Could vision therapy improve speedcubing, especially look-ahead?

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

I only have one "good" eye. My right eye I need to have prescription glasses for, but my left eye was 20/20 last time I had it checked. My right eye is like 20/25 I believe, I can't quite remember. My point is that I feel like I haven't reached my full potential of F2L yet (granted I'm stil a 16-17s on average [full solve]), but I feel like my eye condition isn't the case. I do feel however if somebody had a more sever medical condition, this could certainly be the case, but my best guess is that on average it is not.

You guys should have some fun with this. Try solving with only one eye open. Try solving with only the other eye open. Make it fun, do a an average of 20 or something each, not just a few solves (I was going to suggest average of 50 but figured that'd be far too much).

Find a way to blur your vision, but be careful with that. You don't want to make your eyes work too hard to focus on something and end up screwing up your vision. Certainly don't go wearing prescription glasses that aren't prescribed for you. Maybe put some sort of translucent plastic between your face and the cubes.

Try solving in lower light conditions. This should force you to slow down.

Find more fun little things like this and test your outcomes. Whatever you do, do the same number of solves in each "test."

As for actually getting faster, learn to have spacial recognition on the fly (ie knowing what R U R' does to the ULB corner) and you'll notice a nice drop in F2L times. Slow down to the point that when you make the last move of your insertion, you can immediately know what move you are going to make next. Getting to this point is the hardest for me. I find that in some of my solves I can do this for pairs 2-4 (first pair is always different of how fast I approach it since I sometimes see the pair during inspection and/or cross building, sometimes don't). If I can consistently get to the point where I can make the final insertion move and immediately jump to my next pair, I'd drop a minimum of 2 seconds from my F2L.

Example:

Setup Alg:
R' U' R U2 R' U' R2 U' R'

If you did R U R' (normal insert here) you'll notice you can cancel that R' out into an R2, because R' U R will build your pair, then U2 and insert into back right slot.

Setup:
R' U R U R' U2 R2 U' R'

If you do the normal insert of R U R', if leaves R' U2 R U' to setup the back right pair + insert, (R' U' R), you can have that R' of the first pair insertion and that R' of the next pair cancel out into an R2.

Find more examples like these and you will certainly drop your times.

I'm certainly by no means a master (or even good) at F2L, but I've found that when my recognition of knowing what a corner will look like after I do some moves, my F2L time drops significantly.

I don't intend on this being any sort of hijack, but I just wanted to make clear what I valued as more important in the F2L recognition look ahead, which I really don't feel like vision therapy would help too much of, unless (as stated earlier) a medical condition actually hindered vision.

You're talking about eyesight. I'm not talking about eye sight. I can see just fine with my glasses on. I can solve a Rubik's Cube just fine without my glasses too. Yes, it's ridiculously blurry because my EYESIGHT is horrible, but my times are only slightly worse without my glasses, with or without squinting.

I'm talking about visual processing. Look it up. And look up how vision therapy is used to correct visual processing problems and why visual processing problems would arise in a human being.

EDIT: But yes, I'll try out what you've told me to try, with the bad lighting and whatnot.

 

[Jorghi]

I understand it. But I don't think any of us have any idea about how the Brain works scientifically so we are all making basic observations. The only thing to do is practice.

I read the whole thing about what Vision Therapy is.. "inappropriate development of the "fusion center" of the brain"

Don't you think that many technology causes that????! Almost none of us have any answers lol.

"spending nearly all my time solely on improving my look-ahead"

You can't really improve look ahead that much. What about recognition?

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

I understand it. But I don't think any of us have any idea about how the Brain works scientifically so we are all making basic observations. The only thing to do is practice.

I read the whole thing about what Vision Therapy is.. "inappropriate development of the "fusion center" of the brain"

Don't you think that many technology causes that????! Almost none of us have any answers lol.

What causes it? Who knows? But I already have the problems. I care more about correcting it.

And yeah, I don't know much about how my brain works either. That's why I'm trying to learn about my brain by doing research projects like this. The more I learn about my brain, the easier it will be to learn techniques to enhance my mind.

Why not just consider the possibility that my eyes don't do what they're supposed to do, and that this is preventing my brain from processing the information? I'm not saying that it is. It's just a research project. The title is a hypothesis. Have I proved it? No. There's no reason to argue against it until more data has been collected it. But hypotheses are based off of observations. I'm observing two things in my life, and I'm wondering if the two are related. That's all. Nothing more.

You know the old saying: "Don't dis it before you try it." Wouldn't hurt to do a bit of research. I'll learn in the process. It's a learning experience, right?

