar tissue doesn't make things even worse. So I'm keeping the computer monitor almost three feet away today, and wearing no compensation.

But what I don't understand about muscles has filled many books, I'm sure.

I've been wearing -1.00/-0.50 contacts for the last couple of days, finding that they allow for pretty good vision and seem to promote low-level muscular activity behind the eyes as opposed to the stronger pulling sensations I've been used to around the temples and nose.

There seem to be layers, or levels, of muscular activity at play here. My intuition is that smaller and more involuntary activity is preferable to larger and more voluntary activity; that the former is likely to involve the extraocular muscles exclusively, and the latter might be more akin to squinting – or anti-squinting, perhaps – involving mostly the orbicularis oculi muscle.

Maybe it's worth noting that -1.00/-0.50 is right around half the strength of my old contacts prescription, -2.25/-1.00. I don't know if this means anything.

Over the last couple of weeks some laziness has set in and I have been going without contacts, only occasionally popping on the undercorrecting glasses when driving. On a few occasions, most notably for an hour or so yesterday, I've noticed some discomfort around the left eye; not quite the same as the gentle tearing sensation I mentioned on Dec. 19, but variously the eye has felt too dry, too wet, or oddly unanchored; and sometimes there is pain like a pinprick.

If nothing but stubborn optimism could cast these symptoms as hopeful, then I'm stubborn and optimistic. But there's some reasoning behind the hope as well. If certain extraocular muscles (particularly the superior obliques) have been too short for many years, then relaxation won't be enough to fix them; they need to be stretched, and that stretching might not always be comfortable.

Some ten years ago, I injured my right shoulder playing softball. I spent months in unproductive physical therapy, doing mostly lots of flexibility work, before obtaining a referral to an orthopedist. He diagnosed a torn rotator cuff and told me to stop stretching and start strength training. Along with that, I made an adjustment at my workplace so that the position of my mouse was along the side of my body instead of out ahead of me on the desk. It didn't take long before my shoulder was not only pain free but stronger and healthier than before. The right kind of therapy allowed me to avoid surgery.

When a muscle is both underused (activity-wise) and misshapen (habitual position-wise), it assumes an incorrect length and can't do its job properly. In the case of the rotator cuff, the result is weakness and pain. In the case of extraocular muscles, the result may be myopia or hyperopia.

So I've been thinking lately about my own attempted myopia therapy in terms of what I remember of my shoulder. Muscle health is mainly a result of two things, which are activity level and habitual posture. (There's also nutrition, but I doubt that is relevant here.) For the muscles around the eyes, the goal of increasing activity might be a matter of sometimes pulling away from those bits of modern life that lock the eye to one focal distance for hours at a time (reading, computers, television), and doing things that make me look around more; and "habitual posture" might be helped by lots of gazing off into space, and the use of reading glasses when having to do close-up work.

In those terms, it seems I've been working almost exclusively on posture so far. Might it be time for some strength training?

Looking back at my earlier entries, I see now that I failed to make an entry for Christmas day of last year, but I remember clearly that in the morning I noticed a new linkage of sorts: when moving from close focus to longer (or "zooming", in Dr. Bates' parlance?) there was a sensation around the outside edges of both eyes, something pulling gently there and then as gently releasing as the focal distance shortened.

Of course I may have that backward; I can't really tell flexing from relaxing, as mentioned earlier, but there was some new sense of motion that clearly went one way and then the other in a predictable, repeatable fashion.

If healthy eyes use the extraoculars to assist in routine focus — not just long-term calibration, as I thought at first — then that might be what I started to feel that day. And it would also mean that people with fully functioning eyes might be largely immune to presbyopia. I'll have to explore that idea further toward the end of this experiment.

Since the last entry I've given the idea of exercise some more consideration, and yesterday tried something new: no contacts, but frequently putting on and taking off the undercorrecting (-1.50/-0.50) glasses.

As it was a work day spent mostly at a computer, I had a timer set to remind me when to make the changes. The timer used randomized intervals in an attempt to overcome anticipation effects — and that's another topic to pick up later.

What I noticed throughout the day was that the repeating adjustments took up to a half minute or so in each direction and were entirely involuntary. I am referring only to physical sensations around the eyes, and for now ignoring any changes in perceived vision.

There were muscle spasms around the left eye this morning, and now there is sustained tickling. It's not quite painful. I don't know what any of this means.

Yesterday after several days with no correction (not sure how many days - I'm not keeping as good track as I've been intending to) I wore -0.75/-0.50 contacts to work. They were fine for the commute in the car, but once there I found it quite straining, and occasionally painful, to look at my computer screen; wearing +0.75 reading glasses over them relieved that strain, so I left those on most of the day. Once home, I took the contacts back out to enjoy the evening au naturale.

