I was talking to my neurologist about the new (to me) FL-41 coating I got for my glasses, which helps my headaches substantially and makes me actually use them regularly. He asked to see them, I assumed just to see how dark the tint was. But he spent an awfully long time looking at them, which I found odd.
He then turned his attention back to me and excitedly said “you have antimetropia, getting that corrected probably helps as much as the coating!”
He went on to explain that my left eye is farsighted and my right eye is nearsighted, which, uncorrected, leads to headaches, photophobia (sensitivity to light) and various other issues, and can eventually cause lazy eye, where the brain filters out info from one eye entirely. My optometrists never said anything about that, but probably should have. I would have actually worn the glasses more often even before the coating (the correction itself is pretty mild). Though that does explain why I could never figure out if I was supposed to wear them all the time or not.
I looked it up when I got home, and I guess it only impacts 0.1% of the population, so yay. Make that TWO rare conditions! (I also have a birth defect where my bottom 3 vertebrae are fused to my pelvis, lumbar pillows, even the ones built into car seats, are horrible torture devices for me)
My grandma has the same thing. She has glasses but she usually doesn’t wear them. She says she just switches the eye she uses depending on what she wants to look at. For a long time she didn’t even realize her vision wasn’t normal she just went for decades thinking that everyone had one eye for seeing up close and the other was for seeing far away.
Haha that’s wild, I mean I didn’t realize there was a problem, either, but thats mostly because my eyes weren’t really that bad when I got glasses, and I only got them to see if they’d help the headaches, so on and off for years I’d get new glasses made, wear them for several months, then stop.
I don’t really have stereoscopic (3D) vision, though, as far as I can tell. Like I have depth perception, but it’s exactly the same with one eye or two, so I think I use non-stereoscopic cues. Probably related. Do you know if your grandma has any problems with depth, and if it changes using one eye vs two?
I’m not sure if she has depth perception problems, I’ve never heard her talk about that so I would assume not. It’s possible she does have problems and just doesn’t realize it.
My aunt had the same thing. I can’t imagine the headaches you got.
If it helps, I spent my life hearing “boy if we had caught your lazy eye as a child we could have put a patch on and it would have been fixed in a week but now it’s too late”. Long story short, because I see double, my brain has always ignored my right eye. I didn’t notice until high school when I was doing some of those Magic Eye games and could not make them work. It wasn’t until about 6 years ago that an optometrist was willing to help me correct it, and it really changed my life. I could maybe have enjoyed sports instead of not being able to catch the ball because I couldn’t follow its arc in the air. It really caused me a lot of frustration but I am glad to have appropriate lenses now.
I could never get those magic eye things to work either, I wonder if its related…
I’m glad you get your vision corrected! Was your fix exercises or surgery, or something else entirely?
Seems there is a crucial stage of brain development that you can fix it. Afterwards, it’s too late. So my glasses have prisms in them to adjust to the fact that one eye does not point completely straight.
That’s not strictly true. You’re talking about the concept of critical periods, first proposed by child psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget helped tremendously in the field of child psychology, but like Newton, his theory was eventually superseded. Today, psychologists believe in the concept of the sensitive period.
The difference between the two theories is that sensitive periods aren’t absolute. An old dog can still learn new tricks, it’s just harder. The current generation of psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, for the most part, believe that the brain remains plastic at all ages. It’s just that plasticity diminishes.
If I were you, I’d try an eyepatch for a few months, see if this old dog can learn that trick. Oh, and here’s a source:
Recent studies have shown that the neural pathways of the brain can be enhanced at any age—this means that a lazy eye can actually be treated at any age, even into adulthood.
Ooh, turns out they got new therapies for adults! Read this:
My mom has this, in her 80s. I wonder if this would help her.
At 80 I’d say it depends on how active she keeps her mind. Most people lose fluid intelligence and gain crystallised intelligence as they age. That’s your brain transitioning out of learning mode and into knowing mode. Old people tend to have a lot of wisdom, but not much neuroplasticity.
But those are just population averages. Your mind retains and can even recover plasticity if you keep it active by continually learning new things. It’s just like physical exercise. So it’s going to depend on your mum’s mental fitness, which all comes down to her choices in life.
I’ve known plenty of old people who just give up on learning, because they think knowledge is for using and they’re not going to use their knowledge much before they die. Other people stay active because they value the pursuit of knowledge and rely on their mind as their sense of purpose and identity.
I was more speaking on what the optometrists say. I will have a look at those sources you sent, though. Thanks.
Nice! Maybe in the future instead of getting bifocals you can just open one eye and close the other. Or an eye patch, I’d go with an eye patch
Haha thats actually kind of what I do now, when I’m out in the bright sun walking around my right eye is usually closed (my sunglasses aren’t prescription and I’m sensitive to light, so that limits the input). I don’t do the opposite when I’m indoors or reading, because my right eye is my non-dominant and it just doesn’t work that well with my brain, but maybe I’ll work on that, now that I know. Lean into it and make it stronger, biohacker-style!
Love the idea of slowly mutating into an inconsistent pirate! “Didn’t you have the patch on the other eye? What the hell?”
