Eye patch fun

[karen]

I was reading this essay about left-right brain differences and thought that seeing what spending some time with an eye patch on might be like.

So I picked one up and put it over my right eye. Right away I was feeling good, but things got interesting when I started to focus all my attention to see through my right eye: it felt like the part of the brain that pulls data from the right eye had to pull that from the left eye. (It could simply seem like that rather than doing that)

Then for fun I kept my left eye open and focused only on what the right eye was seeing and then everything blacked out shortly even though my left eye was open.

Then in my mirror, looking at my left eye with my right eye through my left eye really caused a work out...

Then I getting right up against the mirror looking at my open left eye with my right eye through my left eye at that close range forced my eye to twitch and it looked like my left eye was looking soling at my right eye in the mirror even though it was actually looking at itself! It was very weird.

Then I tried it the other way and got sick and immediately had to go to bed.

Today I remembered a "20/20" show with a doctor who made up some goggles to help people. This was in relation to his theory of left or right brain maturity/deficiency issues. I bought this book today to see what he has to say.

BTW, doing such eye experiments might cause vision problems too.

[zendancer]

Karen: There are some great stories about psychologists who have experimented with vision. One guy back in the twenties or thirties (I think he was Russian) devised a set of glasses that turned everything upside down. He walked around looking through those glasses for about ten days and then, suddenly, his brain flipped everything back to normal even though he was still looking through the glasses. His brain had learned to take the upside-down visual imput and put it back into a "normal" mode. Here's what's cool: when he took off the glasses, everything he looked at was upside down! It took another ten days or so before his brain flipped the world rightside up again. He did some other experiments like this, but that was the one that he became best known for.

[karen]

What a dramatic demonstration that what we are seeing is a model of of reality, not reality itself.