Touching the World with Your Eyes: A Simple Shift That Changed Everything

Can you touch the world with your eyes? It might seem like an odd question, but this idea really hit home for me the other day while working with a patient in vision therapy.

This patient is an incredibly accomplished concert pianist and composer. She’s well known and deeply respected in her field. And yet, she struggles with diplopia on a daily basis—especially after spending time grading papers or working on other professorial tasks at the computer.

You see, she’s built a world around her that really only extends to about arm’s length—maybe just out to the music stand in front of her. So when she tries to look beyond six to eight feet, things begin to double.

Now, sure, it would be easy to label her with Convergence Excess (CE) or even Divergence Insufficiency (DI), but those are just clinical boxes to help us understand how she presents. The deeper issue is that she’s constructed a world that doesn’t allow her eyes—and, more importantly, herself—to extend out and interact with reality beyond her perceptual limits.

During a session, I asked her to picture herself at the piano, looking at the music. Then I said, "Can you see yourself? Ask yourself this: Are you bringing the notes to you—or are you going out to the music?" I encouraged her to imagine letting her eyes—and her awareness—go outward, away from herself, to where the music actually lives.

She paused, then said she had never thought about it that way before. She realized that she tends to pull visual information inward, rather than reaching out toward the object she’s looking at.

We then worked with a Brock string. I had her touch a bead placed at arm’s length while telling me where the strings crossed. As expected, she was highly esophoric. She told me the bead appeared single, but the strings were crossing a couple of inches in front of it.

So I asked her to look away for a moment, then to try again—this time, with the intention of “touching” the bead with her eyes. With that small shift, she regained fusion on demand. The strings now crossed at the bead, not in front of it.

We took that concept into base-in vectorgrams. For the first time, she saw the Quoits floating in front of a window with real depth. She was able to localize them and reported that they felt like they were out in the parking lot—fifteen or twenty feet away.

She’s now beginning to experience a very different world. She can look out the window and see the trees and nature without diplopia. I reminded her that if things begin to double again, she can bring herself back by remembering this simple idea: Touch the world with your eyes.

Maybe that’s something we can all try to do a little more—step outside of our comfort zones and reach out to the world around us.