Experts on How to Improve Your Vision Naturally | 1196 | Dave Asprey

So many people said, don't strain your eyes. Don't read like Abe Lincoln under the firelight and candlelight. You have to have super bright light and big print, like a fluffy pillow for your eyes. You like fine print? Why?

Yeah, because it actually requires you to relax. And again, this is kind of the symptomatic treatment as I see people with phones and the text is on the super enlarged size, like humongous letters, and it allows you to strain. And again, now you can read the text, but you're using bad habits.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You talked about palming, which is one of those really important things. And. But palming is only one of the three big things you talk about to have a healthy mind and healthy vision. Can you tell me the big three? And let's get into palming. What is, what that is?

Well, so the, the big three, I mean, there's. It can come up with list of 5 and 7, but big 3 is really light rest and movement. So the eyes need rest. That is calming. We need sunlight. And I know you're big on sunlight too. We do need natural light. And there's so many studies now, and I think even traditional medicine, whatever you want to call it, have now realized that sunlight is not as bad as we thought it would be. And then movement, the really, really important piece of good vision is movement. Your eyes are basically moving all the time if you have good vision. If you don't have good vision, you're probably trying to, to stop movement from happening. So those are the big three.

Okay. So it's how you move your eyes or your body or both.

Both. Really. Both. I mean, the eyes make these little vibrational movements called saccadic eye movements. And much like blinking and breathing, they can be improved with practices that, you know, I teach or that are part of the Bates method. However, you do them automatically and they're very. They're like very like. They're the heartbeat of the eyes, except that we want them to be fast, we want the heartbeat to be usually slow. But yeah, it's. People with poor vision have a habit of trying to see. Now we're getting a little bit into the anatomy, but they're trying to see a big area clear at once. And our fovea, which is the teeny tiny part in the retina where we have perfect clear vision, is about the size of a pinhead. So when I look at you on the screen here and I look at your right eye, Yes, I can see everything else in my room. But I cannot see your left eye as clear as your right eye, so I would have to shift my attention. So, yes, you definitely want to move your body, you know, with your eyes. And that's also connected to astigmatism. You mentioned that earlier that you had astigmatism. So there's a research that was done in the 80s, actually, with when people habitually move their eyes in one direction without moving their head along. That's the axis of astigmatism that you develop. And you can maybe look in your prescription, everybody listening, and see what kind of axis you have in your. And your astigmatism, which is the. In your prescription, if it says axis and cylinder, you have astigmatism.

Interesting. So it's all about proper movement of the eyes. I've done a couple episodes recently on functional movement of your feet or of your body, and it turns out functional movement of your eyes is probably more important than either one of those. And. But they're integrally linked. When I changed how I moved my eyes, it changed how I move my body kind of automatically, which was a little bit surprising. And that's why some of the exercises, I thought sounded really stupid, because they involved a physical movement and, you know, closing your eyes or. Or palming your eyes. I think I'm like, why am I doing this? This guy making me move like a clown here. But, you know, it's like, why am I exhausted for six hours after my eye training? Because my brain was rewiring itself. So it was. It was really profound stuff that's hard to talk about without having you on the show as an expert. So we have rest, we have light, we have movement. Let's talk about some techniques that people can use to give their eyes real rest. What's your favorite?

Well, palming is kind of the. The key component of the Bates method. And so that's what I recommend. And that works a lot of people to just lubricate your eyes to feel more refreshed and rejuvenated. And do you want me to demonstrate it or just talk it through?

Criticize my technique. I'll explain what I'm doing. I want you to tell me what I'm doing wrong. All right? Okay. So first thing I'm doing is I'm warming up my hands by rubbing them together. The. The tea master guys like Dr. Barry would be happy with that. And then I'm going to put them. After they're warm, I'm going to put them over my eyes. I'M cupping my eyes. So I'm not touching my eyes. I'm making a little cup over them. And if I open my eyes, I can't see even a tiny bit of light. And if I close my eyes, I can't see that. And then if I wasn't talking, I would take a couple deep breaths. How do I do that?

Sounds good. I would probably cross my hands a little bit more over the forehead so that your nose has a little bit more space. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there you go.

You know what? I've always not crossed my hands until you just taught me that. Thank you. See, I knew there was something you learn here. So this is kind of a cool look. Like, take a screenshot. So, yes, I look a little ridiculous. I have done this in board meetings and people like, what are you doing? Like, restoring my vision. How long should you have your hands over your eyes to make it work?

See, this is a question. I always say it depends. You can do it as long as you want, and you can do it for a minute or just a couple of breaths. Everybody is different. And I noticed, for instance, in my own vision journey, when I did it in the morning, it took me just a minute for my eyes to feel really fresh and lubricated. In the evening, it took me sometimes 30 minutes because I used to work as a designer, you know, in a job I didn't like in a stressful environment, and I was just tired at the end of the day. So it depends. Some people do best with, like, five times one minute, five times a day for one minute. And other people do best with one little bit longer session.

I like to do when I'm driving. Is that a good idea?

That's a great idea. If you're in the backseat, yes.

Actually, here's a suggestion. I'm going to let you guys in on my real biohacking secrets. When you go in and use the bathroom, you're probably going through Instagram, which is slowly rotting your mind away.

But.

Or instead of having to wash your phone, like, you have to wash your hands when you're done going to the bathroom, you could just palm your eyes for a minute and see how much better your so much better your eyes get when you're in the Oval Office, so to speak.

Oh, my God. I love David. That's awesome, Dave.

That's great.

Because Iris is teaching an episode on habits, and I said how you can combine habits. You're already doing, like, going to the bathroom. So I coined, like, pee and palm.

I love it. Key and pom. It's another one of the unfair advantages that women have.

You can do toothbrush, like brush and blink. You know, when you brush your teeth, like combine some things that you're already doing and just remind yourself, oh, this is a great time to do some like quick butterfly blinking or something.

I'm feeling sort of left out because if I tried to do palming while I was peeing, I could only cover one eye. It's just. It doesn't work the way it does for you.

So let's sit down.

I need. Oh, I could sit down. That's too easy. I need government support for this problem. Come on, guys. This is at least $1,000 a month in inflation of our currency that I should get. I mean, come on now. That was palming. And we talked about how long do at least a couple breaths, maybe a minute. And if you do it for a minute, it's kind of interesting. Your mind can wander and like, how are my eyes? And you really focus on your eyes and focus on your breath. And I, I do this sometimes as part of meditation practice. It. It's a real thing. And if I'm like in a big box store or at movie theaters now have LED lights behind the projector and they're really between the jerky cameras and the blinking lights that you can't see that are blinking, that are very rich and blurry. My eyes get tired in something like that. So I'll palm my eyes in the middle of a movie during the boring parts, you know, where there's kissing and stuff. Ew, gross. Just kidding.

