Category Archives: depth perception

depth perception, Uncategorized, Vision therapy, Writing

Stereopsis or 3-D Vision: The Pure Experience

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SPACE, MATTER, LOVE

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Gerard Manley Hopkins

December, first snow, 2009

Who hasn’t said, “You don’t know what you are missing,” when speaking of something she believes another ought to experience– sky-diving, say, or a certain exotic brand of coffee or the pleasures of her favorite restaurant. Because I was unaware for years that I lacked depth perception this was literally true: I did not know what I was missing because I no longer remembered what I had lost. I had in fact no idea there was anything to lose. But with prisms in my glasses, and after months of vision therapy and eye exercises, experiencing 3-D, or stereopsis as it is properly called, was as spectacular as it was elusive of description. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a writer and so I do my best to put it into words and show you.

Early this morning I went to move my car from the snowed-in parking area and found myself at 5 a.m. alone outside. The street lamps next to the building were on. I could clearly see snow falling against the dark sky as I headed towards the lot. Suddenly there was a nearly audible click in my brain and everything changed. I felt as if I were in a snow globe, inside the snow, separate flakes plummeting around me, each on a different plane, riding a separate moving point in space as it fell.

I looked at a bush with its bare twigs, the ends of which were mounded with snow.  The contrasts in it were heightened, with the boundary between the blackness of twigs and the white snow crisper than I’d ever seen it. Everything was silent. Along with the exquisite clarity and precision of detail, a rush of affection for the universe knocked me breathless.  I stood there smiling. Had I ever seen anything more beautiful than what space had done to this bush with its twigs of snow?  This was not the negative emptiness of which some art critics spoke so passionately, but something positive like an embrace. It is difficult to convey what I mean by this: when we speak of space we usually mean the empty gap between masses, between physical entities or things that matter –after all, isn’t that why we call them matter? But in this instance, I meant space as sculptor of reality, and as artist and sculpture both. Space was the loveliest thing I had ever perceived. It had mass and, by virtue of its own volume, gave substance to the objects surrounding it.

But I could not yet put all this into words. At the time I just smiled, and gazed at the bush and twigs and sidewalk and streetlamp in a kind of dazed wonder.

I went back inside to write at my computer. Just as I sat down and put my hands out — out! how lovely that my hands went out into space, I thought –  the keys on the keyboard drew my eyes to them. My heart ached at the sight of the fraction of an inch between each key and the computer. The space that was their height above the computer took on a numinous quality that would not let me withdraw my gaze. My typing fingers too. Not only that, but the sheer fact that they were above the keys, the space between fingers and keyboard, then the way embodied space gave form and substance to the small squares –indented just slightly to fit the pad of a fingertip – all this made me laugh with tenderness and delight. I was full of bubbles. Why, the entire world was friendly!

I circled my rooms, hypnotized by space, by how space made everything important. How profoundly dishtowels spoke to me, saying, Towel, Towel. The threads stood up, cupped and defined by emptiness, each one loved into being by the artistry of space. Terrycloth folds were utterly different from a fold in paper and yet that folded paper, bent on an angle around a “shapely void,” struck me as infinitely loving. The sculpted space on each side of the fold was so exquisite it brought tears to my eyes. On I went. Doorknobs yearned, reaching out from doors into space. Bookshelves provided a welcoming recess, intimate and implicit with corners, as if saying, Come in, we will protect you. What a delicious concavity each spoon was, a miracle!  My circuit of the room would have been ridiculous, had not everything been so lovely, and so thoroughly devastating.

Mere words hardly serve to describe how I perceived. I felt seized by joy, by delight and yes, by an overwhelming love for all that my eyes alighted on – snow-covered bush, computer keyboard, a friend’s hand extended  in comfort. I know that most people understand the first and last, but few are mesmerized by spoon or towel or indentation of computer key. This troubles me. It is easy to love nature or one’s friends. But I suspect overpowering love for every literal thing is not prosaic. Space sculpts the world, and I was abruptly and unexpectedly given the gift to love all of it. Surely such a gift is available to everyone, yet it seems inaccessible, except largely to those crazed by either drugs or illness. Or to others who have regained, even temporarily, long-lost depth perception. Perhaps because so many have always seen space, they have lost the ability to perceive how beautiful it is and to feel how it embodies.

