How do you strenghten your vision/hearing?

[saltydeath]

Does anyone know of any good drills to strengthen your sight and hearing for martial arts awareness? I'd like to hear some ideas.

[David Jamieson]

eye and ear ups.

lol

seriously though, spend time listening and observing.
Do your best to be as completely aware as possible of a given item, object or scene.

pay attention to your surroundings.

be aware.

turn off the chatter in your head when you are practicing this. Willfully turn that mind chatter off and pay attention to what you are doing. You will eventually get a state where you can quickly observe or give a quick listen and pick out a threat.

If however you have vision or hearing impediments due to genetic weakness then you can still do the same thing.

other ways to heighten sense are by cutting off their counterparts.

IE: to improve hearing and sense of smell and touch, blindfold yourself and operate in that state for an hour. Do this exercise with regularity and you will refine the senses that replace the loss of your vision.

For seeing, you simply need to practice really observing.

[冠木侍]

I'm still trying to make my ears move. One step at a time is the old saying.

[mickey]

Greetings,

For eyes, try playing handball.

mickey

[uki]

i get glasses and buy a hearing aide.

[IronFist]

I used to be a hockey goalie and read some "eye training drills" in a book when I as a kid.

Basically I think you just like would look at one corner in a room, and then quickly move to the next corner, down, up, back, wherever. I think also alternate focusing on things that are close to you and things that are far away from you and back to things that are close to you.

Your eyes are muscles and can possibly be trained like any other muscle.

So I used to do those exercises when I was a kid and now I'm 27 and still have 20/20 vision.

Then again, my parents also had 20/20 vision until they were in their late 40s/50s, and then just got reading glasses.

I don't know anything about it, tho. That book I had was from the 70s so it could have just been something some hockey coach made up to sound smart or fill pages.


RE: ears. Uh... keep them clean and don't listen to too much loud music. I'm pretty sure with ears all you can do is prevent them from degrading. Not sure you can do much to improve them. I could be wrong. Maybe listening to complicated music allows your ears to "hear" more things at once. I think a case could be made that musicians may be able to detect more subtle audio changes than non musicians, as their brains/ears have been conditioned a certain way.

[taai gihk yahn]

it's not only the function of the physical structures of the eyes / ears that you need to consider, which I guess could be considered as acuity, but the aspect of the incoming sensory info that your brain has to process and decide what to do with; obviously both are necessary;

if you are interested in a variety of visual processing (as well as some acuity) exercises, try some of what you find here - it's what is used for kids w/visual processing / oculomotor dysfunction

for auditory, most of what you find on-line are adverts for programs you can purchase to improve auditory memory / processing; for acuity, trying to discern low volume sounds, or sounds at the edge of the discernible pitch spectrum;

spending a day in "the woods" would be good for all of the above as well;

another thing to consider "training" - spend an entire day without speaking (according to TCM, this preserves "shen"...)

[inic]

Hearing - Learn an instrument. I started learning violin a few months ago and my ears are starting to pick up on sounds I never noticed before. I can now start to noticed differences in pitches/notes of sounds too.

Vision - PLEASE ignore anyone that says anything about reading in the dark or doing anything in the dark. Go read some anatomy on how the eye works and focuses. Talk to an eye doctor too. I don't think it's possible to improve how much your eye can focus, BUT you can improve the response time that your eye picks up movement and colors. First person shooter games have shown to improve this alot. I do boxing and my greatest strength is my response time to punches coming to my face. I see almost every punch coming to me, which is actually rare in boxing. I'm pretty positive this skill game came from my endless hours of playing shooter games (GO TEAM FORTRESS 2!). If you look at the current shooter games like FEAR and HALO3, the average person will not even be able to keep up visually with what's going on. But watch the good gamers and how fast their eyes spot things and how fast they can respond. Go compare the original Doom with Halo3 or FEAR, and see how fast they make games now. I wonder how fast shooter games will be in the future. Interesting to see how far we can push the eye->brain->body response time.

[iron_leg_dave]

Also, make sure your eyes are looking where they are supposed to be looking throughout your sequences.

The 8 pieces of brocade has this one too:

Stand in a soft horse stance with your hands at your abdomen with both palms up and look down at ground about 10 feet/3 meters in front of you. Really look at the ground. Breath in, and as you breath out start looking to the left in a circular line at the floor as you turn your head as far as you can comfortably, while trying to look at the floor behind you at peak exhalation. Start breathing in, as you trace your eyes back to the spot in the front, and do you same thing to the right. Nince times each way.

You must not move anything but the head and eyes, think of "energy at the top of the head" or a good 'straight' but relaxed spine and an upright head position.

[uki]

sometimes i watch the rising sun... the old masters could gaze at the sun at it's zenith. a more comical incident was one day i was chipping stone and a piece flew up and hit my eye, yet it improved my vision somewhat due to the way it cut... the eye doctor told me i was lucky, but it does in fact happen in the freakish of incidents.

[saltydeath]

[QUOTE=for auditory, most of what you find on-line are adverts for programs you can purchase to improve auditory memory / processing; for acuity, trying to discern low volume sounds, or sounds at the edge of the discernible pitch spectrum[/QUOTE]

Do you have any links to these sites?

[TenTigers]

sometimes i watch the rising sun... the old masters could gaze at the sun at it's zenith. a more comical incident was one day i was chipping stone and a piece flew up and hit my eye, yet it improved my vision somewhat due to the way it cut... the eye doctor told me i was lucky, but it does in fact happen in the freakish of incidents.

you should never stare directly at the sun for more than a few minutes.



I got my eye gouged in a tournament-had a lacerated cornia. Funny thing is, when it healed, the eyesigt was better in that eye than the other.