EDIT: "inappropriate development of the 'fusion center' of the brain"? Sounds like that might make sense, if the fusion center is where sensory information is processed, but that doesn't explain the problem very well to you, does it? Maybe you should talk to an opthomologist too. He'd probably explain it better.

EDIT 2: Also, I want to go into pediatric neurology. Researching stuff like this is fun for me, and it won't give me any REAL experience in the lab, but it'll help me to be a bit better prepared for doing research in college. That's part of the reason why I do it.

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

"spending nearly all my time solely on improving my look-ahead"

You can't really improve look ahead that much. What about recognition?

Do you know the limits of the human mind? The possibilities are practically limitless. We humans only use about 10% of our brains (I'm not positive about that being the exact average percentage), but if we used 20% of our brains... Man, speedcubing would be a BREEZE. I'd be sub-5 seconds cuz I felt like it. We'd probably all understand God's algorithm perfectly well too.

EDIT: If we learned how to use even 2% extra of our brains, we could probably look-ahead without even trying to do so.

 

[Jorghi]

Do you know the limits of the human mind? The possibilities are practically limitless. We humans only use about 10% of our brains (I'm not positive about that being the exact average percentage), but if we used 20% of our brains... Man, speedcubing would be a BREEZE. I'd be sub-5 seconds cuz I felt like it. We'd probably all understand God's algorithm perfectly well too.

EDIT: If we learned how to use even 2% extra of our brains, we could probably look-ahead without even trying to do so.

O-o I don't even know why I am arguing with you o-o. Now I feel like Ubercuber.

Instead of wasting time following a Corner and edge making you have to slow your TPS tracking it all I do is focus on the entire cube so you can notice everything and whats happening so you can solve what you see first instead of having to track all the time.

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

O-o I don't even know why I am arguing with you o-o. Now I feel like Ubercuber.

Instead of wasting time following a Corner and edge making you have to slow your TPS tracking it all I do is focus on the entire cube so you can notice everything and whats happening so you can solve what you see first instead of having to track.

....... That sounds like a description of look ahead. In fact, that sounds like a description of REALLY ADVANCED look ahead. Looking at the whole cube and noticing everything (which is, at the least ALL the F2L pairs visible) is really hard, and is practically the same thing as look-ahead. Look-ahead is basically when you look around the cube while moving it so that you know what you're going to do next so that when you finish solving an F2L pair, you're not sitting there like a duck for a whole second or two trying to find two pieces. I can't solve for beans without look ahead. I'm glad I invested in it. That's how I pushed myself down from 20-sec avg.

EDIT: lolcensorshiplol. I typed a rather benign word, and it was censored, so I replaced it with "duck"... Understandable, but still kinda funny, especially when some pretty inappropriate things are posted on here every once in a while...

EDIT 2: And it's hard to focus on the whole cube with high TPS if you're not used to it and haven't worked up to watching the cube at that speed. To be able to find something immediately and NOT pause is so hard. That's like having to figure out what to do on one cube and then having someone hand you a new cube immediately and then ask you to start moving it at the same speed as soon as it reaches your hand and doing all the right moves too, or risk being killed. That's impossible. Your brain needs to do some processing of the colors on the cube. That takes at least a little bit of time.

 

[Jorghi]

Well I don't mean it like that "forcing to track all pairs". But just noticing whats happening. But its kinda easy I think. My F2L average is 12 seconds so I think I might need 7 to break sub 20.

@EDIT2: Not everyone starts with high TPS. Well people who are 12 and have low TPS then grow bigger hands to be 15 and get high TPS.

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

Well I don't mean it like that "forcing to track all pairs". But just noticing whats happening. But its kinda easy I think. My F2L average is 12 seconds so I think I might need 7 to break sub 20.

It's still kinda hard to "notice what's happening", whatever that's supposed to mean... Actually, I can't say that it's hard because I still don't see the difference between that and look-ahead. That sounds like learning look-ahead without slowing down.

EDIT: But if you can "notice what's happening" on the whole cube, then your brain's processing of peripherial visual information must be very good, which means you should be able to pretty easily learn how to speed read. Speed reading requires reading in chunks of words, or reading "entire ideas", you might say.

 

[Jorghi]

I suck at speed reading xD But I did this:
http://www.readingsoft.com/ and got 386 words per minute with 90% comprehension. But screw reading and all this junk!

Cubing is all that matters in cubing xD cya I'm gonna go cube xD

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

I suck at speed reading xD But I did this:
http://www.readingsoft.com/ and got 386 words per minute with 90% comprehension. But screw reading and all this junk!

Cubing is all that matters in cubing xD cya I'm gonna go cube xD

I'm sorry, did I sound really stupid in that argument? I don't mean to. I'm just trying to figure out what you meant... but yeah, let's end it right there, because I probably won't be understanding what you mean any time soon...

