Lazy eye (by alaric)
I have a lazy eye. I was born long sighted and astigmatic in my left eye, and therefore my developing retinal ganglae and visual cortex have taken much more notice of the clean signal from my right eye rather than the fuzzy one from my left.
Now, opticians have always told me that this is incurable. They can set up lenses that make the vision in my left eye clear - I can tell the edges are sharper, rather than fuzzy - but still, thanks to the lack of neural development, I can't process the image properly. I have to close my dominant eye to see my left-eye signal properly, and even then, a pall of blackness from the closed dominant eye is obscuring everything; my left-eye signal comes murkily through amongst the blackness. On top of that, because the normal blurry signal from my eye doesn't have good edge information in, I can't see edges properly. Even with the optical issues corrected, the edge-detection stuff hasn't properly developed, and I see an odd hard-to-describe world of patches of colours and textures; yet when I try to concentrate on where the boundary between two patches is, it eludes me.
The opticians tell me that even though lenses make the image in my left eye noticeably sharper, the neural stuff will never get better, so I'm refused glasses these days (even though I have a hunch I might get less headaches with spectacles, since my left eye still seems to try to focus on things and then aches).
However, today I read this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4849244.stm
Apparently, VR researchers have been treating this kind of thing by putting people in a VR game, while feeding incomplete visual signals to each eye. Eg, one eye seems some objects, the other eye sees others. This forces both eyes to operate together, rather than the old patch-over-the-good-eye technique, which often ended up causing difficulty in co-ordinating both eyes together.
This fills me with hope. For a start, it looks like the optician's statements that there was no way of fixing the neural issues is poppycock...
So as soon as I get time, I'm going to an optician and demanding spectacles, this time with this article to show them!
Tue 28th Mar 2006 6:59 pm 
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By Lionel, Tue 18th Apr 2006 @ 10:13 am
My eyes have been deteriorating in the normal age-related way - getting more and more long-sighted. But I notice the right eye is much worse. If I look through the left eye, then the right eye, I see the difference. But if I make an effort with the right eye I can get it back into focus, as if it is getting lazy and leaving things to the left eye unless I push it. Made me wonder about wearing an eye patch for the odd few minutes each day to make my right eye work a bit and get back into shape.