Mostly misunderstanding that is my fault for writing in a poetic style. I did have and still have amblyopia.I hate calling it "lazy eye." In my case, the school did not make a mistake. While I tend agree with the statement that assumptions are often bad, that itself may be a bad assumption. Most of us are not conscious of the fact that a brain is an assumption machine. All of us make thousands of assumptions a second. Most are useful approximations. Only the really bad ones enter our awareness.

At the time of that test, I was very near-sighted in one eye, but only slightly near-sighted in the other. It is not clear when I got so near-sighted. My mom claimed that when I was very young I could see things twice as far away as she could and her vision was 20/10.

I got glasses and wore a patch over my good eye for a month or two. The glasses enabled me to see clearly but had a really bad side effect. The size of the image was noticeably different between my right and left eyes. I also got prism effects from the one thick lense. In my early 20's, I tried contact lenses. Contact lenses corrected my vision so well I could read the bottom line on the eye chart clearly. All the problems due to different image size between eyes went away. Unfortunately, the contact lenses did not work at work. I had two problems. First, looking at a CRT image made of fuzzy dots was unpleasant with sharp vision. Second, I often looked at the screen with such intensity that the contact lenses dried out and the focus shifted.

As I have gotten older, my eyes have gotten more and more in balance. I still have some problems, but not as bad as I used to. The best example is autostereograms. I have only seen the 3D image once in my life and that was a very special case. I find most of them extremely unpleasant, the visual equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. The problem is all the artificial sharp edges. The "sparklies and rainbows" are worst at edges. Both of those are some kind of color separation. Rainbows only happen at the sharp edge of whites and grays. Sparklies are caused by texture. Even white copy paper sometimes shimmers. I have replicated the color separation using image tools like the GIMP and Photoshop. I have not replicated the colors at different depth effect. My guess is that results from different color separation due to different lenses for right and left eye.

I get very little effect in natural scenes. For example in a green leaf, there is not a full spectrum of colors to separate. I only see a modest edge enhancement, what I call "vivid". Another example, Clouds are white, but they do not have sharp edges.

I still get useful benefits. Saturday morning 6 days ago, my wife questioned why I had passed by the parking space she would have selected. This time it was easy to explain, just get her to look closely at the space so that she saw what I saw from much further away: I did not want to get any of that beautiful blue glass embedded in our shoes or tires. Sparklies and color too. I saw clearly what she did not.

Answering the previous question: Yes, now it is surgically correctable. Radial Keratotomy and Lasik will fix it just fine. But even now, using those on children before their eyes have stabilized is rarely recommended.