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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 3670397, member: 112&quot;][USER=92655]@Randy Abercrombie[/USER]&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Randy I think there&#039;s 2 questions in your original post. 1 - how does one avoid missing things on coins ?&nbsp; And 2 - how does one train his/her eyes. Now I&#039;ll grant you that the 2nd can be and probably often is done in order to accomplish the 1st - but I see them as two different things. I also think the 1st is much easier than the 2nd. </p><p><br /></p><p>So on to the 1st, and if memory serves correctly I got this from Q. D. Bowers long enough ago that I can&#039;t remember exactly when. Start by looking at a coin in a circle, a circular pattern I guess would be better way of putting it. Look at the outside edge, just the outside edge, call it the rim if that helps ya understand what I mean, but also realize that sometimes the rim is not just not the outside edge, sometimes there isn&#039;t even a rim there, and go all the way around the coin focusing only that tiny little bit of the coin, and only one tiny piece of that little bit, at a time. Ignore everything else, don&#039;t even look at it, while you&#039;re doing this. When that&#039;s done, then work your way inwards, looking at the next tiny (in width) strip of the coin. And focus intensely on just tiny bits of that next strip, and all the way around the coin. Simply put you work your way inwards in tiny bits and pieces, always in a circle. And along the way you always make note of everything ya see. </p><p><br /></p><p>Now if circles are a problem for ya then you can do the same thing in lines, just like you&#039;re reading this text - your eyes automatically move that way anyhow because they&#039;re so used to it. But everybody&#039;d mind works differently, circles work best for me, and that&#039;s what was originally suggested. With me, if I work in lines my eyes tend to drift, they wanna jump down so I just don&#039;t do it that way.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyhow, don&#039;t look at the coin as a whole until you get all this completed. Along the way you&#039;ll pick up any and all flaws because you&#039;re only focusing on tiny little pieces. And so when you look at the coin as a whole, all of this will come back to you collate into the whole.</p><p><br /></p><p>The reason I say this is the easier of the two things is because all you&#039;re doing is forming a habit, the habit of always looking at a coin in this specific way. And once you&#039;ve done it enough times, like all habits, you just do it automatically without ever thinking about. And it&#039;s easy to do because every single one of us has a thousand different habits, though not everybody realizes they have all these habits, but we do.</p><p><br /></p><p>Training the eyes, as I said that&#039;s a different thing to me because what you&#039;re doing is really training your brain - your eyes are just the tools that allow your brain to do everything else. But to train your brain to recognize things when you see them you must first acquire a good bit of knowledge, about many different things. Because if it&#039;s something you haven&#039;t seen before or don&#039;t know what it is then you simply aint gonna see it ! Your eyes&#039;ll go right past it not even realizing it&#039;s there. And that&#039;s what makes this the hard part. There&#039;s hundreds of things about coins and you have to know what each and every one looks like, and how they vary, why they vary, even if they can vary - but almost everything can, stress almost. Some things simply can&#039;t, don&#039;t and won&#039;t. It&#039;s the acquisition of the knowledge that is the real training - not the training if the eyes. Your eyes&#039;ll see it automatically, once you know what it is you&#039;re looking at - what your eyes are seeing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Once your eyes/brain are/is trained you&#039;ll be see things at a glance that you never saw before. This is why people who really know how to grade can grade a coin, accurately and correctly, in 5 or 6 seconds while the average person is gonna spend minutes maybe tens of minutes, grading a coin. And because they can&#039;t do it in mere seconds, and they believe they do know how to grade a coin, they doubt the ability of somebody else to do it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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