Later these visions, these perceptions faded along with my new but brief ability to perceive depth at all. But I remember near the end looking into a certain receptacle and being bowled over to see that it had a rounded interior. The sheer “interiority” of it, as well as the fact that it implied roundedness so matter-of-factly that I didn’t have to feel it to know it: why hadn’t I understood before? It struck me as sad and yet the most transcendent discovery of my life. If the world was charged with the grandeur of anything, then that something was the positive, optimistic Shaper of things, their Creator, which we instead call, as if it were nothing, “empty space.”

This is a tragedy and not merely for the individual of normal vision, but for humanity, most of whom will never experience a love for spoons and doorknobs or computer keys or hands above the paper or, by extension, love of every object and every nose and every creature in this world, of every thing and all matter, which is shaped by the Space that loves us. This may be the reason we have done what we have done to the environment, the precious matter in the Creative Space around us.

Because we could not see and therefore could not feel how space is the Creator and loves the matter of the world, we have destroyed it, and ourselves in the process. How could we have done otherwise? We did not know.  We did not see. And we could not feel the truth: that Space is Love and loves the world and makes us, and all matter, beautiful.

Art and artwork, depth perception, portraits, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Vision, Vision therapy

Vision Therapy, Art and Wonder

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The following may repeat some of what I have written before, though expressed rather differently. I “purloined” it from a letter I wrote to someone I once knew, who I hope will forgive me if he ever visits this blog and recognizes it here.

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Life continues to present many challenges, which both the poetry book and Mary’s introduction to WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS illuminate , I suppose, in some detail. But among the thrills and wonders of these last few years of recovery are two that are related to one another but which I would never have dreamed of in relation to me.

I speak of vision, one — of depth perception —  and two, of art. I don’t know if you have heard of the recent science memoir by Sue Barry called, Fixing My Gaze, in which she describes her strabismus  and her work in vision therapy. Apparently the book has become quite popular, at least around here, after a review in the Hartford Courant (Barry lives not far from Northampton, MA). Strangely enough, I have been writing for the past year about, among other things, my own experience in vision therapy trying to achieve stereopsis .  I believe I must have had “3-D vision” at some point, since I did not have strabismus as a child. At least not to the same extent as Barry, and I think I did when very young “see” what others said they saw through those Viewmaster toys (you must remember those binocular viewers with the “3-D” slides?). My later lack of 3-D vision never bothered me, apparently, and I never knew that I was missing anything, until I developed frank double vision about four or five years ago. My optometrist told me I probably had had unrecognized intermittent exotropia since childhood, but that my eye muscles had been somewhat stronger then and so my vision had stayed single. She could not say however if it had indeed been binocular, that is to say that I had used both eyes in seeing.. In any event, it was only when I was given prism glasses in 2008 and in February suddenly experienced brief, brief flashes of stereopsis that I understood what most people see, what I had in  fact  gone for so long without seeing. The world was suddenly, achingly more beautiful than — well, than anyone else seemed to recognize:

The first time on the Broad Street Green I passed the huge tree with its bark “sticking out” I was stunned, stopping dead in my tracks to stare at the reddish burnt sienna ridges that had suddenly leapt out at me. Stark, knifelike and jagged, the crusty surface was backlit by an early setting sun in such a way that  it all seemed limned with light. A gentle roughness edged the troughs and depressions. Spawned from the cortex wood, the bark strained and stretched. I could scarcely believe how the air gently touched and tasted each indentation and projection of bark — as if saying, “I love you, I love every inch of you and my kisses, my airy bearhug proves it.” Just as surely as I knew the air loved that bark, I knew that space, the “emptiness” that cups and holds everything in its place safely,  adores matter. This struck me as neither bizarre nor even uncommon, only obvious. What was strange and unfortunate to me was the fact that no one I spoke to about this experience seemed to know what I was talking about…