But I thought, you know, I do want to say really important with palming is too, that your mind is. You know, I had a client, she always listen to CNN during the 2016 debates. And like, you want your mind to relax. So I always say think of. You can definitely observe your breath or something like that or just like. Like I do at a meditation as well. Right. But you can also just bring up a happy memory. Like something where you know, you're like, oh, yeah, like, imagine you're at the beach or you're at a favorite place or with a favorite person. So you want your mind to be. You want to relax your mind. Because if your mind is stressed or thinking about all the stuff you have to do, you're not going to get the same results.

You've probably heard that eating fish is good for you. That's because it has fish oil that has things like EPA and DHA that are good for your heart, your brain, your eyes. Problem is that fish is full of toxins. And that also means that a lot of fish oil supplements have those same toxins. If you're doing what I'm doing, which is eating less fish and taking more Omega 3 supplements, you want to minimize exposure to contaminants in your Omega 3 supplements. So check out Puree's O3 Ultra Pure Fish oil because it is fresh, it's pure, and it's really potent. I like it because there's full transparency with all of their products, including O3 fish oil. It's third party tested by the Clean Label Project and IFOs, approved to be free of more than 200 contaminants. The actual data behind every batch is there online. So you know you're getting clean fish oil that's good for all these different systems in your body. And because you listen to the show, you get 20 off site wide, including on already discounted subscriptions, which means it's about a third off. So you save money, you don't have to eat as much fish and you get way less toxins and you get way more benefits. Go to puri.com Dave it's P-U-O-R-I.com Dave and use promo code Dave. P-U-O-R dash I dot com Dave quite often you get exposed to a neurotoxin, your vision changes. There's something called a visual contrast sensitivity test, which you can get at certain eye doctors. And it measures. Can you, can you see the difference between these 64 shades of gray? And if your nervous system is dialed in, you can see it. And if it's not dialed in, you can't see it. And they all look the same to you, or you don't see any gray at all and it's totally invisible to your conscious mind. But when you say A versus B. Oh, what the heck. So this is used to diagnose environmental toxins. And I have seen people, including me, like I do something wrong biologically, the next day, I'm not 2015. One eye or both eyes may be blurry. And then I've even had times where, wow, that fine print is off. That's weird. But it gets better when you remove toxins and you increase mitochondrial function. Right. So some of this may be that. So when you had this sudden appearance of, you know, of nearsightedness, did you move into a new house? Was there any environmental change that would have changed the toxic load on your body?

Not that I'm aware of. I'm trying to line it up with like when it happened? Yeah, nothing that I'm conscious of.

Okay. Do you practice dimming your lights at night?

I have been for maybe like the last couple months, so I haven't been.

Okay, so it's a new practice for you?

Yeah.

I'm seeing more and more problems with just eye overuse. Your eyes are not meant to see bright lights at night. It's like candles, fireplace or fireflies and stars and the moon once a month. That's, that's the entire history of our species until recently. So dimming those lights, it takes time. Replacing crappy lights is a good thing. And you're in your podcast studio, right? Right.

Yep.

What's shining on you right now to make you look so beautiful?

Yeah, we got some pretty bright lights shining on me right now.

And they're LED lights, right?

I believe so, yeah.

So they're kind of flat panels, kind of bright, harsh light. Okay. How much time do you spend under those lights every week?

Quite a bit.

Okay. You wondering why your eyes are having problems? Okay. Very bright pinpoint sources like those, they actually cause skin aging in addition to eye aging. So there's people who I actually support who will say, wear sunscreen indoors or long sleeves to avoid tissue aging from harsh LED lights, especially studio lights. Now sunscreen is generally not good for you because of its hormone disruptors and all that. So this is mineral type of sunscreen. That, that isn't the harmful stuff I'm talking about. Or maybe paba, the B vitamin based stuff. So what I'm doing that's different than you is I have 120 watt halogen over there and 120 watt halogen over there. In front of them is a diffuser screen. So basically my eyes are seeing two sun shaped orbs about this big. They call it a diffuser screen from Amazon. For some amount of money at least put that in front of your LEDs. But your life will change if you just get halogen. Yeah, they're hotter and they use more power and you need to change the bulb every now and then. Who cares? It's $100 lamp. But halogen makes a huge difference because it's warm and because there's, there's infrared light in it. The other thing you can do to, to, to chill your eyes out a bit. Having a red LED light on somewhere makes a, a really big difference for you, even if it's just behind your monitor. So you're just changing the ratio of this bright stuff. The eyes are expecting the rainbow of spectrum and heat to come from Light there should always be outdoors in the sun. There's heat and light together. When you get light without heat, the eyes actually don't turn on some of the healing stuff they should do. But I don't think you're going to turn on a radiant heater. I certainly don't do that. But if you look behind me there, see that red light that just came on behind me? Yep. At night those things are on. And I have something similar behind my monitor so that there's just a little bit of a red glow. Okay. You'd be like, Dave, you're the biggest nerd ever. Look, you're on a low carb diet, right? It's because too many carbs do bad things to you. Okay?

Absolutely.

I'm suggesting you need to change the ratio of red light to blue light and infrared light in your life the same way you did with your food. And that when you do that, it's going to create long term advantage for you. Okay. It's not as crazy as it sounds when you look at it through that lens. Right? Right. Okay. The next thing I want to do is go back to that training I did. The stuff I learned from Meyer Schneier. We talked about that resting of your eyes. They call that eye cupping. And guys, you can Google Bates method. You can look at Meyer Schneier's book M E I E R S C H N E I R. One of the more inspiring books ever. You realize what this guy went through to retrain his brain? It's nuts. And it is tiring to do brain training. I have 40 years of Zen that does that. But training your eyes is just as tiring. So I brought something for you. This is actually left over from my eye training. Years ago I would refer you guys, but the guy who did that is not there anymore. Like they don't do that. So what I have. And a functional eye doctor or someone who does neurological eye training or a developmental ophthalmologist can do this. Can you see these little letters?

I cannot.

