Due to a landscaping accident when I was about 10 months old, I’m blind in my right eye. This led to a whole bunch of complications, obviously, and greatly increases the difficulty of certain every day things. No depth perception (yay catching anything and driving), limited range of vision, my bad eye is fairly light sensitive…a plethora of complications. These issues make some tasks that are already potentially difficult even moreso, a perfect example which I’ve gone through is tennis. I can’t tell you how hard that was to adjust to, and my aim started off so bad that my first set of strings broke on the bottom instead of the top (where they break 99% of the time). However, every once in a while you run into something more mundane that is inordinately difficult due to lack of sensory information, which brings us to the main point of this thread;
How in the hell does one tell if one’s hat is on straight with only one eye open/working? Seriously, I didn’t think it would be this hard…maybe the brim of my hat is lopsided? Whenever it looks straight I notice that it’s about an inch above one ear and right on top of the other…is my head lopsided? :smack:
What type of hat are we talking about? Many hats look better stylishly tilted – in fact, I believe that hats like fedoras are designed with an in-built bias to one side or the other.
Dude, I’m as blind as blind can be in my left eye, and I have never had any trouble with hat alignment. Either the problem lies in the fact that your bad eye is the right one, or it’s your head.
I tried closing my right eye to see if it would make a difference, and it did, but I couldn’t see anything then and kept bumping into things.
Most of us have a lopsided head, or one eyebrow or ear higher than the other (google Shannen Doherty asymmetry for some scary pics), so a hat can look uneven if you look too closely. But here’s the thing: no one looks that closely at someone else’s hat. Unless you’re a Chassidic Jew wearing a big flat brim, you’re probably fine just plonking it on and going about your day.
Have someone whose perception you trust adjust your hat until they say it’s straight.
Then feel with your fingers the spacing between the tops of your ears & the base of the hat on each side. Depending on how level your ears are (mine aren’t), you’ll feel either the same spacing or maybe one gap will be two fingers wide while the other is just one finger wide.
From then on, just put on your hat & adjust until the feel on each side is right. Once you determine you want, say, 1/2 finger-width extra on the right, that’ll apply for every hat you own whether the hat sits low on your head or up higher.
There is literally no part of my body that’s symmetrical. When I see myself in a photo, the image is so different than what I see in the mirror, it looks like a distorted caricature.
When I’m putting something on my head (hat, glasses, earmuffs) I always go by touch, never by sight. I can just feel when things are on straight, though sometimes with glasses, I have to blink back and forth, till the top rim looks straight. But the bottom line is: just put it on and don’t worry about it.
Small hijack: In my youth I would regularly get trashed at band practice and/or gigs and drive home with one eye closed due to double vision. Depth perception was never a problem, or maybe I was just extremely lucky. But still, I was doing this for like 18 years (not every night, but often). Any thoughts on how that was possible are appreciated.
Keeping my fingers crossed for my liver. :dubious:
brownsfan, your brain adjusts to what you can see and that becomes “normal” for you when that one eyes is closed. You think you are not having depth perception problems, but you are. Chances are just about 100% that you don’t have full depth perception.
Depth perception requires that you see an object from two slightly different points of view. You can’t do that with one eye. That doesn’t mean that you can’t tell that the car ahead of you isn’t flat. You’ve learned to respond to other visual clues and added that to your own common sense.
When I was in high school, I had no idea why I could never hit a softball or play tennis. Darts always lined up to the right of the dartboard and I never thought about trying to compensate. I just aimed for the dartboard yet again. Doh! Of course I knew that I had very little vision in my right eye, but no one told me how that was affecting my perception of placement.
To this day my friends think I’m weird because I can’t cut a pie down the middle. That’s okay. They always offer to drive their cars because they know I drive by ear.
Thanks for the reply. I hadn’t thought of that. Since posting, I was thinking about it more, and maybe familiarity with the route, knowing the area and how to avoid cops–stuff like that-- had something to do with avoiding trouble.
