Seeing-eye

First published in Column Eight on the 22^nd June, 1994

An historic occasion! I’ve finally managed to see all the ‘hidden’ pictures in the Magic Eye book my mother received for her birthday. No longer the frustration of watching my youngest child breeze his way through each one with an air of superiority, or having other people say, ‘But it’s so easy.’

I’m not sure if ‘seeing’ is the right term to use with these random dot pictures. Do my eyes actually see the pictures? Are there pictures to see? Does my brain have to make some adjustment which means that it only thinks it sees the pictures? The whole business questions our view of what constitutes sight at the best of times.

But let’s not get into metaphysics. A rather more intriguing – though connected – matter needs to be addressed.

In the latest Advertiser (one of the endless stream of j-mail* that appears in any letterbox not marked ‘No Circulars’ – we might miss something interesting, mightn’t we, if we never got any j-mail?) As I started to say – before I was rudely interrupted by a parenthesis – in the latest Advertiser, an ad appears for a book that can only be described as remarkable, and whose appearance ought to chill the blood of every optometrist and optician in the land, and make them tot up whether they’re due any redundancy.

Why?, you ask.  The advertisement is headed, ‘Throw away your glasses forever.’ The book is entitled, Better Eyesight Without Glasses.

Apparently, in spite of having worn glasses for short-sightedness for nearly forty years, I can regain 20/20 vision merely by reading this book.

Along with all spectacle-wearers my problem is that I’m suffering from mental strain. So the author says. How I’ve managed to cope with life for so long under such debilitating circumstances is a bit of a mystery – though it may account for some of my peculiarities. But I rather wonder about the assumption that the glass-less people out there are mentally unstressed.

The writer of this book – I presume it was one Dr Bates, but the reproduction of the book jacket was so small I couldn’t read the author’s name – found that if he could get people to mentally relax, their vision problems would vanish and they could discard their glasses.

Might be worth spending $17 just to find out how he managed to persuade so many people that their problem is all in the mind. Certainly it would be cheaper than taking a trip to the opticians for a new set of lenses.

You’ll no doubt see why this is connected to the Magic Eye books. Dr Bates appears to  have cottoned on to some mystery within the brain. The brain gives up its notion that the eyes are short-sighted, and takes responsibility for the visual problem itself. This is the same as when people looking at Magic Eye books have to short-circuit the eye’s usual workings, as it were, to make the brain see differently.

If only I’d read this book as a child I could have saved myself hours spent in a cold, sparse waiting room in of the Stuart St terrace houses looking out through drop-filled eyes at the unstimulating view of some building’s rear end. Only the sympathetic concern of the nurse, one Miss Brownlie (who in later years made visits to Terry’s sheet music department worthwhile) prevented total despair.

I could have actually seen the ball in those sports I so enjoyed doing as a child (NOT!), like rugby or basketball. I could have found my round the old Moray Place baths without swimming for the wrong end.

I could have saved myself the ongoing frustration of cleaning my glasses just before a movie starts only to find that they’re then more smeary than they were before.

Dr Bates, why have you come into my life so late?

Cover of one of the many Magic Eye series of books. 

In the original column I wrote that Miss Brownlie worked at Beggs’ Music Shop in Dunedin,, but in fact it was the sheet music section of Terry’s, at the other end of the main shopping street in Dunedin that I meant. Terry’s was a large two-storey shop selling stationery, books, music, magazines, and educational material. Along with at least ten other bookshops, large and small, it departed the scene in the late 80s/early 90s. Miss Brownlie was a delight, always welcoming (whether at the eye specialist’s or at Terry’s) and I remember her with great affection.

Magic Eye books, of which there are still a wide variety available, use autostereograms to create the optical illusion of a three-dimensional scene within a large two-dimensional picture. Better Eyesight Without Glasses continues to sell after almost a hundred years of publication in various forms.

*j-mail = junk mail

Cover of one of the many versions of this book that are still available