Does the way you see affect your personality?

A few years ago, I decided to test the visual styles of the members of my family. We have a large, bulletin board that spans almost the entire length of our kitchen wall, and it is always cluttered with papers and pictures. So, one day, when my husband and kids were out of the house, I rearranged all the papers and then waited to see how they'd respond.

My son got home first. He came into the kitchen, immediately froze, frowned, and then asked me why I had bothered to reorganize the whole bulletin board. He has excellent vision for both far and near and is very observant in all ways, immediately picking up on the mood of people around him, quick on his feet with funny remarks, and a born engineer. He can look at any machine, take it apart, and easily put it back together again.

My husband came home an hour later. After some time, I asked him if he noticed anything new in the kitchen. He kept looking around and guessing at random, but it took lots of hints before he figured out what had changed. He has excellent far vision. As an astronaut, he used to fly high performance jets in formation, where, wingtip to wingtip, the jets were only four feet apart. My husband dreams big and lives out his dreams. Yet, even with his amazing eyesight, he cannot find anything that is located right in front of his nose. His gaze and thoughts are directed far away.

I have a friend who has lazy eye. She loves details and is an excellent scientist and proofreader but has trouble finding her way even in familiar places. Recently, she described to me a building she had passed every day for years but had only just noticed. Her experiences are very familiar to me for, having been cross-eyed most of my life, I've always been good at seeing what is located front and center but have been clueless about the greater surroundings. Until I rehabilitated by own vision through optometric vision therapy, I was always disoriented and constantly lost.

I just read a book by Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the ever popular I Love Lucy show. He explains that he had double vision throughout childhood but didn't realize that he saw double - or rather that other people saw single - until he was an adult. He wasn't any good at sports or school but found that he could make people laugh. If you see the world differently than most, he writes, then the commonplace can take on a certain ridiculousness.

Then there's my student who is wall-eyed and cannot look at anyone directly in the eye. Her answers to my questions whether in class or on written assignments are much more substantive and better thought out than most. I told her that I thought her faulty vision has made her a more analytical person. She has to think about things in advance because she can't trust her own vision to bring her the information fast enough.

So do visual skills help shape your personality? Do they help determine whether you are a dreamer, a scientist, a scholar, or a comic? I can sometimes predict how a person sees by their likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses, and the ways they behave.