Well, that's because you have eye vision problems. Right. It might be a camera issue. It's just like a grid you would use for searching out a word finding game that you'd find, but they're pretty darn small. And I have a smaller one and a bigger one. So what you do with the near sighted training or, sorry, the farsighted training is to train your up close vision. You have these really, really awesome little things. There are lenses that have different levels of focus, kind of like readers Right. But if you wear readers all the time or corrective lenses all the time, your eyes get weaker and weaker by design. Now, every eye doctor who recommends glasses. How dare you say this, Dave, Don't. You know, guys, I have some information that you may not have. And yes, I wore glasses for the first, whatever, 20, for at least 15, 17 years of my life. I haven't needed them ever since. And I know dozens of other people who've been able to train their eyes. You can say it's impossible. I have evidence that it's possible. One of us is right, and one of us probably is wearing glasses. So there you go. Right? And this doesn't mean everyone can do it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't wear glasses. Just saying that if you put on progressively stronger readers, you do what most people do. Oh, like I'm just gonna walk with a crutch all the time. And, well, eventually you kind of need the crutch, and then you get a walker, right? And then you get a wheelchair, and it's a progressive decline. But if you're injured, you need the crutch for a little while, and that's okay. So what you do with these things is you look at the finest one you can see, and then you have the corrective one, Then you turn it over, which makes your eyes go in, out, in, out, in, out. And you get really tired and probably yell at people around you because your brain's really hating life. Okay, before that, training, not having toxins and having stuff that increases your mitochondrial function. I don't know, little mct, Oils, coffee, you know, and all the other stuff you might do, even doing breathing exercises, maybe some wim hof, whatever you like. Anything's going to charge you up, but you can actually do this. And you can order these kinds of lens things online. But honestly, find a developmental ophthalmologist or a neurological ophthalmologist. Call them up. Say, can you train my eyes? You actually do the same amount of effort you put into getting arms as big as tree trunks. You put it into having eyes that can be flexible like that. And that's a big part of this. It's like you've been training so much of your body for so long that these guys haven't been trained. And you've increased the load on them a lot without any recovery time because of the shift in your studio lighting. And, okay, without studio lighting. We have a history of people needing readers, but not as early as you. If you've been listening to the human Upgrade for even a little while, you know that alcohol isn't good for you. Also, if you're like 99% of people out there, you probably do drink on occasion because it's a social experience and it tastes good and let's face it, it feels good. So what do you do about it? Well, the thing I'm most excited about is a product called Zbiotics, because Zbiotics makes a genetically engineered probiotic drink. And you have this before you have alcohol. And for the next 24 hours, it helps to protect you from the toxic breakdown of alcohol. And it's genetically engineered, but it's not the kind of genetically engineered crop stuff we're dealing with. It's actually an edited bacteria that can't reproduce. And what it does is it just breaks alcohol down into something that's not toxic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking, because you know how those PhDs are. Here's why it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct called aldehyde in your gut. It's that product, not dehydration, that's making you feel like crap the next day. Zebiotics produces an enzyme that breaks that toxic byproduct down. All you have to do is remember to make Zebiotics your first drink of the night, and then you'll feel so much better tomorrow. Every time I serve alcohol at parties at my house, I put Zebiotics out and everyone says, wow, I feel so different. And when I have sake with my sushi, I take Zebiotic. So if you're planning a little partying this summer, definitely take care of your liver and take care of your aging with zic. Go to ZBiotics.com Dave to get 15% off your first order. Seabiotics has a hundred percent money back guarantee, so if you are unsatisfied for any reason, they'll give your money back, no questions asked. This stuff really works.

So I do want to talk a little bit about those saccadic eye movements and the fact that your visual perfect clarity is so tiny. That blew my mind when I first I was like, no, that's not true. I can see the whole thing. And yes, you can see the whole thing. But if you look at a point on your computer, I just want letter. Notice how you see that letter better if it's not sharp. I always say better because sometimes people are like, well, it's not clear than anything else, even the letter next to that. So improving those little saccadic eye movements with Practices like the Swing, which is from the Bates method, is super important. And like breathing and blinking, we can improve that.

I always called the swing the Snuffleuphagus. But talk to me about what, what's the, what's the swing?

So basically, you know, you can do this just like sunning in a similar way where you just turn your head side to side, but you can also do a whole body movement where you put pivot on one foot and you basically turn your whole body right in 180 degree circle. Now I'm getting too much far away from the mic. And the idea is that your eyes are basically as you're moving. Like let's just think of like your head being a brush or something. And the eyes are just moving it. They're kind of making these tiny, tiny, tiny movements as you are moving in a circle versus somebody with poor vision. Might be like the eyes be like plum plong plum. They make like a ping pong ball, right? They don't make this kind of smooth movements. So you want to improve those saccadic eye movements. Other movements are tracking movements, vestibular, ocular movements, which is kind of like what we don't want to do in the swing and the swing we want to end up seeing. Sorry, I'm too much. In the swing. We're going to go think of like a car, like turning right. Your eyes stay with the nose. You want to kind of turn your, your head in that 180° circle. Another movement would be where you turn your head to the side, but your eyes still look in the center. So the eyes turn exactly the same degree than the head in the other direction. So that's also a way of. That's not something we focus so much on in our practice, but it's just another way of eye movements. And then also fusion, right? How your eyes work together to focus on something.

Fusion is something that most people wouldn't know they had a problem with. And I had a really severe one. Entirely invisible until I started training my eyes. It turns out that my brain learned a long time ago because my eyes sucked at being teammates with each other. It's probably why I suck at being a teammate, right? Anyone who works for me will tell me I'm kidding. But what happened was that it was so stressful to my brain to make my eyes work together that it would just turn off my left eye whenever it wasn't needed. So I was losing stereo vision much of the day without knowing I was losing stereo vision and learning how to turn on My left eye was, like, grueling work in order to do it, and it made my light sensitivity worse because now I had two eyes that had to get used to not wearing sunglasses. But it made a really big difference. And now I'm actually working on testing out a VR system that teaches I teaming really, really effectively. So you got a different word than teaming. What was that?

Well, I call it fusion, But I love teaming because I do talk about, you know, are your eyes friends or foes? Are they. Are they teammates or not? I use that language, too. I love you. We use very similar language, actually. So you see a question how to test this or how to know if you have fusion or stereopic vision, Binocular vision.

So. But is there a test that someone watching the show could do or hearing the show do right now? So how do you know if your eyes work together well or not?

I mean, there's a whole host of tests, but one super simple one that everybody can do is literally just use two fingers. Use your two index fingers. Hold one a little closer to you, and hold the other one in line with your nose a little further out. And now look at the one that's close to you. And do you see two fingers behind you? And otherwise, when you look at the one that's further away, the exact distance really doesn't matter. And if you look at the other one farther away, do you see now two fingers in front of you in the closer thing? You know that basically, wherever you don't look, you see two, and wherever you do look, you see one. Even if you look at your phone, you should see, like, four feet. You know, when you look down, basically everything doubles up where you don't look.

This exercise was so difficult for me when I started this, and eventually I got to do the beads on a string exercise. Do you want to walk us through that? If you agree with it, yeah.

Oh, totally. The Brock string is definitely part of my practice as well. So basically, imagine a string. You can have a short one that's arm's length. You can also have one that's like 20ft or 6 meters long, and you have a series of beads on it. And the goal is. So basically, when you look at this string. And so if you have even your headphones of your cable or something, you can use that, too. And you look at that with two eyes. Yeah, I have my headphones here. So if I look at. There you go. Perfect, perfect.

Now you're here like that.

You hold it under the nose. Exactly. And then you look down on that string. And you should see wherever it depends on where you look. If you look in the middle, you should see an X. And both of those strings that you see should look the same. And if one is faint or weak, then that might mean that either is not, you know, either more challenged or is not participating. If you don't see two strings, you don't use two eyes.

