So I would think you can train your brain to process what you see underwater clearer with a lot of practice.
Just my amateur thoughts ....
I had a normal vision since I was born until I got an artificial lens in my right eye at 9 y.o. to deal with glaucoma caused by trauma. As you may guess, this new lens is not even close to the biological, as it has different elasticity and light refraction properties. The picture from my right eye is heavily abberrated, but my brain applies inverted abberation to the left eye's picture to have an almost perfect binocular vision. It wasn't like that on day 1 from operation, but progressed over a couple of years. Same thing with lens focus - it was 20/200 when I leaved the hospital, 20/30 after a year and 20/20 in two more, although the abberations couldn't be fixed.
I got the bright idea to have cataract surgery in my late 20's despite the cataract never really bothering me. While the sight in my left eye is now objectively "better", the surgery actually made my binocular vision worse because my brain isn't used to the new type and degree of aberration, and so doesn't yet know how to correct for it. I'm a few years out from the surgery and it's definitely better, but I kind of wish I'd left well enough alone.
I've tried to learn how to do this myself with very limited success. If I try to force my eyes to become blurry and then unblurry, I can notice some improvement in my ability to resolve images underwater. But this probably takes a lot of practice, and my lens is already starting to harden with age.
So the weird thing is that both my eyes have a visual acuity around 20/120 or worse; that’s with correction (glasses) and it depends on the day (tiredness/dryness/etc) — but having lived this way my entire life essentially, I find it REALLY difficult to describe what it’s like to people. People think things off in the distance must be ‘blurry’, but that’s not the case at all. It’s more like ‘less detailed’, like if you turn the resolution and texture detail down. It’s not like an unfocused lens at all. There are studies I’ve found that seem to back this up.
Another problem I have that’s related is a nystagmus - both my eyes oscillate involuntarily from side-to-side, separate from the normal saccades (rapid eye movements) that everyone has. You’d think I’d see the whole world oscillating from side to side - but I don’t at all. I don’t usually even notice these movements when I look in the mirror, though I can see them if I’m looking at a video of my own face.
That is, most of the time. There’s one really strange failure mode I’ve observed - PWM-controlled small LED lights or segment displays like on a digital clock, particularly if they’re red but green as well, in a dark room. If it’s dim enough that I can still dimly see what surrounds the display, I can sometimes notice the LED oscillating left and right, WHILE THE STUFF SURROUNDING IT STAYS STILL. It’s really freaking weird!
in short: the eye and brain are complicated!
If I look at the car's rear trunk lid and hold my eyes still for a few seconds, the raised brake light starts moving up! (Or down, I don't remember which direction right now, but I think it's always the same direction.)
And it's not like everything in my vision is moving with it, that one raised light is moving all by itself. And it keeps moving and moving in the same direction, but somehow stays in the same place.
It's a strange experience, almost like a Shepard Tone of vision.
The brain does an awful lot with blurry and outright missing data. Look at something in your peripheral vision and name the colour of it, that's the brain filing in information that your eyes can't see. We only have good eyesight in a surprisingly small region directly in front of us.
> The dividing line between near and mid peripheral vision at 30° radius is based on several features of visual performance. Visual acuity declines by about 50% every 2.5° from the center up to 30°, at which point visual acuity declines more steeply.[18] Color perception is strong at 20° but weak at 40°.[19] 30° is thus taken as the dividing line between adequate and poor color perception. In dark-adapted vision, light sensitivity corresponds to rod density, which peaks just at 18°. From 18° towards the center, rod density declines rapidly. From 18° away from the center, rod density declines more gradually, in a curve with distinct inflection points resulting in two humps. The outer edge of the second hump is at about 30°, and corresponds to the outer edge of good night vision. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_vision
That went away over time, even as my prescription became much more nearsighted (I'm almost 9 diopters now)
I do have less near focus with corrective lenses.
If you hooked a camera up to a newborn’s ears and microphones to their eyes, the baby would learn to see imagery though their ears and hear sounds through their optic nerve.
The data quality would be horrible, but they’d still see and hear.
It’s the structure of the world (and our relationship to it) that creates meaning in our minds, not the structure of our brain. Although our brain is structured to get clearer signals through certain parts.
For many on HN, that's the way they are used to thinking of imagery, as a big array containing information about how strongly a grid of sensors was stimulated.
Here are some examples to try:
I have lost the ability to hear people in bars, or the 200sqft tile room where the elevators are at work, or when people are holding multiple conversations in a conference room.
I'm fortunate that I was able to identify the problem and prevent it from getting worse. It's amazing how just a small amount of missing information has effectively broken the "noise canceling and directional isolation" "software" of my brain.
Hearing loss isnt so much an inability to hear "quiet" (despite how hearing tests are performed) as it is a los of dynamic range. By wearing earplugs you can lower the volume of all conversations and prevent "clipping", so to speak.
Try it! Next time you're having trouble hearing someone try to plug your ears with your fingers.
When we'd be out and loud music was playing and somebody couldn't hear what he was saying to them, he'd lean in, speak more softly and place a finger lightly on the front part of their ear (so as to not put his finger in their ear).
He was always much easier to understand one he had done that, and we all picked up the habit. We weren't sure if the finger acted as a conductor, or what the explanation was, but reducing the dynamic range seems like a really good explanation.
They work, but it's annoying wearing them in all the time. I also have Sony XM3 adjusted to reduce most (not full) noise with anc and that helps quite a bit as well.
Like all experimental psychology from the 60's and probably today, you might want to see if it's been replicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Stratton