When talking with someone who has a Lazy Eye - which eye do you look at?

I have a good friend with Amblyopia or Lazy eye. He and I have had several conversations regarding which eye to look at when talking to someone with Lazy eye. With him, his right eye looks away from you when he is talking to you, and his left eye looks directly at you. I always try and look at his left eye when speaking to him, so normally I look at the eye that is looking at me.

What about you? Which eye do you look at when talking to someone with a lazy eye?

Those who have amblyopia, any anecdotes?

I’d probably just look at the non-lazy eye.

But then again, there’s a guy who comes into Wal-Mart where I work and he talks to everybody and he has TWO lazy eyes and I just don’t know where to look :(.

My roommate has two lazy eyes. I usually just pick on eye and focus on that, or look right between his eyes. It gives the illusion that I’m looking into his eyes but he’s not going crazy trying to focus one or both eyes on me (which actually pains him to do).

I have it (left eye):

You look in the eye that’s looking at you. For people with two lazy eyes, look in the middle.

Hope that helps!

I’m confused as to what you mean by “two lazy eyes.” The whole point of amblyopia is that you have one dominant and one passive eye.

Do you mean strabismus? Many people with amblyopia, such as myself, also have strabismus (deviated eyes), and I presume you can have two eyes, both of which deviate from looking forward.

I have both amblyopia and strabismus, although the strabismus is very hard to notice. Consequently, even though I see predominantly out of my right eye, people perceive me as looking at them in the face, and I see them as doing likewise.

So I intuit that a person with amblyopia is probably used to making a mental correction as to where the centre of the visual field is, so that if you simply look at them in the face as you would do for another person, it will appear normal to them.

Shit, I don’t know what they call it. I’ve got one lazy eye and have seen people with two. When you see those, ignore the medical definition and look them at, or if it bothers you, between the eyes.

If you’re talking to a woman with a lazy eye, you can always stare at her breasts.

Okay…I thought this problem was easily corrected these days. I thought there’d be like one response to this thread. Is this something that can be slightly improved but never completely corrected? Am I thinking of something else?

I don’t want to seem crass, but I’ve wondered for years (and there are at least a couple of peolpe in this thread with the condition): How does the vision of the lazy eye affect you? Does your mind just blank out the view from the errant eye, can you switch back and forth between the (I assume) different views?

Thanks for any insight.

You crass swine! Not really.

I had it, and I never really knew that I did until an eye doctor did some weird test about where a red dot was on a screen. I just thought that I was nearsighted.
Whenever I looked, I always saw a standard picture, nothing particularly doubled up or outrageously out of kilter.

Duke, my right eye is slightly lazy because I lost about 90% of the vision in it sometime around birth. If someone holds up fingers, I can count them, and that’s about it. So what I’m seeing doesn’t distract me at all. In fact, having that little bit of peripheral vision makes a big difference in my driving ability.

BTW, having a lazy eye came in handy when I was teaching. The kiddies never knew for sure when I was looking at them. (Actually, it just shows up when I’m tired.)

And I’m always good for Christmas Eve: “When what to my wandering eye should appear…” :smiley:

Kalhoun, I think that some problems with eyes that aren’t straight can be repaired, but others can’t. I don’t understand it myself.

This is kind of a hard question for me to answer, because it wasn’t until I was in the fifth grade that I actually comprehended the fact that people see a bit differently than I did.

Most of my “field of vision” is in my right (non-lazy) eye. The left eye image is always there but is never as focused as the right one, so therefore it isn’t as “strong” as the right. If I concentrate, I can increase the amount of vision that comes through my left eye, but then the astigmatism takes over once I pass a certain point.

I read through my right eye. Can’t do it in my left w/o some serious concentration and my eye about 2 inches from the monitor.

My right (non-lazy) eye is far stronger than my left (lazy) eye, meaning

I have strabismus (my eyes do not both look straight forward - one of them turns out when the other one looks forward) and anisometropia (my eyes have different prescriptions - my left eye is slightly farsighted, my right eye quite nearsighted).