 

[uberCuber]

Sorry for the off-topicish post, but, Jorghi, if you know so much about this "better" form of lookahead you are talking about, why aren't you sub-15? It doesn't require high TPS at all to be sub-15, so you can't make that as an excuse; all you need is lookahead.

 

[tozies24]

Sorry for the off-topicish post, but, Jorghi, if you know so much about this "better" form of lookahead you are talking about, why aren't you sub-15? It doesn't require high TPS at all to be sub-15, so you can't make that as an excuse; all you need is lookahead.

It's cuz his last layer xD is 15 seconds xD xD xD xD

 

[Andrew Ricci]

You have totally misunderstood the entire thread. Please understand the situation BEFORE you comment.

You say that anyone who disagrees with you doesn't "understand the point of the thread" even though most of the people you said this to were making legitimate points. Just because someone doesn't think what you're saying has an effect on cubing doesn't mean they automatically don't know what you're talking about.

And was Jorghi really BS-ing? Then great. Whatever. I really don't care. He probably misunderstood the subject too, but I seriously don't care. I hope you guys have fun laughing together.

What does me telling you that Jorghi has absolutely no idea what he's talking about have to do with any of this? Now you're just making assumptions that have no backing at all.

Finally, why did you mention all of the other stuff, like intelligence and eyesight, in the first place? Why not just post the main point of this thread? It would certainly help make your point easier and avoid any confusion over what this thread is supposed to be about.

 

[5BLD]

Sigh ...jorghi just likes to make unjustified assumptions/statements that are most of the time wrong. Don't bother flaming him or replying to him... Lets just ignore him.

By the way, the point of this thread is doing an experiment. No point saying that this is BS, or, even saying it's completely true and works.
The idea of the experiment is to experiment, so we need to experiment and THEN find the results.

 

[DaKrazedKyubizt]

You say that anyone who disagrees with you doesn't "understand the point of the thread" even though most of the people you said this to were making legitimate points. Just because someone doesn't think what you're saying has an effect on cubing doesn't mean they automatically don't know what you're talking about.

You didn't listen to me. Never mind. Don't worry about it. And there's nothing to disagree with. No actual argument has been made. I didn't try to prove anything yet. I don't have anything to back it up. It's still just a hypothesis.

I did not disagree with you. I only said that you misunderstood the thread. You mixed up eyesight with visual processing. You just weren't fully understanding what I was researching, as far as I can tell. Or maybe you misspoke. Or maybe I misspoke. Or maybe both of us misspoke. I don't know. But that's sure what it looked like to me.

What does me telling you that Jorghi has absolutely no idea what he's talking about have to do with any of this? Now you're just making assumptions that have no backing at all.

I always thought the definition of BS-ing was lying just to make someone believe something for the heck of it (like a more subtle form of trolling), not pretending to understand the topic. I guess I misunderstood you there.

In high school, I lived with someone who BS-ed to me a lot, so I always thought that the way he did it was the definition of BS-ing. I guess it's not. Or maybe there's two definitions? I guess my experiences built an incorrect definition in my mind. Dearest apologies.

Finally, why did you mention all of the other stuff, like intelligence and eyesight, in the first place? Why not just post the main point of this thread? It would certainly help make your point easier and avoid any confusion over what this thread is supposed to be about.

You want me to remove some more stuff? Sure. I can do that, if it'll make the thread less confusing.

EDIT: Okay, I think I fixed it. Is it less confusing now? Does it make sense? I'm trying to make progress, and I could use a good opinion. Thanks.

 

[Kirjava]

Blaming lack of improvement on specific things outside of your control just sounds like an excuse to me.

 

[Carrot]

Yay autism. I'm have Asperger's Syndrome. We could be autism buddies!

Can I join please? (PDD-NOS)

 

[chrissyD]

Can I join please? (PDD-NOS)

of course

 

[michaelfivez]

"Feliks, I wonder how you fast can read. If you're reading this Feliks, could you please tell us how fast you can read? (I'm pretty sure I saw an book of the Eragon series in one of your videos... or was that somebody else?) And how about the other top notchers? Morten? Erik? Harris? Anthony? Rowe? Luigi? Anyone else in the top 100 or so that I have forgotten? How fast can you guys read? "

Having read a book of Eragon or whatever doesn't say that you are a good reader, there are a lot of 6-8 year olds who read books of 1000 pages (like lord of the rings).

But I think reading fast has to do with practice, so if someone is good at reading it just says something about how much he has practiced it. I read prety fast but that is because I read a lot, often before I go to sleep I read from 11-12 till 2-3am.
(I got 500wpm at your test but only 65% accuracy, but keep in mind that English is not my primary language, I actually speak 3 languages better then English)