Vision Basics
When most people think of vision, they think only of their eyes and eye charts. They also usually have a fixed mindset about vision, for example, “I’m near-sighted” or “My eyes are getting old”. The implication is that one’s vision is what it is and is only likely to get worse.
In reality, vision is made up of a number of skills and most of them can be improved. In fact, you are probably already very familiar with a few skills other than acuity (visual clarity), e.g., night vision, peripheral vision, reading vision, and eye fatigue. But there is much, much more and as we said, a lot of it can be improved with a little work.
How Could I Improve My Vision?
The short answer is that people underestimate the role of the brain in vision. Think of your eyes simply as cameras for now. The muscles that surround your eyes control where they’re pointed. There are actually muscles in your eyes that control the shape and focus of the lenses. Your brain is responsible for contracting, relaxing and coordinating those muscles. The information coming from your eyes is fed directly to your brain via the optic nerve. That information is stored in visual memory and processed in a number of different ways in your brain to control depth perception, balance, trigger hand/body reactions and emotions, and provide information for decision making.
So, everything that controls your eyes is driven by your brain and all of the information received by your eyes is processed by your brain. That’s great news because your brain is plastic and can be taught and improved which means your vision can be improved, too.
How We Think About Vision
There are many ways to think about vision. We’ve found that this is the most useful way to organize our thinking and education to get results quickly.
Decisions that could affect your vision
- Glasses
- Contact lenses
- Surgeries
- Anything in your field of vision
Looking
- Stability
- Eye Movement
- Types of movement
- Range of Motion
- Speed
- Endurance
- Coordination
Seeing
- Clarity
- Recognition
- Peripheral Vision
- Prediction
- Scanning
- Depth
- Contrast
- Binocular vision
Integration
- Physical reaction/No action
- Balance
- Decisions
Attention and Awareness
- Focus
- Situational Awareness