Central suppression
I always thought optical prescriptions were like shoes. They had to be fit JUST RIGHT. That was until my optician fitted my right eye with a contact lens that is at least 1.0 diopters too weak. His rationale being that it would enable me to do close-work. At any given time the brain is taking input preferentially from one eye at a time. Developmentally, this can be a bad thing - children with amblyopia ("lazy eye", often due to having one eye with poorer acuity than the other) will suppress input so consistently that it becomes permanent - the optical cortex served by the poorer eye does not receive the correct stimuli to develop visual processing (same as kittens, reared blindfolded until they're past the age when the optical cortex is susceptible to learning, are effectively blind when their blindfolds are removed). But in the adult, it's the way the brain works, although I gather there's a bias. So the rationale of my having one weak eye and one strong eye is that the left will do the far work and the right do the near work, and with adaptation the central suppression will take care of the switch. I am not convinced. My accommodation is still pretty good, though the lense may be thickening at 15 layers (cell layers?) per annum, and the weaker lens, while fine for reading, is not so fine for using the computer, which I tend to set as far away from me as the geometry of the workstation allows. And when I'm up and walking I feel like I'm looking through a scum. It's worse because I am right-eye dominant, as I discovered in archery. I'm trying to remember - was it the movie Top Gun where the central character almost washed out of ?flight training because his dominance was opposite to the way the instruments were configured, and once his army-brat female friend figured it out, they got up to some hairy antics retaining him? Anyway, an interesting experiment, and I'll give it a little while, but I think I'd rather see well at distance with both eyes.
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