I cannot tell you (or anyone else for that matter, except perhaps Sue Barry, or Oliver Sacks) how much “space loves us” and everything it touches. Space is what gives us as a gift to ourselves..And when I saw it, saw space for the first time I fell in love with matter, and with the hollows and shapeliness of everything. I wanted to do nothing but gaze upon the world without touching it or or talking for at least a week…I wanted to walk around in silent solitude, experiencing space without interruption, to see without the interposing of frivolous conversation how incredible it was that you write words with pens held above the paper; that when you see a sign or a billboard, there is — and you are as certain of this as of any delusion —the knowledge that there is  flatness to it, and that “more space” lies beyond it…Someone’s nose which reaches out in space is far more interesting than their voice, and the way a hand extends outward can be the most lovely thing seen…Indeed, I would tell people quite spontaneously how beautiful they looked, the way their noses projected from their faces, or their hands suddenly coming out at me…

Oh, it is so impossible to convey the sheer — well, even now there are no words for this, no words beyond that single inadequate word, beauty, for which there seems to be no useful synonym. All I can say is that while I felt no better about myself, I certainly fell in love with the substance of the world! Who can say, What is the matter with the world? Seriously? All is the world is the matter, and that matter is more exquisitely lovely and worthy of being preserved than even many principles — Free trade, capitalism, rugged individualism above socialism in any and all forms etc —  Americans feel they have  a right to hold so dear…
As for Art? In my cooler moments I reduce it to “medicine”, to symptomatology…thinking perhaps this amazing talent, so unexpected and newfound, has merely to do with the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy or seizure disorder with which I was diagnosed after having ECT about 3-5 years ago. I don’t know. (I read in SEIZED by Eve La Plante that not only are there personality changes but one can acquire sudden artistic abilities and interests, almost full-blown after developing TLE..so who knows?) Perhaps not. In any event, (I should mention that this is my theory little mentioned to anyone at all…Not sure to whom I should talk…) starting in 2007 I took up lifesize papier mache sculpture in a serious way, and just a week ago suddenly, VERY suddenly, discovered that I could paint portraits, just like that…I had never done a portrait before, rarely even tried to draw, had always said I couldn’t draw or paint for beans. Then one instant I felt drawn to paint (with which I had always decorated my papier mache, with swirls and colors but not true representational painting) and to doing “real art”. I “decided” I would paint a young man, and then went ahead and fearlessly did so (see first attachment)…Since then I have done one portrait a day. Some imaginary, some from photos…And I have no idea, had no idea I could do so at all! Frankly, ditto the sculpture, though I am getting used to that ability now that I have several to my name…(see two other attachments for examples of earliest pieces).
I hope you won’t mind all this “Wow is me” stuff…I’m not usually so impressed with myself, I assure you. However, while I am at it, I want to send you three newer poems. I actually dislike most of the illness poems in the book, and want you to see what I have been doing more recently,  since the DIVIDED MINDS book was finished in 2003. I hope these poems speak for themselves. The “Epithalamion” one got a lot of chuckles, and ought to, when read properly (best out loud). I read it at my twin’s wedding. “To the Reader” will be the first poem in my second book, the opener, though perhaps not as “welcoming” as “How to read a Poem”.  And the vision therapy one is about what I have been doing in order to regain stereopsis. Which by the way really works, vision therapy that is, despite the skepticism of most ophthalmologists, who never bother to try it out, just condemn and contemn it out of hand, because it is done by ODs not MDs….VT has to be continually practiced though or like me you can lose the ground you gained after a while. Now I struggle to gain it back. I vow to  keep practicing. I do not think I can go without the exercises not after having gotten my eyes to do what they should do. It is so discouraging now to be back at nearly square one, I must admit…

depth perception, Vision therapy

Vision Therapy: Beginning Again (on my own)

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I don’t know what happened, but I don’t believe I am seeing depth any more, or very rarely. I discovered this when I looked at some shelves, and again experienced the sensation of the incredible beauty of space, which told me that I was not in fact used to seeing it. If I were, I would not marvel so.

I immediately started the vision therapy exercises again, in part to test myself, hoping to reassure myself that I could still do them easily. In fact I cannot keep both my eyes “turned on”, even doing so-called pencil push-ups. During these, you wear red-green glasses and look at a white pencil held at eye level and  about 12 inches away. The idea is to slowly bring the upright pencil to your nose, all the while keeping it “one pencil”  i.e. not doubled, and the white color as red and green (due to the bi-colored glasses).  When I do manage to keep both eyes on looking at the the pencil, the pencil itself goes double and blurry. Also, another exercise, when I  manage to get both eyes on by holding a finger up and focusing on another object held behind it (the finger should double), then I notice that the background is crystal clear with jumbled intersections near borders, even though  I know from experience that they ought to blur if I am seeing 3-D.

