Has anyone tried learning with separate eyes? I read something somewhere (but forgotten what or where) about covering the left eye while learning right hand and then covering the right eye while learning the left hand. Then have both eyes uncovered to put the two hands together. Anyone tried it - does it work?

If I covered my right eye I wouldn't be able to read the music.
My left eye isn't much use on it's own even with correctional lenses.

Umm - I have just been put into reading glasses for the first time in my life (in my 40s) because when I went for my test the optician said my right eye used to be bad but it is now worse! I asked why and he said 'well you are 4* now, what do you expect'......!
Staring at a computer monitor is probably not helping.

Anyway I might try your experiment and see how it affects my sight-reading. Practising with separate ears might also be an interesting exercise, or trying to play the piano with gloves on!

My piano teacher once made me play sitting under the grand piano with my back to the pedals, reaching up above my head while he held the music. It felt sort of upside down and inside out.... I was a poor sight reader but it felt much easier once he let me play normally again!

Brilliant - maybe I should try that! Judging by my attemtps to follow advice given in an earlier thread, I am trying the 'a hymn a day helps you see, read and play' routine but my rendition of Abide with me would have any listener running in the opposite direction.

I tried this briefly - I have a weird perception problem and the lines seem to jumble -
and I wondered if it was the eyes doing different things, or perhaps the hemispheres
processing at different speeds which is one theory about dyslexia except my problem relates
solely to music notation.

Not convinced such a method does anything unless you have zero peripheral vision.

Incidentally since you write about sightreading problem, I found the children's books
"Playing with Colour" incredibly helpful, it has somehow sorted out my processing of
music notation on 2 staves.

I don't get it, what would be the benefit of doing this?

I think it is meant to make learning and memorising easier but I suspect to do it properly you would need something to patch the eye not in use as trying to cover with the hand is a bit odd.

Sounds really interesting - I'm going to give it a go! I think it might actually be very helpful for me.



Wow, that must've felt so strange!? How did you get on? I bet it was hard?! It's great when you do something which is much harder, so that when you go back to what you were doing, it seems so much easier!

I don’t think it would make any difference for me since my eyes apparently work separately and my brain compensates (what else !). When I was six I got sent to the « eye hospital » for exercises to train my eyes to work together. They said I could have an operation to stop me squinting but my parents declined as it might have made me see double. The exercises got dropped too as my mother got fed up with me being sick on the weekly nine mile bus trip. I still squint when very tired.

I was told I would never be able to see 3D at the cinema but I can. Only when I look through binoculars I see 2 circles instead of one.

Aren't eyes wonderful things!!

From my breif (IE explorer which I am being forced to use refuses to let me spell it correctly) studies of NLP, I can say that it would work if one hand used the left brain and the other used the right but it doesn't really work like that and seems like something that someone with a little understanding of it might come up with.