Page 173 - The Power of Light, Colour and Sound for Health and Wellness draft

Relearning to see also requires a cognitive shift – it means that myopic and other ametropic persons have to overcome the feeling of incapability of seeing. When this sense of inadequacy is eliminated and replaced by the will to see, an important cognitive step to challenge the refractive error is taken.
Where there is no object but an objective of the process of seeing, there is no reason for the squint as the typical symptom of both the objective eye incapacity and the subjective sense of inadequacy for the task of seeing. Such sense is normally harboured in the mind of a person with poor vision when the glasses or lens are taken off. But when their eyes are fnally allowed to be kept wide open over a certain period of time with no effort and strain, thanks to the release from their usual attachment to the immediate blurry environment7, the result is – a sudden leap into sharpness.
It is about the capacity to switch to vision diachrony mode and the ability to attend to its objective residing in the near future, which is inseparable from the capacity to temporarily put aside regular functioning mode of sight synchrony normally making the eyes adhere to a certain object here and now. If such object(ive) is one of anticipation and desire, welcomed as benefcial and healing, the reward system stays active during the entire period between the cue and the reward. Although myopic, such dopamine- powered anticipating eyes are at rest and can be effortlessly kept wide open over the whole mentioned period like normal eyes with no refractive error. Myopic eyes are normally deprived of this feature due to their exposedness and subjugation to the ubiquitous blur and a sense of being captured in such a state within the mind of their master. But when an attended object(ive), the one of desire, is situated not in spatial but temporal distance, it ceases to cause squint and the accompanying mental strain8. On the contrary, it recovers lightness and rest which were lost in the times good eyesight was lost.
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7 Thus we are led by the theory to the conclusion that an eye in which any error of refraction exists is practically never free, while open, from abnormal accommodative efforts. In other words, it is assumed that the supposed muscle of accommodation has to bear not only the normal burden of changing the focus of the eye for vision at different distances, but the additional burden of correcting for refractive errors. Such adjustments, if they actually took place, would naturally impose a severe strain upon the nervous system, and it is to relieve this strain – which is believed to be the cause of a host of functional nervous troubles – quite as much as to improve the sight that glasses are prescribed. W.H. Bates, The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses, New York, Central Fixation Publishing, 1920 8 Dopaminergic neurons respond to stimuli paired with rewards during the process of learning, although they stop responding to the reward itself over time and they are actually inhibited if the reward fails to be presented after the cues. Hence, the dopaminergic neurons appear to be sensitive to the predictability and timing of the cue-reward relationship. Previc, ibid. p.45
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