Yeah, so there you go, guys. If you're driving, don't do this, obviously, or operating heavy equipment or holding a baby. So don't do that. But otherwise it's pretty safe to do this. And the two fingers, always make sure you're seeing two fingers where you're not looking. And if you want to do the string thing, you should see an X that's evenly strong on both sides of the X. And the string has to be touching your nose, not just off to one side. And it is amazing how many people go, wow, one of the strings is really faint. Well, there you go. That I. Your inputs from that I are weaker than. Than they should be. And you can teach your brain to turn that up by doing that exercise some more and doing some of the other things that are in the things that you teach. By the way, your website is my holistic vision.com, right?

Yes, yes.

Talk to me about regulating the nervous system and how that's tied to vision.

So, yeah, I mentioned that a little bit in the beginning. How we, our vision is best when we are relaxed. And you all know this. If you have been stressed, if you've been late for an appointment, if you just had a car accident, you know, your, your vision will blurry or, you know, you, your peripheral vision shuts down, your pupils open up, you, you know, you get this shot of adrenaline and you end this fight or flight mode and your vision will not be good, which is a good thing to have if we are in an actual emergency, you know, to have this fight or flight system kick in. But if it becomes chronic stress, you, you know, you will also start chest breathing. The more you do chest breathing instead of abdominal breathing, the more your trapezius and the sternocleidomast, all those muscles in the neck and the shoulders will tighten up, maybe your jaw muscle. And that creates, first of all, reduces blood flow to all these tissues. And you create kind of, what do you call it? Like you consistently shut your peripheral vision down and your vision will be more blurry. And that's what I mean with the engine light. If you now put the, the glasses on you basically, I'm sorry, with the pills for the eyes, when you put the glasses on, you don't address this constant strain and stress and the tension in your body. And yeah, I always say blurry vision is the engine light. It's like, hey, something is not right. So maybe check out what the problem is.

Most of the vision supplements out there, we are balancing. Look, are people really going to buy this? If I put as much as I want to put in there, Right. Versus I'm going to have enough that there's clinical results to do this, I know it's going to help people. Right. And it's not the case with all supplements that more is better. You know, you can overdo zinc and copper and minerals and B vitamins and stuff like that. So I don't want to tell you guys to go out there, but there are some really good arguments that having large, large amounts of astaxanthin are good for you. And bilberry, we know, helps pilots from World War II, they figured it out that you can see better at night. So I think you want to do those because night vision means you can read under those red things and it's going to help your eye strength. And I'm so grateful that I can go to the store, I can pick up the bottle of supplements and they've got kind of a gray text on a green background in super fine print, and I can read it. Right. I don't need glasses. But there are some days where I'm like, man, my vision is a little bit blurry today. And then I sit there and I do some exercises and I have learned to consciously focus my eyes. I can cover one eye and make the other eye, like, go in and out. I didn't have that skill before I trained it, and that usually clears things up. And if not, I take some charcoal and I get my toxins down. And funny enough, the next day I can see you again. So your, your daily visual performance does vary. All right. You mentioned something at the beginning, getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning. There are studies that show getting ultraviolet light into your eyes helps with vision, although the study that I'm aware of most says that it helps with, with nearsightedness. I don't know if it helps with farsightedness, which is what you're dealing with, but it probably would. And this isn't a huge amount. It's 20 minutes sunrise, maybe even sunset. The reason you're doing that is there's some circadian timing that's good for you. It's why I recommend it. Normally, you don't need to stare right at the sun. In fact, a lot of people would tell you that's bad. I know a few sun gazers who swear it's good. It's generally safe to get some sun in your eyes in the morning without glasses, without contacts. I didn't ask. You're not wearing contacts or anything, right?

No.

Okay, good deal. So what's going on there is that signal causes collagen synthesis, which is a really good thing you'd want to do. There's also something called Gabor patches. G A B O R. And these are weird images that stress your brain's visual perception area. That could help. So you can just do some research on that one. I haven't used them, but I'm familiar with them. Let's see some other stuff going on here. There are apps that train your eyes that probably work. There's one that I'm intrigued by. It's called Glasses Off. But I actually, I don't use it because every time I turn it on, I installed it like a couple years ago. Every time I turn it on, it turns my screen brightness up to 500%. And this phone is so bright. I don't want to stare at the phone and see little tiny things. It's like, come on, guys, if you're glasses up, let me control my screen brightness, you jerks. So I would, I would do that training, but I wouldn't want to stare at the brightest possible iPhone setting to try and train my eyes to do small, detailed work. But I, I think that works. And now I'm going to get something else irritating to some people. Video games might be good for your eyes. That is, if you're playing a video game with very, very tiny things on your phone, whether it's one of the brain training games or just some little dumb arcade game. As long as it's got very tiny things moving around and you have to distinguish between them. Well, the brain is very interested in video games because it feels like it's you. That's why they're so engaging. So if you're getting little dopamine hits every time you focus properly on a tiny little thing. So playing a little arcade game on a screen can make a big difference. And there's, you know, dumb little ones like this, but like, here's one, it's called plasma something and you know, it's a dumb little video game, but the point is tiny little dots moving around, screen as dim as you can get. Hey, brain. Now here's something engaging to make your Eyes do something. I think there's actually value for that. Right. But make sure this, the screen is very dim when you do it. No, no one's ever told me that. I don't have a study that for that. I just know that if you get the brain to be really interested in something up close, it's going to learn how to see it and what you're dealing with there is. That's most of the story. The other One is Omega 6 fats. What do you do around the type and composition of fats that you eat?

I primarily eat like grass fed meat and eggs.

Man. It's like we've been hanging out. Yeah. Okay.

When we, when I came up there we talked quite a bit about, yeah, I've been doing ketogenic diet since like the mid-90s. You know, I've been at work keen to this stuff and, and been out of this stuff for a while. So I, you know, if there's some omega sixes in my diet, I think they're sliding in there some as well.

You're not cheating with nachos and you know, whatever.

Occasionally I'll eat like whatever. Yeah, occasionally I'll have like some pizza or some ice cream or something like that.