This morning I woke with muscular discomfort in just my right eye. This seems remarkable, because almost all physical sensations have been concentrated in the left eye up till now. I spent a couple of hours doing electronics work, involving soldering, with no correction, and the discomfort persisted and even strengthened during that time. The sensation could be described as a tightness, or as if there were a lash stuck in my eye. Later as I settled down to watch some television (focal distance about 12 feet), the discomfort stopped and was replaced by the very familiar and relatively comfortable pulling/buzzing sensation around both temples.

I continue to think that an occasional touch of minus-correction is helpful, reminding the visual cortex what sharp distance vision is like. Once the correction is removed again, the cortex struggles anew to recreate that sharpness. More recently I've started to think that a similar benefit comes from certain activities involving hand-eye coordination.

Ah, sweet pain!

Don't take that the wrong way. I think I've just figured out how to get enough conscious control to stretch my obliques. It's something like this:

1. Extend an arm and focus on something at my fingertips.
2. Feel the muscular accomodation as eyes start to lock in.
3. Try to extend the same sensation a little further till they hurt.

I don't know whether this is a good idea, but it seems to make sense at the moment. I've done it several times today. I can't control which eye hits the stretch point, but one or the other eventually starts to complain.

This morning I'm experiencing my best vision yet. I'd write more except I hate the idea of looking at a computer screen for an exteded time.

I'll need to follow up on this entry later, remembering to include the Wallaby's episode.

Of course the previous entry was somewhat over-optimistic, and I half suspected so while writing it. But the seven days since have been pretty good, so I'll accept what seems maybe like two steps forward and one back.

The aforementioned "Wallaby's episode" went something like this: I was at a sports-themed restaurant and started experimenting with zooming exercises, but targed over a specific focus range: looking at a couple of big TVs showing college basketball in the distance, then finding certain objects that were somewhat closer, just close enough that looking at them started to produce a subtle physical sense of muscular adjustment around the eyes. Once I was sure of that for a few seconds, I would switch back to the more distant object for a while, and repeat.

The idea was to work just on the edge of the physical range where accommodation typically fails; ignoring both the closer distances and full infinity, repeatedly crossing the border between what is clear and what just barely isn't, but relying mostly on physical rather than optical cues to judge where that border is.

The next morning at work I found it possible to read my usual eye chart all the way to the bottom for the first time, so I put another chart at about twice the distance and made a point of gazing at it every now and then, watching it slowly slide into focus before returning to my computer monitor. That's when I thought I had those keys to the kingdom within my grasp.

But that seems to have been a local maximum, in mathematical parlance. In the days since, with the euphoria having ebbed, I've found that I am not completely locking into that distant chart, and last night when I was in the crowd at a basketball game I didn't see everything in three dimensions quite as well as I expected I would.

Still, after coming home from that game I felt an unusual amount of apparently deferred adjustment going on, culminating in a gentle but definite tearing sensation (see entry of last Dec. 19) that progressed into tingling in a radiating pattern outward from both eyes and down into the cheeks, somewhat stronger on the left side than the right. It was all profoundly relaxing, and it followed me happily into sleep. The tingling is gone this morning but the optimism remains: whatever my body is doing, it must be for my good.

A slightly easier way of getting to the stretch-point than I mentioned earlier: close my eyes, turn my head toward an object I know is in the medium distance, wait a few seconds (mandatory!), open them. Gaze at the object and notice the texture and details. The pain comes a few seconds later. For some unknown reason this more reliably brings on the effect than if my eyes are open before I train them on the object.

Here's how I know my brain is playing tricks on me. The "tearing" feelings referred to a couple of times before have become more persistent and have moved and spread from the temples and cheeks to a line across the forehead, maybe an inch above the eyebrows, and around occasionally the back and top of the head. The feelings wander idly rather like the lights of an aurora display, and the apparent locations make nothing like physical sense. I can only speculate that when confronted with sensations from muscles that don't normally produce any sensations at all, the brain arbitrarily makes something up for the conscious self, just shrugs and plays some pin-the-tail-on-the-cortex.

Also I should clarify: as the sensation has spread, it has felt less like tearing and more like tingling, but it is definitely a continuation of what felt like tearing before. These subjective descriptions may be next to worthless, but they are the best I can do.

Some time ago I decided that -0.50/-0.50 let me see better than -0.75/-0.50, and I've stayed with equal compensation in the eyes, when wearing any at all, almost exclusively since then. But I begin to wonder what that means. Yesterday -1.00/-0.50 worked extremely well, and it also prompted a higher level of perceived muscular work than I'd felt in a while. Furthermore that work felt very localized to the eyes themselves, not involving much of the cheeks and forehead, something I generally take as a good sign.

So I'll speculate a bit here. Perhaps the problem with -0.75/-0.50 is that it confuses things; the visual cortex likes to work either in stereo or monovision as circumstances warrant, but splitting the difference makes it lose direction or something.

