Sensory Processing-Visual

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Well, here's a question along the same lines; have you ever thought you could hear voices or music while listening to white noise? I just think it's interesting how the brain tries to make order out of chaos. Once when I was in art school and pulling an all nighter I was painting in the building alone. I could hear the sounds a building makes, particularly the fluorescent lights and I kept hearing conversations ( I checked-no one was there). I've had that sensation with the noise of an air conditioner too. I clean this area adjacent to a garage for a crane service. The guys listen to top 40 country all the time. Once I was there alone and I was so sure I could hear country music I went out to see if the radio was on. If I listened more closely I could hear that it was only ambient noise from the building itself. I mentioned this to someone and she got this look on her face and said that sounded scary. I think it's normal but most people don't pay attention.

Childhood amblyopia makes depth perception issues much more likely than a motion aftereffect. Your description of the bottle event sounds similar to what I read in "Fixing my Gaze", a recent book by Susan Barry, a neurobiologist who gained stereoscopic vision when she was over fourty years old. Like you she was amblyopic as a child. Her eyes were straightened by surgery early on, but it was in effect only a cosmetic procedure, because the eyes, although from the outside seeming to look at the same point in space, did not work together and she continued to see the world flat as on a postcard. Only when she started visual behavior therapy a few years ago did she learn to integrate the input from both eyes. Before that, only one eye was active at a time, and sometimes the other other would even wander towards the nose in order provide input that conflicts less with that of the dominant eye. She describes the newly found stereoscopic sight as a revelation. She drives much more confidently now and can even see the patterns in magic eye pictures. The therapy took one year, but she had her first drastic stereoscopic experience right at the beginning, after doing a simple exercise involving looking along a beaded string. Today she sees space like normal people who never had amblyopia do, but she writes that in times of great stress one of her eyes might begin to wander again and her amblyopia resurfaces, similar to what you describe.

Interesting. I had to do exercises to strengthen my eye muscles by crossing my eyes because my right eye trailed outward. Actually I notice if I cross my eyes things seem to have more depth.

Similar to what you wrote earlier, what I gather from the book is that amblyopia is not caused by a muscle in the eye being too weak. The muscles are perfectly fine physiologically; it is the brain that commands them to look cross-eyed because it cannot integrate the input from both eyes. You might want to try the exercise that made her have her first stereoscopic experience. It is called Brock String exercise. It can tell you whether your eyes overconverge, underconverge, or converge just right. It is very simple to do, I did it myself. You just need a 3m string with three beads on it. Tie one end to the wall and hold the other between the eyes on the root of your nose such that the string is pulled tight. Focus on each bead in turn. When focussing a on a bead, you will see two strings crossing, because each eye sees the string from a different perspective. If the point where the two string images cross is in front of the bead, you overconverge. If it is behind, you underconverge. People with normal vision see the string images crossing right at the bead. By focusing on different bead positions the eyes can learn to work together. This was just one of the exercises she did during the visual behavior training.

I'll try that. How far apart do the beads need to be?

Couldn't be more clear than that.Thanks.

They did that to me too

I asked my optometrist about that just a little while ago this morning, and here is a little more about the "Brock String":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_string

He told me the string can be used both for evaluation and for training a wandering eye.

He also showed me another way to see whether there might be a problem:

He had me hold a small flashlight pointed at his nose about an arm-length away while he looked directly at the light, then he asked me whether the light's reflections I saw were in the centers of his pupils. If not, an off-center reflection indicates a problem with one of the eyes looking at the light, but the light test cannot be used in place of the string for eye training.

I have a three-year-old granddaughter that seems to have a lazy eye, and my oldest grandson has one pupil that sometimes appears larger than the other ... and my optomestrist has just confirmed those problems as neurological rather than muscular, but he did not know whether they can be related to autism.

My eyes twitch. Could be to do with tics maybe?

If I'm not mistaken, amblyopia is something that shows up with autism sometimes. My optometrist did an exercise to determine my dominant eye and decided it was my left eye, the eye not affected by amblyopia. Is that what the string/beads tests determines?

check this out:
http://www.devdelay.org/newsletter/arti ... yopia.html

I do not know, but maybe someone else here does. I have not had an eye twitch in some time, but that used to happen frequently.



I think the string (or the flashlight test) is about checking to see whether the eyes align together properly, then the string can also somehow be used to train an eye that does not.



Nice read. Thank you!

My optometrist also mentioned an expert on this kind of stuff:

http://www.wowvision.net/

The web page you link to cites a study by Melvin Kaplan. Kaplan is known for his use of yoked lenses to treat visual problems in children. He believes vision problems lie at the heart of many behavioral, learning, and even postural problems. In his interesting book „Seeing the World Through New Eyes“ he writes that initial difficulties of the brain with processing visual input let it develop compensatory strategies that eventually lead to fixed suboptimal behavior like strabismus (trying to reduce the interference between the eyes), scoliosis (trying to compensate for a distorted perceived visual space), or hand flapping (trying to find out where the own body is). His main treatment consists in disrupting the learned strategies by having the child wear lenses for a few months that distort vision either up,down, left, or right. The child’s neural system has to learn from scratch, but this time under supervision of a visual behavior therapist. He claims that after the treatment many of his patients show drastically fewer autistic symptoms. He does treat children without autism as well, but believes autism is highly associated with visual perception problems. Kaplan is a very experienced practitioner, but mainstream science does not seem to have picked up much on his ideas, and there is little plausible theoretical explanation in the book.

The Brock String test is more about eye convergence than finding out which eye is dominant, but I guess it could even help with that. When your brain switches to monocular mode and inhibits the non-active eye you should see one of the strings disappear.