Is it possible for people with vision in one eye to account for their lack of depth perception by moving their eyes back and forth rapidly?
I can’t remember at all where I heard this, but I remember someone telling me they knew of someone that had no vision in one eye, and the way that person made up for the loss of depth perception was by moving their good eye back and forth rapidly. As it was described, if this person was standing still in front of a chair, they would look at the right side of the chair, then the left side, and back and forth very rapidly. I guess it would look somewhat weird to see this person with their eyes moving rapidly back and forth, but supposedly it worked.
When I first heard this, it sounded cool but didn’t make a whole lot of sense. When I thought about it later, it made even less sense. I don’t remember where I heard it from; I don’t even remember if it was something a friend told me or if it was something I read somewhere, so I can’t track down the source and ask for more description or proof.
So, can moving one eye rapidly back and forth make you see depth perception? Is it possible?
It’s not really a problem for the most part, but parking an unfamiliar car and certain maneuvering in tight spaces can be nerve wracking.
And thanks for the suggestions…I was pretty much going for the “Just put it on and go with it” idea, especially because it moves around while I’m playing tennis anyway, but my mom kept commenting on how I was wearing my hat crooked (baseball-type of hat…someone asked).
Depth perception due to binocular vision only works out to about 10-15 feet. All depth perception beyond that distance is generated in the brain from things like quality of detail, which things are occluding which other things, relative motion of different objects in the scene, etc.
So for routine driving, two eyes do almost nothing for depth perception. Coming up to a stop behind the car in front without using the Braille method of stoppng does make some use of binocular depth perception, as does hitting a tennis ball & pouring from a jug.
As our OP says, parking can be challenging. My Dad flew 747s for years with one eye. Said it never really made any difference except for the reduced field of view on the blind-eye side. But shortly after he lost his eye he was a slapstick riot at a buffet table, bumping & spilling stuff everywhere. The difference being that in the jet, the closest things he needed to judge distance on were 50+ feet away where one eye works just as well as two; not so at the table.
Whoever said I was doing the landscaping ? “Landscaping accident” is basically as condensed as I can make the story.
I was watching a friend of my mom’s mow the lawn and the lawnmower hit a pebble. Apparently the lawnmower had a design flaw in that it allowed small objects to come flying out at full force, and also apparently I have had EXTREMELY bad luck since I was born, because the pebble hit me just about dead-center in my right eye. It tapped my iris off of my retina (I have about the bottom 20% of my iris left in that eye; rest was removed), killed my lens (removed), and damaged my optic nerve some.
And to LSL:
I found it quite humorous when my friend had to wear an eye patch due to getting a stye removed from his eyelid. I got to laugh as he found out how hard it is to grab a bottle off of the table with no depth perception. Kind of makes me understand the humor my sister and mom found in moving my cereal bowl away when I couldn’t open either of my eyes after an operation when I was in kindergarten…
I remember once reading a list of famous WWII fighter pilots who flew with only one eye. I’m really amazed. When driving, I’d imagine that one of the more common depth-cues is to compare the size of a far-off car with the width of the road or lane that it is in. But in the air, each plane is surrounded by nothing, and those sort of cues are missing. Kudos to whoever can manage such stuff.
During a slow-moving baseball game on television, the announcers got to joking about the left-handed pitcher. They agreed that lefty pitchers seldom wear their caps straight.
An old friend of mine lost an eye playing with gasoline as a boy. He took up target shooting to develop his depth perception and monocular alignment.
In a PBS program about owls, the birds were shown bobbing their heads up and down, and side to side to get slightly different angles to help with depth perception.
I have one ear that is about 1/2" lower on my head than the opposite ear. Normally it is unnoticable, except that…
Hats never appear straight. If set even on my brow, my ears are out of whack. If lined up with my ears, the brim is uneven.
It also used to give hairstylists fits trying to figure out why their cutting angles never came out right. Now, I just shave it all off so it’s no longer a problem
? “Landscaping accident” is basically as condensed as I can make the story.
