Ah the Brock string. A lovely length of white string with 3 colored beads on it. You tie one end to something and hold the other to your nose with the beads at different distances. Then you look at each bead in turn to induce physiological diplopia or double vision. Yes, we are trying to see double. Um...I thought that was bad...but apparently not if you are trying to do it! It's like those optical illusions you did as a kid - yeah, the ones I never got! But I remember one where you put your fingers together at your nose and you were supposed to see a sausage. No, I could never really see that. I just tried it and I can sort of get it to work!
The idea is that you want to get to where you look at a bead and see 1 bead with the string making an X that crosses at the bead. It trains your eyes to turn both on and make them look at the same object at the same time. Starting with 1 bead, this was not so bad. I can do this. I can even move the bead farther than a couple inches from my nose and hold my gaze. I see the V in front of the bead, but I don't see both strings in back. Drat! Flick the string she says....still nothing! OK, let's just work on the front part and maybe the back will (miraculously) just appear.
I've been working on this for about a month now. I can get a great lock on the bead and move it up to a yard away! Hey, that's progress! I could barely get to a foot when I started. And I had to have a solid background. Now I can turn off the background interference and work just about anywhere. But I still don't see the back cross - I see a Y instead of an X. That's OK, we'll get there I keep telling myself. It's still early in the process. I realize it's a suppression issue. There are times when I lose a chunk out of the front section too. It's always the same section - it's a couple of inches of the right string backing up from the bead. It's what my left eye is seeing....and really good at suppressing.
I have to fight to turn on both eyes and balance the images. This is not normal! But then we knew that - my eyes are not normal. That's why we are doing this! As I'm fighting to balance the images, I imagine Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in there each with a control knob for one eye duking it out trying to outdo the other! The back section missing is the image from my left eye. I know, surprise, surprise! People look at me really funny and confused when I tell them that I can manually switch with eye I'm seeing with. I can switch images and they are different. Somewhere in a past life, I was a chameleon and moving my eyes independently was the key to my survival! Being it was a past life, we how well THAT worked!
One day last week as I was doing my homework, I managed to get the yellow bead out pretty far. I like the yellow bead for some reason. I sit on my bed with the loop on my toe - a very nice bowline if I do say so myself! I decided to try adding another bead. I managed to work the green bead up to my hand that was holding the string and slip it out past my nose. Ooooh, I can see 1 yellow with the cross in the right place and 2 green! Exactly what I'm supposed to see! Ta da! The next trick is to be able to jump between beads. Oh, what the heck - we're on a roll here, let's go for it! So, I jump my gaze (yeah, more like slid my gaze) to the green bead and voila! I have 1 green, my cross in the right place, but I only have 1 yellow! Foiled again! Let's try to go back to the yellow! Nope! Denied! If I scoot the green back to my nose, I can refocus on the yellow and then slide the green back down. Yeah, this is gonna take a while!
How can something so seemingly simplistic bc so difficult? It's a string and a few beads! Ugh.... My goal over the next few weeks is to master 1 of the 2 issues - either turning on that back section of string or being able to jump from 1 bead to another and then back. I'm not convinced these 2 things are not related.
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