But it's pretty rare. Even, even those, I mean the pizza, if it's from a normal place, they're probably using canola or soybean or corn oil in the crust. Right. But you don't want to have much at all of that. It doesn't sound like you're having a high enough level for that to affect your vision. I think it does. Especially eating fried things can have the next day can have effects on vision because fried food is more inflammatory than smoking a cigarette. I mean people don't like to hear that, it makes them mad. But that whole thing about inflammation is what's behind it. And it doesn't sound like you're doing anything bad there. The, the diet you're eating is around 1-6-2% omega 6 fat. That's what you find in at least grass fed beef and pasture raised non vegan eggs are probably similar. They, they might have a little bit more. I, I don't want to, you know, just make it up. But they're still going to be mostly saturated in those egg yolks and they'll probably be enough arachidonic acid and other things. So I'm not going to worry about you there. I think it's mostly a polyphenol issue and astaxanthin and lutein and the other things like that. So look, vision formulas out there, but you might want to do several of them if the ingredients in them are, are appropriate. You also have to remember because we're just about identical body weight. We're not hundred pound people. And there are lots of these, you know, teenage plant based men or wannabe men who are inhibiting testosterone and bone development and, and things like that who maybe are not going to be as large as you are or as I am. But supplement manufacturers have to make a dose that is absolutely safe for the very low end. So you can have, you know, 90 pound, 4 foot 11 woman and okay, this is the recommended dose. I double dose almost everything. In fact, I order two meals at restaurants because they're meant to satisfy 120 pound person. And I'm like two of those. Right, you probably do the same thing.

Absolutely.

Okay. With your supplements though, you need to double and maybe triple because you also have way more percentage of muscle than the average kind of spongy person. So I think for anyone listening, if you're obese, you might need more detoxing stuff. And the recommendations in Superhuman around calories, like. Well, you kind of subtract most of your fat weight and then that's your calorie need. And Dave is talking about calories. Well, Emily's talking about protein, not calories to be really clear. So that's your protein need. But you don't want to be eating extra, extra, extra calories. Just that that's not the biggest variable. So for you, I think we're not gonna worry about your diet because you're pretty good. Are you taking any fish oil?

I do, yep. I take. Okay, probably I've been doing this for like the last two months because I go on and off fish oil here and there. And I've been taking like, I think I take six of them twice a day.

Six big pills?

Yeah, yeah. Six big capsules. Yeah.

You might be overdosing it. And was this after your eyes went off?

Yeah, I've been doing. Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Okay.

I've been doing this more recently. Yep.

And there's debate over the, the correct amount and you know, in the 90s the anti aging group that I was running, if you. Oh, I'm just take three glugs. I'm just drinking it. But you can overdose on, on threes as well and then they become pro inflammatory. But if you've only been doing it for two months, it's not gonna be an issue. I'm happy with 2 or 3 grams a day. But if you're doing 10 grams a day, it might be beneficial, it might not. I think that there's, there's great, there's great debate about it. It's just, we know it's good. Just because it's good doesn't mean more is better. Which is the exact opposite of what I just said before. Because while we're bigger, we need more, right? But it doesn't mean we need 10 times more. It only means we need like two times more. So, so let's talk about one other thing that may be helpful. But I don't know for sure. You can do micro current tens around your eyes and this is. What does Trans 10 stand for? Transdermal electrical. What does the N stand for something anyway? The, the little, little thingies that you can buy for five bucks with little patches make your muscle go squeak, squeak. Not like the electrical stim that you or I would use for physio or for putting on muscle, but those little things. There are devices meant specifically for macular degeneration that strengthen the acupuncture and acupressure points around the eyes. There's even a pair of glasses you can buy, or it's more like a face mask that has the electrodes built in. So you run this for 10 minutes a day to stimulate eye health. I would probably do that for a little while and see if you get a difference because it's unlikely to hurt and it's probably going to help. Final thing is you could look at doing red and infrared light therapy over closed eyes. So you'd want to stare right into things. Even, Even the colored LEDs that can be beneficial for you. I think that there's, there's evidence for doing that for generalized eye health. You'll see, for instance, at, you know, at Upgrade labs we have a thing that, that's there for the face to be super healthy. So it helps you look better. Um, it's one of the, one of the lights that, let's see that true light makes. So it's made by one of my companies. It's not for the eyes specifically, it's for the face. Right. For the skin, for collagen. But there is connective tissue and other synovial fluid in the eyes and it's got infrared in it. So is something like that going to be good for general eye health? Most likely. But I, I, and I can tell you there are studies of just generalized red light therapy and eyes that say it's good. So I would want to get more therapeutic Red light and potentially infrared light on my face, around my eyes, with my eyes closed. But like, I'm just thinking, okay, the things I'm doing, I do sit there and I use that at least every couple days on my face. So my eyes are getting a dose of that as well. So I'm trying to transmit to you. Here's all the weird stuff that probably made a difference, and that's the difference in biohacking, is that I wanted something to work. So I did everything that might work and then I started peeling off things to see, but then I'd never know for sure. And then in Western medicine, what they're going to say is, well, it must be just one thing. Therefore I'm going to throw away everything and only test things one at a time. And these are, these are the kind of scientists who can't make bread because they baked the water, they baked the yeast, they baked the flour. There is no bread. Right. So then you have to combine things. And you know this because you are a power lifter. You don't do just one thing to become strong. Right. It's dumb.

So what about like a stem cell? Like they had. Does anybody have advancements?

Oh, for the audience, yes. Let's get super, super nerdy on this one. Thank you for the reminder. There is, there is a treatment that I've done with Harry Adelson and the team who works with Harry in Park City at Dosser. They can do regular stem cells or they'll pull stem cells from your marrow or from other places and the regulations change. I'm not sure what they're doing right now, but I helped Harry do the six hands whole body stem cell makeover with Dr. Marcella Madera and Amy Killen. So I had three doctors working on me. You know, one doing joints, one doing cosmetic and one cosmetic and reproductive, and then one doing neurological, which was Marcella. And there's part of that now is called V cells, which is a part of the stem cell universe, but they come from blood. So there are also people who will inject stem cells in your eyes, but that's usually for advanced macular degeneration. Like. Like, I don't think you need to do that anymore. But one of the techniques you can use, particularly with these cells, is you can put them inside the nose where they go in very quickly. You can do with regular stem cells too, but they go in. I have noticed stupid improvements in my vision from doing that. Like, I think I haven't measured it formally, but I would guess if normal people see 2020, which means, you know, that you can see what the average person can see at 20ft. And I'm normally 2015, which means I can see it at 20ft and you can see it at 15ft. But I had to be like 28 or like you'd have to be 8ft away. I could see it 20ft away. I had superhero vision for a couple days. The two times I did that, like literally, you know, a mile away I could see a speed trap, but just things that weren't normal and it lasted for a week or so afterwards. So I think there's something to be said. And those were just intravenous, you know, just you can do intravenous cells that way. And Dr. Harry is definitely my, my go to guy for that. But he doesn't do eye treatments specifically. But an intravenous thing is going to go to your eyes anyway. Right. So I would suggest IV stem cells, but after you've exhausted the other stuff and if you're going to do stem cells, V cells are very hard to find these days. But that would probably where I'd want to go for vision.