Then there is the Brock String, consisting of three balls on kite string tied to a door knob and extended out maybe ten feet. The red ball is 6 inches from the door, the green midway from it, and the yellow ball six inches from your fingers holding the other end at your nose. The idea is to focus on each ball, and see an X form in the string in front of  a single ball, then switch seamlessly to another ball, over and over. Well, I do the green and red without too much trouble but forget the yellow ball (the near one). I cannot do that one at all, or at least very rarely. I see two balls and cannot bring them together; the X simply crosses and keeps on going until the balls appear at each end of the X rather than in the middle. It is only when by chance that I start out seeing one ball that I might be able to keep it that way, but then I discover that it is because I only have one eye “on” after all…or  that one eye is dominating the other.

I never did get new glasses, the one Dr D prescribed at the end of my Vision Therapy when my eyes had so improved. I imagine there is no point in getting them now, since they were for better vision, right? But is there anything more I should be doing, except restarting the exercises? I wonder…I wrote to her by email, but received a weird “Auto reply” that said only that she would not respond at this time…Did not imply that she ever would…So now I am essentially on my own and I only remember those two  exercises. If there are others, I don’t do them. But I do turn my eyes on by looking at my fingers, one in front of the other, several times a day, which is, I think, helpful in its own right, even if the effect never lasts and the desired doubling is small.

I guess it took several months the first time I did this, so I can’t expect miracles this second time, even though I do anticipate that it will take a somewhat shorter amount of time and less effort to get “space” back. After all, my eyes and my brain already know what they are looking for. But it doesn’t bode well for the 3-D phenomenon staying or sticking permanently without continued practice, or at least without continued vigilance…I would hate again to fall into the “not knowing I don’t see it again” non-awareness trap. I did subconsciously understand as I painted the goose that something was wrong, but I somehow refused the knowledge I ought to have looked square in the face. I guess I did not at that time want to know that I wasn’t “getting” the full pleasure from the experience that I ought to have. It might have spoiled it for me, maybe.

Now that I am free, however, I can concentrate on my exercises, and make jewelry, which uses these skills. And see how long regaining them will take. I hope not long. But I must be patient and let it happen as it happens.

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On Thursday I will see what I hope will be my last shrink and then I will choose from amongst the three that I have interviewed, though I doubt highly that #1 will be among the real choices. I will certainly count #2 and hope that #3 also provides some real choice. The first is female the second is male, so there are some real differences between them, the female also being an APRN and the male an MD, which is not necessarily a plus. However, we will wait and see, until after I have met Dt Whats his name and have some idea what he is like. Wish me luck. I have my last in-person session with Dr O on Wednesday so I’d better make up my mind soon.

depth perception, Vision, Vision therapy

Vision Therapy: Update

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On Tuesday, the day after the big snowstorm in this New England state, I managed to make my appointment with Dr D,  vision therapist-optometrist. I had thought that the problem, which was that I was having trouble reading due to the letters becoming jumbled and dancing around the page again, was my “constant or near constant exotropia” come back to haunt me. After three weeks spent largely in one small room in the hospital, a good part of that time using either glasses without prisms or at one point no glasses at all (because the lens had fallen out and I had no screwdriver to fix them with) I thought I’d “lost it” i.e. everything I’d spent so much time learning in VT.


Dr D did an exhaustive exam, or so it seemed to me sitting in the chair, my eyes getting wearier and wearier (!). However, when she was through, I was surprised to find out that the exotropia was actually quite a bit better, that in terms of my depth perception, I needed nothing more than to restart the exercises and perhaps spend some time looking  at  anaglyph pictures with red/blue glasses again — to reestablish the habit of seeing 3-D. According to Dr D I had all the ability to perceive it that I had had when I left her.

 

So what was the problem? Well, so far as she could determine, my right eye seemed to have become more myopic than before, enough so that I needed a new prescription. She seemed to feel that it was because of this that my vision felt jumbled, especially after reading a little while. Indeed, when she gave me the card to test my near vision, I could see every line quite well, as I usually could, since I have excellent near vision. But I knew that within minutes of reading a page of text, either in a book or more especially on the computer, I would begin to have difficulty (as I am even now as I write this). She felt that the increased medication was likely the culprit, and that if it was to be kept at this level, I should probably have my glasses changed to accommodate to it.


