If you were driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour and suddenly had to steer the car around several obstacles, could you do it? This ability - to maneuver a speeding vehicle around obstacles - is a skill my astronaut husband learned when flying planes but it is not usually taught to drivers of cars. So, my husband enrolled our family in In Control, an advanced driving school. I, most definitely, did not want to go.
I have been cross eyed since early infancy. Since my eyes were misaligned, they brought conflicting input into my brain, and this made the whole process of seeing more difficult and slower. I found it hard to drive, even to ski and roller blade. My favorite way of getting around was on my own two feet. At age 48, I undertook a program of optometric vision therapy which taught me how to coordinate my two eyes and see in 3D. Driving became a lot easier, but I still did not want to go to the advanced driving school. The teachers were all race car drivers. With their adventurous spirits and quick reflexes, I assumed that they were a whole different breed of people from me.
The driving school was located on an airplane runway on a former Air Force base. In the first exercise, we had to speed the car down the runway at 55 miles per hour, and, upon reaching a set of orange cones, brake the car as abruptly as possible. My husband and kids (ages 21 and 23) loved this exercise. When I got in the car and looked at my teacher, a strong, solid looking race car driver named Don, he could sense my panic.
"We'll start out slow," Don said, "and build up speed with each exercise. For all the driving exercises throughout the day, make sure you get me as your instructor."
Don was a versatile teacher. With my husband, he found a kindred spirit, a guy who relished speed and acceleration. "Floor it!" he would shout to my husband as my husband zoomed the car around the driving course. But with me, Don was completely different. He would lean over toward me slowly and whisper, "Now give it a little gas."
By the end of the day, I was driving the car around slalom courses, making sharp turns around orange cones, perhaps not as fast as the others but far faster than I thought possible. As I rounded the course with each trial, I could see my kids jumping up and down, cheering on their old, slow-moving, cautious mom. On my first trial down the slalom course, I knocked over most of the cones; the second trail was better, and the third perfect. But I regressed a bit on the fourth.
"Should we drive back and pick up the cones that I knocked over?" I asked Don.
"Won't help." he answered. "You flattened them!"
I had to laugh.
During the course of the day, I asked Don and all the other race car drivers for their secret. I wanted to know where they looked while speeding their cars around the track. From all of them, I got the same answer.
"I look in the far distance," they said. "That way I can see the distant point and everything in front of and to the sides of it. I see it all."
Before I undertook optometric vision therapy, I would not have understood their answer to my question. Like many people with visual problems, I paid attention to only a portion of my visual field, in my case, to that which was up close, front, and center. My impression of a walk down a busy street used to be more like a series of discrete snapshots than a continuous flow. I was always getting lost and felt like Mr. Magoo or the character in the Beatles' song, "Nowhere Man" who "knows not where he's going to." With vision therapy I learned to look far and wide. Now when I drive, I see what's happening far in front of me and can anticipate where I need to go. I don't get lost so easily anymore. I'm no longer "Nowhere Man." Instead, I know where it is that I'm going.
(Note: You can read about my experiences with optometric vision therapy, as well as those of others, in my book, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions.)
