@SepiKeshavarzi @AnnualReviews
@katejjeffery
@lisamelton

Glad to see the relationship between #Vestibular and #Visual Cues is being studied! I'd like to share a bit of my experience...

When I was nine years old I was prescribed #PlusLensTheory glasses, plano on top, +0.75 in the #bifocal area. And forced to wear them every waking moment. Suddenly the area where my next footstep would fall was magnified, unless I tilted my head way down to see over the bifocal add. And turning my head side to side caused the lower part of the world to appear to rotate way more than expected.

Six months later the main lenses became -0.75 with a more extreme bifocal add. That continued into the usual ever increasing negativity, until age 15 when they gave up and prescribed hard contact lenses.

I've found two published threads that seem relevant:

The first was long ago, when I dug in the physical card catalog at Stanford and made pre-Xerox photocopies of papers (that have faded to invisibility.) There was a prominent German researcher, Helmut #Rennert (1920–1994), who does not seem to be referenced in English publications, and was mainly concerned with a psychopathological continuity from affective to schizophrenic syndromes.

In the late 1960s he found that as people became more strongly afflicted by schizophrenia their representation of the #horizon line in drawings was displaced downward. Eventually their drawings became maps - schematic representations viewed from above - with isolated images of objects floating in unrelated spaces above them.

That's the most vivid image I've found of my world. I felt the horizon at my foot level, not eye level. I remember meditations where I "turned out the lights" in the upper part of my visual space because it conflicted with the Vestibular and Visual Cues from the lens area. Gradually I swung the left and right peripheral images out and forward until they were walls in front of my body instead of a world wrapping around behind me.

Which brings me to the second thread, Dr. Antonia #Orfield, M.A., O.D., SEEING SPACE - Undergoing Brain Re-Programming to Reduce Myopia

It is still available at:
https://www.oep.org/sites/default/files/referencearticles/Seeing%20Space_1.pdf
but the certificate has expired and you must sneak through the scary warnings to see it. (I'm happy to share a copy if you can't do that.)

She describes the #CyclopeanCave she retreated into because of negative lenses. Very much like I sucked my peripheral world around in front of my face and then inside my head - truly like the world was all inside a mental cave and my body was surrounding it.

The relationship between Vestibular and Visual Cues can get quite complex... I'd love to hear of any other research touching my experience. And I'm happy to answer any questions!