Autofocus

I have always seen that the eyes have a natural autofocus mechanism and that is very much how I have approached improving my eyesight because everything I have read backs the concept up.

Vision training is mainly about a blur 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 in 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 make my life easier,

Further to this 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 so that 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 and so the concept of training the muscles to be able 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 and also 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 will be monitoring focus while your muscles will be adjusting the lens and maintaining their position over time as required. Coordination of muscles is a lot more complex than it sounds and what happens is neurons (Nerves), stimulate motor units which control muscle fibres which 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 through out 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 so exactly the eyes rely on pre configured motor circuits that have learnt what is required for various situations and distances among other things which 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 ever you change your lenses your eyes will need to adjust to the situation and may need to adjust their motor routines or will 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 highlighting why humans have such a large visual cortex in their brain 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 but if the eyes are different like they are 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 being uncomfortable with your 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 we have seen that visual processing is about getting the best images from the raw input of each eye 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 over whelming and quite surprising if you have not seen it before because we are generally raised with the idea that seeing is believing and 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 to seeing exactly what is in front of you.

A simple demonstration of this is something that most of us take for granted which is that 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 it into focus than if we don’t know what we should be seeing.

I use this approach a lot when helping my weaker eye to see by picking a target and looking with both eyes to see what it is then closing 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 eyes vision into focus.

Transfer of learning

This process of perception show how the elements of our body work together and is known under the title of 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 why any improvements must be gradual and progressive. During the day your habits tell your body what you want it to do and during sleep is when you body can implement the upgrades and maintenance that make this happen.

This is also why vision, like anything else, varies from day to day because the body is constantly adapting and in a process of maintenance which means its capacity and therefore ability varies 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 you best guide of how well recovered your eyes are and therefore how far to push them.

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

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 and why I understand the concern people have but also why people fixing their eyes will notice this much more than those with good eyesight.