The only way we have relaxed vision and peripheral field is when we are in a relaxed state or the parasympathetic nervous system state known as rest and digest. That's the only time. And we can never all be relaxed all day long. I mean that's not possible, right? There will be moments when we have a little bit of stress, but that's fine, that's good, right? We do need that little bit of stress. But then when the, when the stress is done or over, then you should be back to your relaxed state pretty quickly. And that's really important to regulate, to really get into that. And I teach breath practices which I'm sure your listeners have heard about. You know, abdominal breathing, just holding a little, hold your breath a little bit. Little breath holds are really helpful. Or focusing on your exhales, making those longer, that's just simple ways to, you know, tell your body, hey, and your brain, it's okay, we are safe, we can relax.

So creating autonomic response or going out of the sympathetic, you know, fight or flight response and just into relaxing helps. I think even heart rate variability exercises with feedback can really help your vision just because the body chills. And for listeners, episode 895 with the one of the world's top five powerlifters, Mark Bell. We talked about what I would do for provision in some detail there as well. And I, I know quite a lot as you can tell. But we have someone who knows 10 times more than me as our guest today. So you should start with this episode. If you're thinking about hacking your vision and you can look at some online programs and all that you'll find from Claudia. Because there's really strong return on investment for spending energy on fixing your eyes. Cause when your eyes work better, you use less energy all the time. And then that energy can go into folding. Then that energy can go into folding mitochondria. It can go into being nice to other people, it can go to learning something. It's just free energy. But you're wasting it with bad light and eyes that are struggling all day long. Your goal is to learn how to keep it so that you're mentally, emotionally and physically not struggling, you're just executing. And maybe you're succeeding, maybe you're not. But the struggle represents wasted energy that you didn't need to do. So that's why I think fixing your vision is such a big thing. All right. Oh, and it looks like I'm just googling here. You have a free five day course. So there you go. Energy, not your money, which is even better. And that's your URL is. I just took it off my screen. What is it again?

It's the URL for the free fighter training. You have to put the www in which I don't know why, but naturally clear vision.com forward/5days.

Okay. So naturally clearvision.com and I'm sure there's links on the homepage for that.

So one thing we haven't talked about that I'm going to teach in that five day training is really memory and imagination, which is we do see in the brain. I want to quote one quick. I know one quick thing that is I think really that blew my mind too. So they did studies with people with dissociative identity disorder, which is used to be called multiple personality disorder. And, and they found that people that have these different Personas, right, it's the same physical body, but they have these different Personas or alters. And they had, they were like severely near sighted in one Persona and had like 2015 vision in another. And even the eye pressure, the color perception was different. And you know, how can that be if it's the same physical body? If the brain right would be the driver and our mind wouldn't be such a peace key piece and vision. And that's what Bates talked about 100 years ago. And neuroscience confirms all of this. We know all this now that the visual Cortex lights up the same way if you imagine something or if you actually look at it, you know, like look at your hand, close your eyes and imagine or have a memory of your hand, and you have the same parts of the brain firing up. And he didn't know that 100 years ago, you know, so it's, it's, to me, it's just mind blowing.

This is the same body of research that shows cognitive improvement from either reading or listening to fiction, because it requires you to do exactly that, and it exercises that part of the brain. So part of your job, and I've shared this with Upgrade Collective members on our, on our bi weekly calls, but part of your job is to spend 10 minutes every day, maybe 20 minutes, not listening to a podcast like this, but listening to an audiobook and maybe one that has really interesting language or really interesting imagery. But the idea is you want to make your brain paint a picture, and I don't know, will that actually improve your vision, just making your brain paint a picture, or do you have to really focus on the visual side of it?

No, I think that's really important is painting a picture is perfectly fine. Or what I will teach in the, in the five days is, you know, a black period, which is something that Dr. Bates used a lot, because a black period is so simple. It's just a little tiny black dot. And can you imagine one, you know, with your eyes closed? And I find that people with poor vision usually cannot imagine a black period in their mind with their eyes closed. So, you know, using that, using your actual imagination of clear vision is also really important because if you say to yourself, oh, it's all blurry, I can't see anything, your thoughts have an amazing energy. And the more you repeat saying, I can't do it, I can't do it, it's all blurry versus imagining something clear. And it literally can clear up using this. The imagination of clarity. And imagination always assumes that you have a memory. So you know what I mean? I always use an example. If you imagine a pink elephant, you need to know what pink is, and you need to know what an elephant is. And then you can kind of, you know, create this new visualization or imagination from that. So having a memory of a clear letter, and even if that's with glasses on, and then closing your eyes and continue to imagine the letter being clear and how it looked like black against white, for instance. So that's really, that's really probably the most important part of the Bates method that nobody talks about is really the Mental eye exercises, if you want to call those.

Imagining black versus white. Imagining that black dot on a white surface. Yeah. You can also play with the. The color and intensity of the white behind the dark as well. I can do that now that you pointed out. I can do that kind of effortlessly. But there's these red letters that say red rum in there. Is that normal letters that say what?

What?

I'm sorry, it was a reference to a Stephen King novel.

Oh, okay. I didn't get that.

That's murder spelled backwards from some kind of.

Oh my God. I used to love. I mean, I used to read these books and now I can't do that anymore.

That's just my. My multiple personality disorder. I have a seventh grade third sense of humor and it just doesn't go away. So that must be a different personality.

You have a great sense of humor. I love it.

Oh, thank you. Now talk to me about reading from a book versus reading from a screen.

So our eyes again are light receivers and having a book is a reflected surface. Right. There's a specific distance. We didn't talk about that with a box string, but when you use the Beats, you can practice your targeting. So there's a specific distance, like I don't know, let's say 40 centimeters or 16 inches. But it was a screen as a backlit. It's like we have this fake 3D, right. I look at you and as I see a room behind you, but it's fake. It's like a flat screen. And it's really tiring for the eyes because there's no physical exact. How do I.

How to fake it Real look, that's not a background. Anyway, I'm kidding, right?

Yeah. So. And you talked about Flickr rate earlier. You know, computers have flicker rates and all these things. So it's definitely much harder. It's easier for the eyes to look at the edge of your computer, of the physical computer than the actual screen, which is kind of this bottomless, you know, fake depth.

Basically, if you're going to be reading an actual book on paper. And by the way, guys, as an author, if you buy my books or anyone's books on paper, we like that better than ebooks because ebooks don't pay authors as much. They pay Amazon way more. So they kind of squeeze you there. But Amazon also has a history of deleting your ebooks when they're not politically correct. It's actually happened now where they have pulled content. I'm not saying for any particular recent realm of misinformation. Or whatever. But there was a big bruh about 10 years ago when they edited stuff on people's Kindle devices. So you don't really own an ebook. You own it as long as the E book provider allows the app to keep working. So there you go. And if there's ever a big power outage or something like that or I don't know, governments that turn off the Internet when truckers do stuff, you might just want to have the important books on paper. And it's good for your eyes.

It is definitely better for the eyes. And as it's also good to read small print.

