I usually walk my dogs in the morning and in the evening. This morning we were about four blocks from home when I noticed something that changed my entire day. My depth perception was incredible. I had to stop and appreciate it.
That may not seem like a big deal to you. When I was a kid, I didn’t have good depth perception. It made catching a ball difficult. I remember wondering if people saw things differently than I did. I thought that I could tell that something was further away than something else, but I didn’t know if that was what everyone saw.
To catch a football I watched its trajectory. As a friend told me decades later, your brain was doing calculus to determine where to go. Maybe. Or maybe it was just guess and check.
To have depth perception, the brain must put together the two images from our eyes. When I was in grade school, our eyes were tested using a machine. I could see the letters with both eyes. I was asked to watch an apple tree to see if the apple fell on the picnic table. It didn’t. They repeated the test. I closed one eye and learned that the tree was in one eye and the picnic table was in the other. My brain wasn’t putting them together.
After graduating from chiropractic college, I followed Dr. Art Thompson in his private practice. Dr. Thompson took 3-D x-rays. He had an X-ray machine that was capable of moving the central ray left and right to simulate the separation of our eyes. The films were developed and placed in view boxes facing each other. He looked at the films using mirrors. Left eye looked at the film to the left and right eye looked at the film to the right. That separation gave him 3-D vision.
I bought a similar X-ray system. Through practice I developed 3-D vision. I remember walking home one night and seeing downtown Bellingham from a hill. It was the first time I was sure I was seeing 3-D.
Today was similar to that experience decades ago. I looked down streets. I looked up at the clouds. I looked at Drayton Harbor. It was fantastic!
My wife and I were having coffee and I told her my experience. She could relate. She still remembers getting her first pair of glasses when she was a kid. Suddenly she saw leaves on trees for the first time. She had just seen green before the glasses.
For the last ten years or so, I have experienced double vision. It comes and goes. It seems to be related to the position of my head. If I turn my head slightly it clears. I’ve suspected it has to do with my upper cervical subluxation. My subluxation is being corrected and my vision and blood pressure are improving.
Double vision has been interesting. It isn’t just a matter of seeing double, although sometimes it is. Two images can be overlayed. It can look like someone to my right is in front of me.
In addition, I’ve had trouble seeing with my head turned to right or left to the extremes. For example, I was having trouble seeing my grandkids in the back seat of the car without turning my body. That has also improved.
Think about how amazing it is that light from our surroundings goes into our eyes. It is detected by the retinae. Messages are sent via the optic nerves to the brain. Somehow that is converted to what we see as our environment.
If there is any interruption in that system, the image can be distorted. If people hallucinate, they see things that we don’t see.
What is reality? It is probably neither what I saw today nor what I usually see. What I see is something that is made up to help me have a better experience. Today’s experience was awe inspiring.
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