It goes like this:

1. Undercorrect for a few days and enjoy great distance vision.
2. Go naked for a few days, experience lots of muscular activity around the eyes, continue to enjoy pretty good vision, and believe that full self-correction is around the corner.
3. Live life normally while the muscular activity ebbs and vision deteriorates, but slowly enough that I don't notice right away.
4. Become despondent and believe none of this will really work.
5. Repeat from step 1.

Alas, I'm within two weeks of the end of my scheduled year.

Continuing with a theme: today I noticed that an obstruction (a notebook) between me and a vision chart on another wall of my office presented an opportunity to test stereo vision. After leaning and cocking my head back and forth a while I had the idea of replacing the notebook with a narrow cardbox box, placed vertically on end in such a way that the middle of the chart was visible to both eyes, the left third visible only to the left eye and the right third visible only to the right eye.

Initially, the left side of the chart was completely missing, so it was clear that only the right eye was involved in distance vision. I kept glancing up at the chart from time to time through the day and it didn't take long to start reliably getting a full view of the chart, although the left third remained somewhat darker (the color of the box) than the rest.

I've come to think that too much of my supposed gain in acuity over this "first year" (!) has really been an indication of my brain getting gradually better at turning off the weaker eye, and right now I don't feel like settling for that. Indeed it might not be a good idea at all to let monovision progress to an extreme. A "gobo" object like the box is a simple tool worth exploring this very idea at least for evaluation, and who knows, may have some theraputic effect. I'll play with it for a while and see what happens.

In case you don't know, gobo is a term from studio and theatrical lighting, popularly taken to mean go between.

Today, as over the last few days, I've been wearing +0.75 reading glasses with the left lens punched out; so, 0.00/+0.75 compensation. It makes the eyes about equally nearsighted. My hope is that once the advantage to the right eye is taken away, the left eye will start reclaiming its dominant role and working to find focus.

This approach makes better intuitive sense to me than undercorrecting the left eye with a -0.75 contact and leaving the right bare, which I tried briefly a while ago; if the dominant eye is made to work at focus, then I expect it is better to aim it for correct focus, not an intermediate target.

The results so far have been encouraging, both in terms of perceived improvement and in terms of physical sensation around just that left eye. But of course, every new idea seems like the ultimate revelation for a while, as this journal rather embarrassingly demonstrates. If this doesn't feel like it is continuing to produce progress after a while, then a prolonged -0.75/0.00 or -1.00/0.00 course will probably come next.

After a few days of inconsistent use of the one-lens reading glasses, I went briefly to -1.00/-0.50 contacts, and have for the last few days been alternating between various minus lenses in the left eye, always leaving the right uncorrected. The selection for the left eye is -1.00, -0.75, -0.50. Sometimes it seems to work well to leave both eyes bare for a while each morning, since I can feel intense activity around the left eye for that time. When it's time to go to my office, or that activity seems to wane, whichever comes first, I insert a contact in the left eye and leave it there for most of the rest of the day. Then in the evening I take it back out, and again, reliably, the pulling/drying sensations return until I go to sleep.

What happens, I think, is that most of the work of correction happens when no lenses are in place; but the visual cortex is lazy and will after a while tire of that, opting to slide back into monovision. So the point of wearing something in the left eye most of the day is to equalize the eyes, put stereo vision within reach most of the time, and prevent myself from getting used to right-eye dominance. I'm insisting on presenting an environment where left eye dominance is usually possible, so that at the times when it isn't, the brain will work at pulling the left eye into shape to get that capability back.

The point of varying the amount of correction in the left eye is twofold. First, it's practical because those are the lenses I have. Second, it seems to me that if the correction was consistent, the visual cortex would be vulnerable to falling into a pattern after a while; it might become adept at coping with those two modes, going to monovision when uncorrected and stereo when corrected. As it is right now, the strongest lens, -1.00, corrects the left eye slightly past the right, and I can't help seeing in pretty good stereo, with the left eye dominant; at -0.75 they are equal, and at -0.50 the difference can easily be made up. Using these three in a more or less random sequence should cause the brain to learn that stereo vision is worth whatever effort it takes to try to maintain.

Alternating haphazardly for the last couple of weeks between -1.00/-0.50 contacts and none (yes, I know this means I didn't stick with the "strategy" I laid out in the last post – blame the need to see clearly when playing softball), I've noticed that especially on the uncorrected days, the best vision adjustments seem to come after short periods with eyes closed. A little game I play sometimes: notice an object I want to look at, look at something different at a different focal distance, close my eyes, turn my gaze toward the first object, wait a moment, open my eyes, and watch as focus and convergence momentarily adjust to that object; pick another object at another distance, and repeat.

Why this often provides at least a moment of unusual clarity I'm not sure, but it seems that recalibrations after periods of black are a feature of the "firmware" in the visual cortex that can be exploited therapeutically.

Also it seems that my best uncorrected vision of the day is in the morning just after waking, which would fit the pattern.