So all’s well that ends well. I left feeling a good deal cheerier than when I went in, knowing that I did not need to begin all over again, but only to do a tune up by myself, and get a new prescription if my meds are not going to be changed any time soon. (I may wait and see about that, since I do want to reduce the Abilify to a “humane” level, rather than keep it so high for good…I did well on 20mg for 18 months; I don’t see why I would need to stay on 35mg permanently just because of one relapse…Surely the increase need only be temporary…)


Tonight, I started “showing my brain” it could perceive the 3-D images that my eyes already see. I looked for my white, marked pencil for pencil push-ups, but couldn’t locate it, nor could I find the Brock string, though I had carefully stored both somewhere. (Lord help me, I am always doing that: packaging important items carefully with labels etc, putting them away for safekeeping, then promptly and completely forgetting where the hell I put them!) So instead, I put on my red-blue glasses and went to the internet site where I knew there were useful anaglyph pictures to get me started. If you happen to have red-blue or red-green glasses, perhaps from a three-D movie or graphic, you might like to check out this particular site, where the shots of Barcelona, and especially Gaudi’s work, are spectacular: http://www.3djournal.com/001/gal_Barcelona_3D.php

 

I was pleased to find that after some initial difficulty, I was soon able to resolve many of the photos into layers of depth, even a couple of pictures that before now I had not been able to see as three dimensional. What is more, upon taking off the glasses and looking around me, the world  changed: suddenly, amazingly, the magic was back…Space was present again, holding things in its embrace, embodying even the flat surfaces of things, so that they now implied the substance that lay behind.

 

What do I mean by that statement, that space embodies flat surfaces so that they imply the substance that lies behind? Well, there is a book behind a flat book cover, no? Without the ability to see 3-D, one would not be able to know, without being told, that something was a book, and not merely a picture. The “bookness” of the book, the substance, the three dimensionality can be seen because of what space allows us to see, the continuity of a surface beyond the visible front. When I had not the same 3-D power of vision that I have now, I did not in fact see this continuity, so that unless I “knew” that a surface was a book, and therefore had the substance of a book behind it, I could only perceive the flat picture/cover presented me. It looked no different to me whether a picture, flat against the shelves, or a book, cover facing outward, and I would not know which it was, if I were not told. Of course, there can be monocular clues, clues like shadows and shading, clues like the oval on the top of, say, a glass or the curvature on the top of a book’s spine, versus the flat line of a picture. All give hints, but barring those freebies, space and depth perception are what tell most people that an object has substance, are what implies continuity beyond what is visible. Without the ability to know objects continue in space beyond what is strictly visible, you do not see the same object that the person with depth perception sees, much as you might believe you do. You can only know what you are supposed to see, say, the book, and then see it. But you do not first see the book, and then know it.

 

For a better example, take that palm plant I used to use as a touchstone for whether or not I could see properly. I knew it was a palm plant, yes, because it had long and multitudinous leaves, a mass of them. Now maybe I would have noticed this anyway, being an amateur botanist all my life, but what I did not do because I did not see them, was try to count the leaves, or find out where they were attached…Was there one stem or several, was it bush-like there, or similar to a tree? Looking never occurred to me, because it was just a jumble of green. I needed to be told what was there, in order to see or even notice it. Without that information, it escaped my vision; I failed to see, I failed to so much as think about it.

 

But that was before, now it is different. Now, and tonight in particular, the magic was back and sudden 3-D-ness made everything suddenly pop. Once again, I am filled with thanks for my original loss of depth perception, simply because in the regaining of it, I experienced, I believe, a sense of beauty that may be unique to those who, like me, have had to learn or relearn depth perception in later life. It is not something I regret in the slightest. If I missed it for some large part of 56 years, it doesn’t matter at all, because I have gained so much  — well, I have no other word for it — magic now that it makes up for every minute when I didn’t have it or know what I lacked. After all, the past is gone, the present is all we have for certain, and the magic is here and now. I’m more grateful for it than I can say.