It was a scientific
fact that the earth was flat, it was also a scientific
fact that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound.
It is also a scientific
fact that eyesight can only be improved by glasses.....(watch this space).
Eagle 1 (In answer to your question from the "Pinhole Glasses Thread")
The method (and there is really only the one main culprit) which makes your vision go downhill is to simply wear glasses. I’ve tried this particular method for the last ten years and it’s worked a treat for me, my vision has never been worse than since I started to use glasses.
One thing that I think must be made clear is that the Bates’ method is nothing to do with “Exercises”. Exercises implies straining muscles and Bates was dead against this.
Bates's methods are about removing muscle strain and opening your mind and vision to the world.
Many people use the term exercise in conjunction with the techniques used by Bates’ vision teachers and it does them an injustice. There are no muscle exercises that are going to improve your sight.
But there are techniques to improve your sight.
Tiger_Moth / Eagle 1
Here is a summary of the things that I did to improve my sight, but I must stress that these were just some of the many tricks you can use to cajole you eyes and more importantly you mind into better visual perception:
Firstly it may be useful to describe the state of my vision before I started trying to improve matters.
My two visual problems were long-sight in both eyes and suppression of my right eye.
Suppression of the right eye was probably my main problem, years of visual suppression had made this eye virtually useless by itself.
The eye was impossible to focus properly at all distances and the image from it was unpleasant (e.g. like the snowy noise you sometimes get on a TV picture). This didn’t really affect my day to day sight since my brain had stealthily adapted to the poor image and had decided to ignore this eye. Therefore I only ever became aware of the poor sight from my right eye if my left eye was inadvertently obscured.
I had been aware of this for some years and had raised these concerns with the various opticians I had visited.
They just said it was unfortunate and I would effectively have to live with it since to an optician your sight is fixed in tablets of stone from eight years old.
The right eye was +3.5 dioptres and the left eye +3.0 dioptres. The trouble is that once you get a differential like this it tends to re-enforce the suppression of the worse eye. The worse eye is then unlikely to correct itself since the image is poor, therefore it gets suppressed, because it is suppressed the brain doesn’t bother to try to focus it properly and the image gets worse ( and so the cycle continues…
Here are the tricks I’ve been using to stop the suppression and balance the eyes.
1) Funny specs with no lenses
Purpose: To ensure both eyes are being perceived and the brain is using a fused image.
These are easy to make, mine comprised a pair of old glasses with the lenses popped out.
You need to mount a piece of thin material about the size of a credit card with a different colour on each side on the bridge of the glasses. Mount it vertically (with blue tack) protruding forwards so that it effectively partitions your two eyes from each other.
(The shorter edge in the vertical plane and the longer edge in the horizontal plane pointing forwards).
You will look like a complete tit wearing these and if anyone catches you they will take the **** !
(I’ve just worn mine around the house – preferably while the wife was out since it just made her burst into fits of laughter!)
However, when you have your class 1 you can smile to yourself and think of that shiny jet out there waiting for you to fly it.
We’ll assume the card is coloured Red on one side and Green on the other for this text but any colour combination will do.
The following text assumes that with the glasses on and looking forwards the Red side is exposed to the left eye and the Green side is exposed to the right eye.
(If you’ve just done air law this will make sense)
N.B. Don’t try to look at the coloured cards themselves, just remain peripherally aware of their existence.
When you have plucked up the nerve to wear this contraption this is what you should see if you are not suppressing an eye (whilst looking at an object say 3 - 6 metres away).
You should see the Red card out to the right and the green card out to the left.
Now you are probably thinking he’s made a typing mistake or maybe Cypres is just plain stupid.
Surely it should be the Red card out to the left and the Green card out to the right. NO.
What should happen is that the left eye perceives the Red card on the right hand side of its image, the right eye perceives the green card on the left hand side of its image. When the images from the two eyes are correctly fused you will perceive the red card to be on the right and the green card to be on the left.
If you are suppressing an eye you will only be aware of one of the coloured cards.
Lets assume you suppress the right eye, whilst looking off to the distance you will only see the Red card.
If you don’t see the cards correctly then try blinking like mad and look at a scene that has lots of movement in it. This should help to wake-up the suppressed image and bring it to your conscious minds attention.
Above all never look directly at the cards themselves, this achieves nothing.
One thing you may notice is that if you look at something close up the cards appear to converge at their tips, this is due to your focal distance changing and indicates good balanced usage of both eyes.
2) Using pencils
Again this may help you, hold two different coloured pencils one in each hand.
Hold one pencil at arm’s length with the other at half an arms length. Both pencils should be aligned centrally between you eyes.
Focus on the furthest pencil but remain peripherally aware of the closer pencil.
You should be aware of two of the closer pencils.
Now change focus to the closed pencil, this time there will be one closer pencil and two of the more distant pencils.
3) Palming / Resting the eyes
Why doesn’t sleep work as good as, if not better than, palming?
Palming does two things, it rests the eyes and it allows the conscious mind to be trained.
By this I mean that when all light has been obscured from the eye you would think one would see a completely black image.
Very few people do, and if you’ve tried it you will know what I mean. You may see Grey, blobs of light and all manner of garbage.
All of this visual rubbish isn’t coming from your eyes its your brain and its imagination.
One of the ideas of Palming is to try to perceive a completely black image when there is no light entering the eyes.
This requires mental control and purpose of thought which aren’t there when you are asleep.
In fact when you are asleep you see all manner of rubbish (i.e. Dreams).
I’m pissed off typing now so I’ll finish the rest off ( 4,5,6,7,& 8) at a later date.
4) Magic images
5) Using paper blobs
6) Blink like you life depends on it.
7) Peripheral awareness.
8) Central fixation.
My best suggestion is to locate a Bates’ vision teacher near you from their web site
www.seeing.org and make an appointment.
In closing, I must point out that my main inspiration was a ppruner called Mr Magoo who used a Bates’ vision teacher to improve his sight and get a Class 1. It was reading his many posts that prompted me to give it a try.
I am very grateful to Mr Magoo for taking the time to make the posts he did and spurring me on to do something positive about my Class 1 knock back instead of throwing the towel in.
[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Cypres ]
[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Cypres ]