Both of those conditions cause amblyopia*, because they cause the brain to receive different, incoherent signals from each eye. When this suddenly arises in adulthood, it causes diplopia (double-vision). When it arises in early childhood, since diplopia impedes sight, the brain learns to block out one of the signals.

In my case, the left eye is amblyopic. When I look at a scene, I see objects on the right and centre of my visual field with my right eye alone; only when I cannot see something with my right eye do I see it with my left. However, if I close my right eye, my left eye sees normally (though farsightedly).

If amblyopia is left untreated in childhood, it can go so far as to cause the recessive eye to be effectively blind; even though the eye itself is healthy, the brain does not use it.

Treatment, in my case, involved my wearing an eyepatch on the right eye for extended periods when I was little (say ages three to six or so). This allowed the brain to make the necessary connections to see out of my left eye, allowing me to retain sight in that eye, even though my right eye remains dominant.

As a result of my amblyopia, I do not have good depth perception; also I cannot see those stereogram things that were popular a while ago. I have investigated (partly for aesthetic reasons) a surgery to further correct my strabismus (when it emerged when I was 18 months old, it was partially corrected); I’m told this could cause my amblyopia to ease.

*Note. Further to what I said above, “lazy eye” is used for two different conditions, because they often occur together: strabismus, or deviated eyes, which is a physical condition in which the eyes do not point in the same direction; and amblyopia, a purely neurological condition.

What Matt said. I also can’t see “3D” stuff, either.

I had a lazy eye when I was a kid, but I never knew the technical name for it. It started when I was five. I got glasses, but they didn’t help. Then I had surgery when I was seven. My eye straightened out for a year or so and then went back to being “crossed.” It made me have double vision.

So, throughout my whole childhood they tried different things to fix my eye. I wore eye patches of all variety and I always had glasses. Then when I was 13 the doctor thought he could correct it with surgery. That time it worked, and my eye never crossed again. The surgeon shortened the muscles on my left eye, thus pulling it back to the center instead of the corner.

As for where you should look, I don’t know. Just don’t act weird about it. People with messed up eyes know they are different, and they can tell when it makes others uncomfortable. It’s a sucky condition to have, especially for a little kid.

The guy with two lazy eyes that I was talking about: The only way I can describe it is that it’s like he’s trying to look at his ears. So the right eye looks way to the right, and the left eye looks way to the left. He’s told me that he drives, and obviously he walks around the store and shops and whatnot, so obviously it isn’t a life altering thing for him.

And I’ve been told by two different people that I have a lazy eye. Actually, it was more like, “do you have a lazy eye?”. I don’t really think that I do - I think one of my eyes is just slightly larger. I notice it in pictures, but it’s not as if one of my eyes is looking in a different direction.

I was in a play in college and the lead actor had a lazy eye. In one scene I had to look him in the eye for a conversation and, I have to admit, I had a hard time not laughing in rehearsals, because of the fact that while he was looking at me he was also looking over my left shoulder. I felt bad and I managed to keep it together, but only by concentrating on his left eye.

I don’t look into their face at all. I know that I should out of courtesy, but I simply can’t. It makes my head spin, I get dizzy, and really sick soon. Better look somewhere else than into their face and start puking at them!
Some people can’t stand the sight of blood, I can’t look at a face with a lazy eye.

Thanks for the responses. I’m not sure I would have ever had the courage to ask somebody about this if it hadn’t been for you guys. I really do appreciate it.

Since we seem to be sharing stories -

I think the difference is being born with a lazy eye and developing one. My right is is differently-shaped then left, and over the years as a child it slowly *developed * into a lazy eye. The muscles grew lax. At 10, I had surgery o repair it - basically, they put a tiny stitch in the corner of an eye, and it was fixed. My right eye will always take a much stronger prescription and contacts will never fix it 100 %, but it is much much better.

At will, I can let it drift off and then I see double vision. It only drifts a little; before the surgery it would drift a lot.

Oh, and look at the eye facing you, or in the middle if both eyes aren’t.