your posts last night drove the point home for me, it is all about relaxation. i started to let my eyes to see by itself.
last week, i was also experimenting with Ray Gottlieb's convergence charts, (I understand that they were designed for presbyopia). the experience was interesting nonetheless. Without the pen assistance, with consious effort, I was able to converge and diverge, clearing the print and making the paragraphs float above and below the page. My understanding is that those exercises are a regime to consciously improve accommodation.
If bates's idea is of relaxation of the extraocular muscles is to restore eye's nature ability to acoommodate, and Gottlieb's convergence/divergent exercises were to help the olderly to regain the natural acoommodative capability due to the atrophy of the muscles by age. Then are there benefits in practIicing those exercises to _improve_ one's accommodative capability anyways?
I had emailed Ray Gottlieb a while back with questions about his charts (don't miss his String of Pearls chart!). He said while they were designed to help with presbyopia, people had reported to him some success with improving myopia as well.
My personal opinion about his charts are that they help isolate the usage of the muscles, since your accommodation becomes disassociated with the normal level of convergence/divergence that would occur in "real-life" situations (different muscles for each action). As you learn to converge in all the ways he writes about, you gain more control over which muscles accommodate. Using his String of Pearls chart, as you get to the smallest one there is a high level of fine motor control required to successfully complete the chart, and this control must be independent from accommodation otherwise the 3d effect and convergence is lost.
interesting! i find the string of pearl much more difficult to follow than the paragraph/blackdot charts. how long have you been using them? what are your experiences?
