@ag3dvr

Andrew,

Thanks for sending the link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109233

It includes the best description I've found of how I saw the world for most of my life. "Attention Points" where I fixated on a nearby important object and its immediate surroundings, tilting the flat photo-like image as I moved around it. Indoors the scene was roughly limited by arm's reach - stove, sink, cutting board, refrigerator. There was an overview of the nearby points, but it was not a map I could walk around in. It was an imaginary view from above and in front of the main door to the house, that included multiple indoor fixation points.

In my childhood house that view was looking eastward. When I learned about north as the basis for geographic maps, I created a larger overview that placed nearby houses in a north facing view. Thinking about world directions (sunrise...) from inside a house required navigating through both overviews.

Age six I had a tonsillectomy, which I believe damaged my right spinal accessory nerve. Unheard of now, but a known problem for a tubercular kid with rotten teeth in the previous century. When I woke up, the left side of my throat hurt seriously, but the right side was just gone, no sensation at all!

Soon I was forced to wear "Plus Lens Theory" bifocal glasses that were supposed to cure myopia. Suddenly there were three different sizes of fixation view, and three different ratios of perceived head rotation to apparent surrounding object movement.

I created a system where parts of the world hidden from an eye by my nose existed in a separate world from my central vision. Toward my left, the upper and lower views (main lens and bifocal add) synchronized at the nose boundary. Toward my damaged right, the lower tip of my nose and the mid arch of the skull bone behind the nose were perceived separately, and the world seemed to move differently above and below that divide. The parts of the world outside those nose boundaries existed only in a "backpack full of rocks" that I carried around with me, and had no visual or kinesthetic relationship to the real world.

Each new combination of lenses and bifocal adds created another set of parameters for this complex system, and all of them seem to have been etched into my brain. Many years later I retired to my country home and just stopped wearing lenses. I very slowly overwrote the complexity with a single view through my unaided eyes. But I still processed it through the expectations of multiple conflicting image sizes and motions for each fixation point.

Recently I've broken out of those expectations. All my life I fixated on near objects, relegating the background to a flat diorama even when moving around outdoors. Now (when I'm not stuck staring at a screen) I'm intentionally attending to the most distant objects, and how nearer objects occlude them as I move.

At first it only happened looking at a forest a hundred feet away, I could sense tiny branches (that my ventral stream couldn't begin to resolve) moving in front of each other as I walked past. Gradually I've learned to see this way even indoors. When it is happening there is no fixation point. Every object in the visible world is floating independently and synchronously around my relatively immobile body.

I believe this is my dorsal stream in control. If I stop moving the vivid 3D view collapses back into a flat picture and my attention gets sucked toward a habitual fixation point. Does this make any neurological sense?

Does anyone who has worn "corrective" lenses for much of their life see this way?

#DorsalStream #allocentric #SpatialVision #OpticFlow #VisualNavigation