 
Thursday, 7 August, 2008 Sound Tracks (details)
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What is binocular instability? Identifying and correcting binocular instability (BI) is all part of an optician’s training and day to day professional life. However, there are hard to detect instances of BI which can’t be picked up without specialist training. Preferably by an optician trained in screening sufferers with specific learning difficulties (SLD) such as problems with the blurring of words on the page. Not even hospital domiciled orthoptists – the SAS of the profession – are guaranteed to pick up on these strains of BI. And goodness knows there are few enough orthoptists around per head of the population. In fact there is probably no more than 1 SLD practitioner for every 300,000 of the population. The science stuff. Basically cells which should be smooth are pockmarked. The signal is weakened and doesn't provide the level of fixation necessary for the eyes to read with ease. Or hold their focus at the blackboard where wisdom is being dispensed. Chances are you will be distracted by the back of someone's head or wherever the eyes rest with ease rather than taking in what the physics master has to say. Yes, hearing problems can all be down to the eyes too! Some really clever people at Harvard first worked this out back in the 1980s and research goes on apace today. And since those days educationalist have been coming up with ideas – such as coloured overlays – to ease the problem. What is in a name? Some call the condition Irlen Syndrome or Miers Irlen syndrome. A terrific solution if all you suffer from is fairly mild visual stress. But, if the problem goes deeper than that you really need to have a long, detailed eye examination from an SLD practitioner to make a definitive assessment of the need for exercises and/or glasses. Seeing the big picture. Running next to the magnocellular system is something called the parvocellular system. According to Oxford Researcher John Stein problems in the magnocellular system are compensated for by the parvocellular system. This can lead to BI sufferers, he theorises, having almost a supra natural view of the world – big picture thinkers – who quickly grasp things that others don’t see thanks to their screwy magnocellular system. It's probably why the genes survived and multiplied rather than gave way to the 'law of the jungle' in earliest times. And great today for the would be entrepreneur, media type or stock market player. But only as long as the sufferer hangs on to their self esteem. Unhappily, more often than not sufferers of BI just think that they are stupid or others tell them that they are stupid. Life can be pretty erratic and only gets more erratic as the sufferer gets older. In other words, a problem for most sufferers that is squared rather than compensated for. You are thick and yet you have all this insight! Plenty of imagination of what life might offer without the where with all to make it happen. Not a happy sense of being. Especially when the sufferer isn't able to follow through as the protective instinct cancels out the true underlying one. Not a happy place at all. So if all this sounds in any way familiar, what are you waiting for. Although you believe to have 20/20 (normal) vision, there could be clues that you may have BI. These include:
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When you have BI – which is often hereditary – the problem lies in the 
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