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Autofocus

I have always believed that the eyes have a natural autofocus mechanism, and I have approached improving my eyesight based on this belief because everything I have read supports this concept.

Vision training is mainly about a blurred horizon, and Jake is very clear that improvements in vision come when you have the right amount of blur for your eye. The way I pictured it is that your eye is trying to find focus, just like any automatic camera, like the one on your phone. Your eyes do it much faster than cameras, but the principle is the same.

With my phone, I know that autofocus has a range of blur in which it can work that it can work with and anything outside that range means the camera cannot focus, and this is what I find with my eyes. Since, for me, each has a different prescription, the most important thing is finding the blur horizon for each eye, so sometimes just covering one eye and focusing on the other makes my life easier,

Further, what is not obvious is that cameras have hard spherical lenses, while human eyes have soft, flexible lenses with hundreds of muscles pushing and pulling. Human lenses can make minute adjustments across the field of vision to direct light where it is required and adapt to changes in the eyeball, retina, or anything else.

That is where biology is far ahead of man-made technology. The concept of training the muscles to direct light on to the retina as the eyes repeatedly scan our environment many times a minute shows how much harder our eyes work than cameras do. It also explains why a background in training muscles and nervous systems is incredibly useful because that is really what you are doing.

Motor control

Your visual cortex monitors focus while your muscles adjust the lens and maintain their position over time as required. Muscle coordination is a lot more complex than it sounds. What happens is neurons (Nerves) stimulate motor units, which control muscle fibres that pull on the lens. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s a decent summary. One nerve can stimulate many motor units, which in turn can stimulate many muscle fibres, and this is how movement happens throughout the body.

Fine-grained control like that of focussing an eye, therefore requires a huge amount of coordination between nerves, muscles, sensory organs and visual processing to find focus and depth and more nerves to relay all this information.

Given how complex it is to focus the lens, the eyes rely on preconfigured motor circuits that have learnt what is required for various situations and distances, among other things. This means that your eye is very used to the vision that it is used to. If you wear lenses, then your vision will adapt exactly to the lenses and instruct the lens-focusing components accordingly.

Therefore, when you change your lenses, your eyes will need to adjust to the situation, and your motor routines may need to adjust. It may also take longer to re-learn to focus due to the new vision requirements.

Knowing this is very helpful in understanding how to work with your eyes and get good vision as the situation changes.

Visual processing

Now, the discussion has gone beyond simple autofocus to highlight why humans have such a large visual cortex in their brains to process visual information. We have spent a long time considering how the eyes arrive at the best visual images possible. Human vision requires merging two images in real-time, so humans have developed a large visual cortex to make this happen and produce the wide field of view that humans enjoy.

Normally, the images from each eye are very similar, so the processing is easy. However, if the eyes are different, like when one eye is weaker than the other, then the visual cortex will struggle to merge the two images, resulting in less clear vision and potentially uncomfortable vision.

My experience is that the blurred image from my weaker eye can cause double vision. My glasses fix this, of course, but over the years, I tried contact lenses and was often in a situation where I only had one lens in, which taught me a lot about the value of two good images and how much work our vision system does to help us understand and experience the world.

As part of relearning to see my habits have involved supporting the weaker eye and developing its ability to see correctly so that the images my brain has to process are as similar as possible. I explain it this way because it helped me find the right lens strength for each eye. I also change glasses through the day according to my situation so that sometimes I am pushing my vision and other times I am letting it relax with full support so they don’t get over tired or over trained.

Perception

Now that we have seen that visual processing is about getting the best images from each eye’s raw input and then merging them into a 3D whole, there is another layer that our brain adds that affects our vision.

Perception is a wider focus on how our vision, the view we see, is created from the combination of raw data from our eyes and our thoughts about what we expect to see and want to see. It is always startling to find out that we never see exactly what is happening but instead always see what our brain interprets from the raw visual data it receives.

The scientific evidence for this is overwhelming and quite surprising if you have not seen it before because we are generally raised with the idea that seeing is believing. After studying perception, you have to concede that seeing is actually the process of interpreting what you believe happened, which is a very different thing from seeing exactly what is in front of you.

Most of us take for granted a simple demonstration of this: If we are looking at words in the distance and know what we should see—maybe it’s a familiar brand—then we are more likely to be able to bring them into focus than if we don’t know what we should be seeing.

I use this approach a lot when helping my weaker eye see. I pick a target and look with both eyes to see what it is, then close my strong eye to see how well my weaker eye has managed to focus on it. It is common to find that when the weaker eye would not focus on something like this on its own, it has been helped by using my stronger eye in this way to magically bring the weaker eye’s vision into focus.

Transfer of learning

This process of perception shows how the elements of our body work together and is known as the transfer of learning. Lots of research shows how the left hand can benefit from the right-hand learning to do something and vice versa, and I see the same value with my eyes.

By understanding that my eyes want to help each other and in fact, need to work together to get me the best vision I am using the strengths of my good eye to help support my weaker eye.

Sleep

I have written plenty of articles about sleep, but there is still so much more I want to say. The key point here is that sleep is when the body gets to fix itself, and any improvements must be gradual and progressive. During the day, your habits tell your body what you want it to do, and during sleep, your body can implement the upgrades and maintenance that make this happen.

This is also why vision, like anything else, varies from day to day. The body is constantly adapting and in the process of maintenance, which means its capacity and, therefore, ability vary from day to day. I learnt this many years ago, and when I started to measure my capacity over longer periods, like a few days or a week, the results made a lot more sense, and my progress in working with my body improved tremendously.

The principle is simply that any training we do is effectively a question we are asking the body, which it then responds to. So when we push ourselves, we get tired, and our capacity reduces, and only when the body is not required to do anything else can it go and replace, upgrade or fix cells and organs as required. This process often occurs over several sleep sessions depending on the amount of work required, so experience becomes your best guide of how well recovered your eyes are and how far to push them.

This knowledge has helped me structure my days and weeks so that I push my eyes at the appropriate time, avoid pushing tired eyes, and avoid causing problems that will slow my progress.

Floaters.

It struck me to hear that people who are fixing their eyes often complain of what are called floaters, which are strange little blogs that wander across your vision. Yet I think the explanation for them is much simpler than people think. The evidence is that everyone gets them but only those fixing their eyes notice them. The structure of the eye is amazing because the rods and cones that make up the retina are situated behind many layers of cells, so anything happening inside them will interfere with our vision.

I say this because I am used to seeing things like this when I look for them and not seeing them when I focus on something else. For example, I have had my old glasses for 10 years or so, and they have all sorts of scratches on, but when I wear them, I barely see the scratches unless I am looking for them.

That is my simple explanation. I understand the concern people have, but I also understand why people fixing their eyes will notice this much more than those with good eyesight.