Okay, that's good. So so many people said, don't strain your eyes. Don't read like Abe Lincoln under the firelight and candlelight. You have to have super bright light and big print like a fluffy pillow for your eyes. You like fine print? Why?

Yeah, because it actually requires you to relax. And again, this is kind of the symptomatic treatment as I see people with phones and the text is on the super bright. What is it? Enlarged size like humongous letters and it allows you to strain. And again now you can read the text, but you're using bad habits. And I have my phone to the tiniest print settings because whenever I do get tired and I'm not perfect, right, I get tired sometimes at the end of the day and I look at this like, oh, it's getting a little blurry. Guess I need to do some palming or maybe I should just go to bed and get some sleep instead of, you know, pushing through. So it's B said if you, you cannot read four print text and candlelight if you're not relaxed. So it's kind of a great way to, to check how relaxed you are by reading small print and not making an effort.

I have this amazing technology that I've been working on and it's a solar powered book that stays charged forever. And it looks like this, it's got these pieces of wood in it. That's just the healthier way to do it. So if you have to be a tech person, there you go. It's just a good old fashioned paper book. What about the type of reading light? People have LED reading lights, but bright light at night keeps you up and you want to read before bed. So what, what's the right solution for that?

I'm not a fan of reading in bed, to be honest. I. That's just my personal opinion. Also, you want to look at things straight ahead. We didn't look. Talk about, about posture. We talked a little bit about posture, but you know, you don't want to lay on the side and read a book. You want to look at things straight ahead. And you also want to move your head with your like a little bit, even if it's not like a lot, but you kind of move your head a little bit as you're reading. You don't want blue lights for sure, but you know, at light at night, you also don't want super bright lights. So I do recommend like a little bit dimmer lights at night. However, if you then have to put glasses on, then I just. I wouldn't recommend reading. Then I would rather have you read. I mean, here's what I do. In my programs, we always get into weaker glasses or no glasses and start with bright light because that's just. It's just starting to understand that you can actually see a lot better than you think. Right. Versus relying on the glasses. And then slowly, when you can read smaller and smaller print and bright light, slowly we then start using dimmer light situations. So, you know, Bates was of the other opinion is like, you have to start in the worst conditions to get people to relax. And Elvis Huxley, who wrote a book, the Art of Seeing, because he worked with a bits a teacher called Margaret Corbett, he said, you know, start with brighter light. And I find that easier. People find it more, you know, encouraging that they can actually go from like really high prescription progressive glasses to like drugstore readers, you know, like really low drugstore readers and all no glasses, in good light, and then slowly get into the dimmer light situation. So that's, that's what I do. Or pinhole glasses, if you've heard of those.

Some people, like, you're just gonna have to got that next. I didn't have mine present, so I just was going to pretend these were pinhole glasses.

Okay.

You've actually got a real pair to show off. That's good.

I got a bunch of different ones. I don't use them myself, but I have a bunch in my. Here in my local practice so that people can try them out. They basically little. They make little. They have little holes. And these are square holes that I'm showing right now. And then there's some with round holes. So basically they create a pinhole effect much like you would do when you try to squint. Right. When you try to squint to see clearly. They bundle the light for you so they, they don't distort like an actual glasses lens, which distort. Right. Reading glasses. Make everything larger. And nearsighted glasses make everything smaller so they just bundle the light for you. So it's not a training tool per se, where you use those and miraculously your vision will improve. But it's a great way to use as a transition or as training glasses.

What about reading under red light?

I don't actually have an opinion about that, to be honest. I never thought about that. I don't. I mean, I think as long as it's easy for you to read and you're not straining, that should be fine.

There's a study actually that it improves eye health and vision, and I'm trying to find it right now.

Oh, interesting.

So I read under a red light. I just have like. This is one of the ones. Oh, shoot, I just moved it. It was on the floor here because I was using it. But no, whatever. I have a little portable thing that we make that's a relatively dim but bright enough red light, like little red flashlight, kind of. And I'll have that or just a red light on in the room. And then you read. You're going to get sleepier under a red light, which is not a bad thing if it's before bed. But according to that one study, it. It made a difference. And there's a study I'm finding it's not the one I'm looking for, but conserve visual capacity of rats under red light. So apparently your eyes last longer if you're using that to read and makes sense.

I mean, Bates talked about the candlelight, right? That was really. It's really, really warm light too, so. So it makes some sense. Yeah, I didn't know about that study. I knew only knew about the infrared light study with the mitochondria, but that's great. Good to hear that.

What happens if we just don't move enough? If we stay sitting down all day? What effect does it have on vision?

Well, if you don't move much, first of all, you're not practicing your balance. Balance and vision is obviously intricately related because if you've ever tried to do a yoga pose on one leg and you close your eyes. So the more you sit or the less you move, the more you will probably not move your eyes. And also the blood flow, I mean, there's so many factors why movement is important. I'm at a standing desk right now, and usually I'm on a little balance board when I'm standing, which I didn't want to do because I didn't want to wiggle around too much. But that creates Automatic movement without doing the swing or any of the vision practices. Just kind of moving around. When you're standing right, you're, you're. And your balance. I teach myofascial release. I use little massage balls in my trainings. Your balance. You talked about the feet earlier, how we are grounded. Feeling grounded and feeling solid on the ground is absolutely affecting your vision. The more unstable you feel, the more you're going to strain in your whole vestibular and visual system.

It's so cool that you're talking about this because I guess on a very recent episode where we talked about zero shoes and proper footwear that allows your. Your feet to move around, we talked about wobble boards, and I've talked about it on a few other past episodes. But standing on one of those or just using it some of the time or a Basu ball, it really does make a difference. But who would have ever thought that it changes your visual quality to relax and get the body moving because you stop staring, right?

You don't stare the second you're moving, you're, you know, without actually moving. Even if you wouldn't move your eyes that much, when your body is moving, your eyes automatically move, right? So you don't even have to think about it. And so that's one reason why I love this. And I actually wear barefoot shoes, and I recommend them as well. So.

Well, there you go. People are paying attention to the quality of their performance. Whether you start with the eyes, you start with the toes, you end up coming up with the same answer, which is kind of cool. That's one way you can tell. Biohacking's interesting when people from entirely different lineages of ancestral study or different scientific study end up meeting in the middle going, oh, that's kind of weird. But this appears to be a foundational and fundamental part of human performance is vision. It's interesting that that is trainable. And it turns out professional athletes like people who are awesome in baseball or football or hockey, where you have to see something, and if you judge by three inches the difference in a throw that's coming from across the field, you might not actually catch it, right? So that's when in professional athletes, you see the most importance of that aspect of vision. But like you said, bead and string. Oh, you mean I could focus both eyes right here, not behind it, not in front of it at the same time? That apparently gave me a score that was pretty darn impressive for someone who's not really spend a lot of time with the scope.

