of my life which I could not bear to face; feelings I had obscured and unconsciously buried by wearing glasses. And the longer I took off my glasses, the more those feelings surfaced. The theory matched my experience, but how could this be? My optometry teachers had never mentioned any correlation between eyesight and emotions.

A few days later I looked at the chart on the other side of my practice without my glasses. It somehow looked different. Suddenly I realized I could read the smaller print, about half the size of the largest. I could see better than I had for years! In my enthusiasm, I could hardly believe it. I couldn’t wait to share this amazing news with my colleagues. I told one of them, “I’m working on an experiment, and now my eyesight is twice as good as before.” He gave me a quizzical look and said, “The images are as blurry as they’ve always been; you just know what’s supposed to be there.’ As if he was trying to say: ‘How can you be so naive?’ It was the same with all the other opticians with whom I tried to share my experience. I felt like a child that had been slapped in the face. They wouldn’t even listen to what I had to say about my experiment. After all, I had no control group or statistically sound research to back up my story—just my own personal experience.

Still I persisted, gradually increasing the time I spent without glasses, and my eyesight still seemed to improve. The longer I kept my glasses off, the better I could see. That’s when I decided to re-examine my eyes. If an eye test could prove my eyesight had deteriorated, it could also prove its improvement; if there was any truth to my experience, my eyes should have gotten measurably better.

As I sat down in the doctor’s chair and placed the large examination tool before my eyes, I ran the full range of tests on myself. The results were remarkable. For the first time, I asked myself that famous question: Which one is better, A or B? It was confusing to be both patient and doctor at the same time, and it was strange how this huge optical instrument in front of me was blocking my whole view. I knew that the eyes process both visual information from the centre and the periphery of our view. We focus on the centre: it is where we perceive the details and colors of still objects in our central visual range. It is mostly active by day, as it is especially useful at high light intensity. Our peripheral view is used to perceive forms and motions. We use it to scan objects surrounding our central visual range. We always use it, and at night, with its low light intensity, it is our prime source of visual information. Yet here I was, in a completely darkened room where my peripheral view should have been called upon, but it was blocked by this apparatus. I realized that the strength of my glasses was based on a whole range of seemingly faulty questions. My intuition was trying to tell me th

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