Ive wondered about this for some time. Is a lazy eye something from birth, does it develop most frequently in children, or is it a slow, gradual, inevitable process? Lately it seems my left eye likes moving to the left when I look at objects at close distances to my face. It’s getting to the point where I’ve become conscious of making sure it doesn’t move around. I can move my eyes individually while one stays in the same spot, as many people can, but I don’t have a lazy eye…yet. I’m wondering if it could develop though.
The above has some information about it. Sounds like what you’re describing isn’t actually “lazy eye” but strabismus, where the eye turns (out or in). Seems it occurs or starts during childhood mostly.
Hope that helps.
I don’t know what to call my condition. If anyone can tell me whether it’s lazy eye, or strabismus, or something else, I’d really appreciate it. So far the only thing my doctors tell me is that they can’t fix it.
Except for what I’ll describe below, my eyesight has been totally typical of people who discover nearsightedness at age 7, get glasses, and keep getting new prescriptions every few years. That saw a few decades ago.
Somewhere around age 10 to 12, I was studying a book of optical illusions, and was fascinated by one in which you put the tips of both forefingers together, hold them a few inches in front of your face, slowly move them apart, and then you see this disembodied finger (with a tip on each end) hanging there suspended in midair. I believe this was called the “floating frankfurter” trick.
I repeated this trick many times, trying to figure out how it worked. Eventually, over the course of a half-hour riding in my parents’ car, I succeeded. Through this experimentation, I learned that our eyeballs are not ever aimed in parallel directions, except possibly when looking at stars in other galaxies. When looking at closer objects, they are aimed at decidedly wider angles. The angle the eyes are at when looking at an object one foot away is much larger than the angle when looking at something twenty feet away, and this is a big part of depth perception.
Here’s a recent thread about depth perception, where I wrote about this “frankfurter” trick.
It seems that as a result of the constant repetition of this experiment, I achieved the ability to deliberately knock my eyes out of alignment. This causes me to see two overlapped views of everything (which is exactly what causes the “frankfurter” trick.) When I pay attention to what my left eye sees, it will be looking straight ahead, but my right eye is pointing off to the right. When I pay attention to what my right eye sees, it will be looking straight ahead, but my left eye is pointing off to the left.
In the beginning, I could switch from normal vision to “eyes apart and images overlapped” at will. But within about five or ten years, it turned out that I was switching from normal to apart without realizing it, and it would really freak people out. (It’s the opposite of being crosseyed.) But all they needed to do is bring it to my attention and I’d fix it.
(Some notes which might or might not be important: (1) When my eyes diverge, it is always the right eye which wanders first. I can then cause the right eye to come back and push the left eye off, simply by focusing my attention on the other one of the two overlapped images. (2) Switching back and forth often requires me to blink. The eyes move apart or together while the eyelid is closed. (3) I can control the separation between the eyes, but with varying degrees of difficulty. To move the eye back or forth a bit is easy, but to keep the two eyes near each other without actually overlapping is very difficult.)
In the decades since high school, I’ve noticed two patterns: These involuntary splits happen more and more often, and they are especially likely to occur when I’m sleepy. When I’m so tired that it’s difficult to keep my eyes open, it is also difficult to keep them together. It is for this reason that I suspect my condition might be “lazy eye” – because when I’m tired and can’t spend the energy, the eye gets lazy and wanders off.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Sounds familiar to me… Either it is relatively benign or we’re both in trouble.
Maybe you’re related to Jack Elam.