Next old fart topic: Cataracts

[Village Idiot]

I'll be asking the same mono vision question in a few years when I get my eyes done. It's my understanding that depth perception is a learned behavior, that our brains learn to judge depth over time. Close one eye. Is everything suddenly 1 dimensional? No. You can still judge depth, and things still look 3D. Close one eye and move your head around. Things shift within context of each other at different rates depending on distance, which enhances what your brain has been trained to do in terms of perceiving depth. Again, depth perception seems to be a learned behavior.

[Marshall]

My brain was trained to follow Fay Wray

[Deleted]

Nov 27, 2017 7:58:36 GMT -5 AlanC said:

As Andrewrg seemed to notice, we are getting pretty damn old. There is a lot that seems to go with that state: grand kids, retiring, assorted aches and pains, dying.

Early next year I will have my nascent cataracts removed and new lenses installed. How many of you have had this done? As of right now I plan on getting the same lenses that I have been using for my contacts which is left eye for close up and right eye for distance. They call it mono-vision.

This has worked well for me for almost 20 years now and has allowed me to make a living at my laptop without bifocal glasses. But last night I began to have second thoughts. I could get both eyes corrected for distance and then use cheap WalMart cheaters when I work. I'm wondering if that would not be better for night driving? Like I said.... second thoughts.

Have any of you had your cataracts removed and lenses installed? Anyone opt for mono-vision?

Had mine done last December and January. Had the distance lens implanted. I didn't realize he bad my vision had become until I could see again. My night vision is slightly improved but any improvement is welcomed.

[Dub]

Nov 28, 2017 22:26:04 GMT -5 Village Idiot said:

I'll be asking the same mono vision question in a few years when I get my eyes done. It's my understanding that depth perception is a learned behavior, that our brains learn to judge depth over time. Close one eye. Is everything suddenly 1 dimensional? No. You can still judge depth, and things still look 3D. Close one eye and move your head around. Things shift within context of each other at different rates depending on distance, which enhances what your brain has been trained to do in terms of perceiving depth. Again, depth perception seems to be a learned behavior.

As a one eyed guy who once wore mono vision contacts I have some experienice with all of this.

First, mono-vision contacts worked great. Much better, IMO, than bifocal contacts which I also wore for a while. Your brain gets used to the two focal lengths pretty quickly and though you do notice the difference, it isn't distracting. I actually wore only a single contact lens for mono-vision as one eye was already good for reading. I should add that this works less well as we age because our eyes lose the ability to refocus quickly. If I had two working eyes and was having cataracts removed, I wouldn't go mono-vision. If I was 50, I might.

I've learned that one's brain does eventually get used to seeing with one eye but judging distance is always weird. Our brains use the parallax information from two eyes to judge distance at close range. Beyond a few feet, our eyes are too close together for parallax to be much use. For longer distance, our brains use information like motion, perspective and relative size to judge distance. So I have no problems driving or doing other normal activities. But at close range, after being one-eyed for sixteen years, I still have to be careful pouring wine or coffee because, without movement, I can't tell whether I'm over the vessel I'm aiming for. I've also learned to play guitar without looking at my noting hand because I can't tell exactly which fret it's on by looking. Unless I bend my head over the fretboard which looks really funny in performance.

When I first lost the sight of my left eye I had a strange experience. I was driving my familiar route to the office when suddenly I was totally lost. It was quite frightening. I had to pull over and park to get my bearings again. I was on a route I'd driven hundreds of times. I could look at landmarks and see that they were familiar but I still felt lost. It took a couple of weeks for that to go away. I'm guessing our brains navigate by learned patterns and with one eye out of commission the patterns had changed. I've read that bees are unable to return to their hive if you turn the hive so the entrance faces a different way. They don't see the opening by itself, they've learned to recognize the visual pattern that exists when they're on the right course. When you turn the hive, that pattern no longer gets them to the opening. They have to wander about and learn a new pattern. It was probably something like that.

Anyway, be careful and be sure.

[brucemacneill]

If and when I get my cataracts removed I plan to go with both distance and I'll live with reading glasses. My visual mind gets confused easy enough just being mon-occular as it is. When my right eye, the bad one, started going weird on my a couple of years ago, probably due to the glaucoma not the cataracts, I would up with a different script for the right eye but left the left as is. Trouble is my old script had a 5 diopter magnification and the ophthalmologist wanted me to get used to 0 so prescribed the new lens with no magnification so now things get bigger or smaller depending on which eye I use. That took some getting used to.

Just now, the cataracts aren't bad enough to fix and I'll wait and see but I plan to get new glasses, prescribed by a different guy and at least make both lenses the same magnification.

[Doug]

What Dub said about getting used to one eye.  Nineteen 70 I got hit with a 2x4 coming back from movie on base.  Tore my eyelid and I lost vision in my right eye on Tue.  That weekend I was going to FL and the guy I was riding with wanted me to drive, I kept stopping about 50 ft before the stop sign. But within a week I was driving normally but I did look dashing with the eye patch. Vision came back in about 5-6 weeks and the only permanent damage is my right eyelid kind of droops.