Soon after meeting new people, I usually explain that I have incredibly poor vision, due to a rare eye condition called keratoconus. Similar to an astigmatism, keratoconus is characterized by an abnormal, cone-like shape of the cornea, causing an abnormal refraction of light onto the retina that causes distorted vision. Even at close range, my uncorrected vision is so bad that it takes me a long time to process familiar faces, even of close friends, and I don't want new acquaintances to think that I'm being rude.

There are several treatment options for keratoconus, but most people first try using rigid gas-permeable lenses, which fill with tears in the gap between the irregular corneal surface and the smooth regular inner surface of the lens. I find them to be rather uncomfortable, and very infrequently wear them. When I do, the improvement in my vision is breath taking, and I often describe it as a difference in resolution between an Nintendo 64 and an x-box 360.

The funny thing about my own experience with the condition is that my worse eye, my left, is also my dominant eye, meaning I prefer visual input from it much like I prefer to write with my left hand over my right. I've always been interested in how this affects my qualitative experience of using my eyes to collect information about the world.

Today I noticed a funny phenomenon when I decided to try wearing my contact lens for reading. Of course, I read much faster. But I also noticed that I began to favor my corrected left eye for reading, rather than close it as I often do to allow my superior right eye to take over. Usually when I read, it is a vocal experience. I translate the written words into a vocal experience, which I find makes me a slow reader, especially if I get lost in thought and forget to translate the vocabulary in my head. However, when I read using the contact lens, I found that I was able to directly translate the written words into ideas, without mentally verbalizing them.

Published on May 6, 2009 in Other