I've been struggling with a question for the past days and I hope someone can tell me the answer. It's about : how do my eyes know that they should focus.
For example : I am myopic, so when I look in the distance, I see blur. A person with good eyesight will see sharp because the muscles around their eyes release and bring the eyes back into a spherical (resting) shape. This is what Bates believed and this is why we are trying to release the chronic stress that's in the eye muscles.
But I've been wondering about the following : my eye muscles are stressed, so they don't release (myopic). So let's say I am looking in the distance and suddenly, for some reason, my eye muscles are not stressed anymore and they are not straining. That means they would give me sharp vision. Now I would bring my attention to object more close to me, which means that the muscles should tense up little and pull the eyeball to more elongated shape. This is accommodation according to Bates.
The question is : how would the eyes know how much to start pulling at the eye in order for the picture to become sharp? I mean, when you've been seeing blurry images for years and you look at something, then you should not be able to know how an object looks when it's seen sharply. This should logically mean (IMO) that the eyes (and brain) would not know when the accommodation is complete (when the image is sharp). This is turn means that even when the eye muscles are relaxed, the visual system is limbo as to where to start or stop accommodating. Or am I seeing this wrong ?
Hence, why Bates was big on the eye chart. The eye chart will give your visual system (and brain) the most accurate, granular visual feedback. Other objects are not as accurate in that sense. It's harder to tell how accurately you are focused when looking at other things, especially things with less fine detail about them.
Thanks arocarty! I was having the same problem Lex was having but I decided to search the forums first before posting a thread of my own. Many people on here have stressed the importance of getting yourself a good quality Snellen chart but I kept putting it off as I thought it wasn't that necessary. Now that I'm on Stage 2 (mastering central fixation) of my NVI journey, (Stage 1 was mastering palming in such a way that it actually gives me relief), I'm going to at least print out a pdf eye chart to gauge my progress.
