Manual Control

A lot of the bodily functions are automatically controlled. That is, they work by themselves and aren't really something that comes to the forefront of one's attention on a daily basis. An example of this is how one's eyes focus. For now, I'm experimenting with my eyes and getting them to work at will, and it's been quite an interesting experience.

For one, I realize that the degree of light diffraction varies by the extent to which one opens one's eyes. For example, I see more astigmatic spikes from streetlights when I squint my eyes, as opposed to when I have them wide open.

And then there's the matter of eye focusing. Interestingly, eye focusing appears to be contrast detection based, so an object with higher contrast tends to be focused on more than one of lower contrast. For example, I can be on a bus with an ad on the windows. These ads are effectively black from the inside of the bus, with holes cut in a pattern that allows passengers to see through. This resultant mesh is relatively high contrast in certain situations, and low contrast in others. Hence, if I tried to discern a vehicle marking from close range, the eye tends to focus on the marking. If I tried it at a longer range, the comparative contrast of the mesh makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the vehicle's marking from then on.

After some experimenting with shifting focus along the length of a pencil near to the eye, I've managed to establish some control over how the eyes focus. So far I'm having some success in forcing the eye to focus past the mesh and on whatever it is that I intend to look at. Tiring on the eyes, unfortunately, but it's most likely something that'll become easier with practice.