How My Vision Improved

I had worn progressive trifocals for some 25 years, even with extra computer glasses required, when suddenly one day I didn't need them any more, and haven't worn them since. The story of that experience is a separate matter from this, where a recent investigation (May 2025) - the occurrence happening a couple of years ago - in collaboration with the Google AI now called Gemini, which deduced the mechanism for the sudden improvement from my descriptions and the dates and times of significant events, whose correlation proved central to the analysis.

The interacting factors were 1) SSRI usage for some 30 years, 2) An angioplasty and stent to fix almost complete major aortic artery blockage, 3) Suddenly stopping the SSRIs due to my van breaking down and losing mobility in isolation. These are how those factors contributed:

The contribution of the SSRIs relates to a recent very large study of studies about the mechanism that sometimes makes SSRIs effective as anxiety and depression treatment that starts to kick-in after a month or so. The study determined that SSRI's were not restoring a serotonin out-of-balance equilibrium - which, as in other chemical imbalance situations controlled by medication, would happen right away not after a month - but they saw a structural change in the brain and overall improved neuro-plasticity as the mechanism for symptom relief. My interpretation of that is that improved brain neuro-plasticity is associated with improved adoption of and adaptation to new information that results in better learning and overall improved thinking; so SSRI's help when invalid thinking is the problem, as with delusion or paranoia, but it won't help when rational evaluations lead to anxiety or depression, since improved thinking will just reinforce the evaluation as justification for the feelings. That it takes months to be effective means that these effects accumulate - otherwise you could take one pill and be done. And I had been taking them in high doses for over 30 years, so consider the overall accumulation effects.
- My brain appears to have always had a naturally high degree of neuro-plasticity, given the range of accomplishments, from winning the Bank of America award for English in high school, to getting my degree in Math with a career in the most demanding highly technical fields, beginning with Nuclear Engineering then turning to software engineering in the aerospace environment (before starting the SSRIs) and concluding at NASA JSC.
After the stent, normal blood flow was restored all over my body, including to my brain. This acted as a catalyst to neural re-reorganization in a brain with high and magnified neuro-plasticity.
The timing of these incidents related to the sudden cessation of the daily SSRIs. When stopping the medication the brain has to adapt, and neural pathways naturally reorganize as a result.

The confluence of events led to a situation where the brain was forced to reorganize due to the stoppage of the SSRI's just when a brain with high neuro-plasticity and correspondingly high ability to reorganize received the catalyst of improved oxygen and nutrients due to restoring normal blood flow as a result of the angioplasty/stent. This induced a massive restructuring in the visual cortex, which adapted to counteract the physical distortions of my astigmatism and lifelong near-sightedness by processing these distortions into a clear picture. This reminds me of how the Hubble mirror was distorted when it first went up, and a complimentary camera mirror was engineered to precisely correct the telescope mirror distortions. My visual cortex figured out how to "undo" the distortions inherent in my eyes to produce clear vision in the same way.

My descriptions of how I reacted to this sudden change were consistent with this analysis as well, because it took me several days of feeling like "there was too much information" to process.. like a much higher pixel density in everything I looked at, but the adaptation after a few days was the natural response to this visual cortex reorganization, and the symptoms revealed the occurrence.

Based on my post-retirement theoretical physics and math work and the realizations of the last 2 years, this aligns with a "whole brain" restructuring and improvement just as in the visual cortex evidenced by my new ability to see clearly without corrective lenses, and is a likely explanation for the sudden improved analytical thinking - after a career that from the beginning demanded precise and accurate analysis for job success.

I think it fits all the pieces together nicely to explain how I got where I am today.