People with lazy/wandering eyes

[oneeye13]

if someone had two lazy eyes, how would it be different than someone with one lazy eye who kept looking around?

[b33nz]

[ QUOTE ]
Is there a good way to know which one to look at when in a conversation?

rJ

[/ QUOTE ]

the right one.

[Sephus]

i mean occasionally it's not obvious which eye is looking at me for an entire conversation, not just that there was a brief period where they looked away or something.

it does make sense that if they are looking me in the eye there is a physical necessity that i be able to do the same to them, so it's possible that in my limited experience with this phenomenon i can't tell which eye is focused on me because neither is.

and uh, i agree with the whole thing about not being a jackass.

[Blarg]

I can't recall ever being unable to tell for long which eye was looking at me. A person can't see you well out of the corner of his eye and won't want to try. One eye should always be turned more toward you than the next, even if the person has TWO wall-eyes or two crossed eyes. Usually a person only has one, anyway.

If you're that mystified, look between the eyes or at the nose, or look away a bit and look back after and see if things are any more clear.

Be kind and don't get too nervous and things will probably work out.

[edfurlong]

What do these people see? Can they still see out of the lazy eye causing some kind of double vision or is the lazy one non functional?

[Blarg]

One eye tends to be subordinate, which can give hazy, reduced vision sometimes, in the case of strabismus(eyes crossing), but mostly serves to make the brain resolve only a lower level of visual information from one eye so it can concentrate on receiving a clear picture from the other without having to juggle two pictures at once. By the time a person reaches adulthood, the subordinate eye may have hazier vision in the same way a true "lazy eye," (not a wandering eye, which is different) acquires it, because of being relatively unused.

It's a neurological thing and I would guess being wall-eyed would tend toward the same thing, as the brain's problem is that it cannot sync the eyes up and triangulate vision and present the eyes a 3-D picture, so it makes one eye dominant and the other subordinate, to keep a person from going batshit crazy, developing headaches and being disoriented from having to process two different but non-converging overlapping visual images at the same time.

Both eyes can still have perfect vision. In childhood strabismus, both eyes often have equal functionality, but much in the way kids who are ambidextrous usually become dominant with one hand, people with strabismus tend to eventually become dominant with one eye. So like with a glass eye, if you can figure out which eye is the "real" one or one they use most of the time, your worries will be pretty much over, as no matter what side of his body you are on, if he wants a clear look at you, he will tend to turn his dominant eye toward you. The older the person is, the more likely this will be the case.

It is quite a task for a brain constructed to deal with one unified visual field to deal with two uncoordinated ones. It's not really a problem with the eyes, in strabismus, but the brain, and not all people with this problem can handle it -- people with the problem tend to be either really smart or really dumb, or rather less than highly functional, as the brain either steps up its game to master a very difficult problem very well or is just too disoriented by it to do much else but try.