My Eye and I

I went to the opthamologist today.  As expected my eyes were dilated and not surprisingly, even with two sets of dark glasses, by the time I spent 45 minutes driving home in the bright sunlight I had a headache and had to retire to a darkened room.

This week is going so well.  Yesterday I was depressed because I finally have the floors I've always wanted, and although that prospect should and does make me happy, it also made me sad because I felt there was nothing nearly as exciting to look forward to in the immediate future.

Not that I'm really complaining, I think I just needed a bit of self-indulgent wallowing.  Increasingly I think we all need these moments or days when we embrace the pain and despair that is also part of human existence.  Wallowing allows us to take a peek inside ourselves to see what really matters.  Or perhaps we just need to allow ourselves a day of rest.  Too much business is probably bad for the self in its purest sense.

Anyway, as I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, both cats at my side,  I started wondering about  my eyes.  There is nothing going on.  My eyes are good, I just need new glasses, which I already knew.  I can't read a knitting chart which is why I am basically knitting stockinette right now.  In fact I have trouble reading at all, which doesn't seem to make me want to read any less, it just means that I get a lot of headaches from the effort of trying to read things I can't see.  

But that isn't really what I was thinking about.   I was thinking about eye-dominance and vision.  Eventually this made me get off the bed and squint at the bright light of my computer screen.  I wanted to know why I am strongly left eye dominant if my right eye is my stronger, less myopic, eye.

I did learn a few things:

Eye dominance and handedness are unrelated.

More people are right-eye dominant than are left-eye dominant.

Of those people whose nearsightedness is not evenly distributed between their eyes (anisometropia), the more myopic eye is usually the dominant eye.  (Raise hand here).

I learned lots of other cool things like how the fact that my eyes are so anisometropic might be a contributing factor in why I also have no depth perception.  And that although people have said I have "lazy eye", I do not in fact have amblyopia, but I do have a strong tendency for that right eye to wander a bit, especially when I am tired.

But I didn't find out why.  Is there some advantage to more focused on that which is close at hand rather than that which is further away?  Well, is there and survival advantage as opposed to say the advantage it confers for sewing, knitting, and reading which are probably not highly necessary skills in terms of basic survival?  And is there a connection between the focus of the eye on the world immediately around the person and the internal focus on the I?  Would I be more outwardly focused if my dominant eye were more outwardly focused? It seems there is more to ponder