Optometry Vision Therapy Center
 

Eye Teaming

Helping Both Eyes Work Together as a Coordinated, Powerful Team

What is Eye Teaming?

Eye teaming, also known as binocularity, is the crucial visual skill that allows both of our eyes to coordinate and work together seamlessly. Each eye captures a slightly different image of the world. In order to see a single, clear, three-dimensional image, the brain must precisely control six muscles around each eye, directing them to point at the same target at the same time.

When this intricate system works well, our vision is sharp, single, and rich with depth perception.

What Happens When Eye Teaming Breaks Down?

When the brain struggles to accurately coordinate the eyes, it can lead to a range of challenging and disruptive symptoms. Even without a noticeable eye turn, small inefficiencies can force the brain and eyes to work much harder than they should. This constant effort can lead to headaches, quick fatigue with near work, eyestrain, fluctuating or blurred vision, and even double vision.

Common eye teaming problems we treat include:

  • Convergence Insufficiency: The eyes struggle to maintain proper teaming when looking at a near object, like a book or a screen. This can cause significant strain during reading and schoolwork.
  • Convergence Excess: The eyes have difficulty relaxing their teaming, or they tend to over-converge and point inward more than necessary, which can also cause eyestrain and headaches.
  • Strabismus (Eye Turn): In more pronounced cases, the eyes are visibly misaligned, with one eye turning in, out, up, or down. This significantly impacts depth perception and can lead to the brain suppressing, or "turning off," the image from one eye to avoid double vision.

How Vision Therapy Improves Eye Teaming

The goal of vision therapy is to train the brain to coordinate the eyes so they align accurately and automatically, without the constant effort needed to compensate for an inefficiency. Through a personalized program of activities and exercises, we can strengthen the eye-brain connection and improve the entire visual system.

By making eye teaming more automatic, we can help make reading and other visual tasks more comfortable and efficient. This frees up more mental energy to be spent on comprehending and engaging with the material, rather than just struggling to see it clearly.