That is very Very cool. And you have ball games. I do that a lot with children and even adults. Like just throwing and catching and occluding one eye when you obviously don't have to have players perception but you know, training your peripheral vision, all that is really important. And I started playing handball as a, at 12 years old and I couldn't wear my glasses and I had squint. In other words I had problems with depth perception too because my right eye was turned in. So. And I didn't want to get hit with a heavy leather ball. Right. So I, you know we practiced a lot and I think that was partly in addition to the braids method and practicing those relaxation techniques really helped me to get rid of my glasses in my late teens was the, the handball because. Right. I couldn't wear my glasses and my depth perception like yeah, you get hit by the. You if you can't, if you can't catch the ball, you know you're going to get kicked off the team pretty quickly. So I think that was part of it. So ball games are really. Kids don't play ball games anymore. You know, like old fashioned, go outside in the park and catch and throw stuff.

As a parent I highly Recommend Getting about 5 bean bags that aren't too heavy and just throw em at your kids and eventually learn how to catch em. And if not you can just laugh every time you nail them with it and they'll laugh too which makes it more fun. And eventually that can lead to learning how to juggle which I think also is really good for your visual system in addition to the cross patterning in the brain. So if you're not like ping pong which is one of the ways Dr. Amen recommends improving cognitive performance and I do a ping pong table for that reason. But I'm not great at juggling. But I got to where I could at least not drop it all the time. And I think it also helped not just cognitively, but I think it helped my vision. Do you have any thoughts about juggling?

Yes, totally. Juggling is absolutely. It gets you into that flow and you, you focus but you also have that peripheral awareness and the hand eye coordination. So juggling is fantastic. I'm definitely not a good juggler at all either. But it's, it's definitely like one of my colleagues who was a teacher at the college of vision Education. They don't actually. The college had to close. That's a different story. But basically he, in his book he talks about. That's what he does with kids. He does basically juggling with kids to improve their vision. So you're absolutely on target, Dave.

I like juggling with kale because I don't care if I drop it because who wants to eat that crap, right? It just just how it is. Stuff tastes bad and it's bad for you. So different story. Now, do you have time for a couple of questions from listeners?

Yes, of course.

All right, raise your hand if you want to go. We have lots of really intelligent questions from our chat thread. Again, if you want to be on podcasts and hear the entire discussion live and be able to have this opportunity, OurUpgradeCollective.com is where you can join this group of amazing smart people. Except for Scott. Just kidding, Scott. All right, Catherine, you have a question. Hi.

Great information so far. Very quickly. Born cross eyed, had the surgery to correct it. Never worked in my left eye. Had to wear a patch. Cheated because I was five and my left eye, they sort of say I'm legally blind. I have a black thing floating around in there that moves around inside my eye. Everything I do see is in perfect focus. But just wondered if any comments or protocols I could use to strengthen my left eye.

Yeah, I mean, so as a kid, did I hear that right? They had you patch the so called good eye and then your left eye, you kind of had to work with the left eye by itself. Is that what you were saying?

Into walls and everything? Because I couldn't see.

Yeah. And there's a black. There's something black floating in your eyes. Is that like just like a floater? Does it feel like, does it look like a little soft something?

It doesn't have edges but it just takes over part. It's just there. It's like a black. Like it's a horror movie and I'm walking through a very black dense smoke.

Is that like retinal detachment or something? Or like. I'm just wondering if there's anything from like a pathological thing. I mean what you can. Here's the thing. What I found is the eye could use more rest. Maybe, maybe it could literally use more rest. Like even one sided palming could be helpful or you could be indeed be excited to kind of be on its own when you cover up the other eye or use an occluder on the right eye. So I found both to be helpful and really depends. And I've had lots of students that have what's called amblyopia where one eye was lazy eye. Right. But one I didn't see as well. So that sometimes Working with that eye alone or even giving that eye just a little bit of extra rest could also be helpful.

Okay. All right, I'll give it a try. Yeah. They say if anything ever happened to my right eye, my left eye would come back because my brain would heal it. So I think if my brain could heal it in that situation, why can't I just heal it then?

Exactly. I love that. And also, you know, doing those fusion practices like we talked about, that could be helpful for you. I mean, there's a whole lot more you can do. But I wonder about the black patches that are floating around. I'm not sure what that is. Have you ever gotten that checked out?

Yes, every eye exam. And they say my eyes healthy, but. And I try to explain that black thing and they're all like, oh, okay. Nobody really has anything to say.

Sometimes there's. There's neurological damage. Like, I had it won. One of the really special moments of my life. I got to spend a few hours with Stevie Wonder and he's pretty open about, you know, how he got to be blind and he got nerve damage from too much oxygen in an incubator. And that actually has happened to one of my family members and in just one eye. So, you know, we talked about it quite a bit. And if the eye is perfectly healthy, but the connection between the eye and the brain has something on it, that can be it. And you might find information by doing a high resolution whole body MRI scan where they can actually look at the nerve. Companies like Prenuvo and a bunch of others do that. It's not that cheap, but you can use health spending accounts to do it. And maybe there's an abnormality physiologically that's outside the eye that they might be able to pick up and.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. I also like the idea of playing a video game, like on a iPad or something with your good eye patched, because what that's going to do is the body doesn't really know you're playing a video game. It just kind of. You associate with a little cursor thing. And so it starts to feel a survival need. Oh, no, I got shot by, you know, a laser blast from whatever the heck, just dumb little arcade games. And that oftentimes can train your eyes in a really interesting way. So I. I think that could be something that's unlikely to cause harm and might be really beneficial.

And also, are you left or right handed? That's also. There's handedness is interesting. And dominance in your eyes. Your left eye could actually be the dominant eye and the other eye has become the preferred eye. I mean, you know, with those scenarios, it's usually a little bit more complicated. Not in a bad way. But I love your suggestion, Dave too, to just be interested. What is this left eye interested in? How does it feel to just see with the left eye?

Beautiful. All right, Laura, you've got a question.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, so I'm of an age where eventually my eyes could not be corrected with glasses anymore. So I had cataracts. And I have since had the surgery. I upgraded to the lenses where I can see distance and I can see reading distance reasonably well. Well enough to work, but it's the computer distance where I still wear glasses. And I'm wondering, since none of it is 2020, you know, it's just good enough to, you know, get by. Do any of these things help?

Yes, they do help. So we've definitely had clients with a cataract surgery, implanted lenses. And I just want to be super clear. So you have the multifocal lenses implanted. You don't have one eye near and one ifr. Or is that.

Well, I know I refuse the mono vision.

Good, good, good. Because that's the worst thing they can get. So glad you. You. You made a good choice. Yes, you can definitely improve that for sure. Because it's not just the lens that's a part of accommodation. And Dr. Bates talked about that 100 years ago. And here's the thing, the science. I just read something on PubMed. We still here. It makes total sense that our outer eye muscles, our outer six eye muscles, which are really strong, that they have something to do with the shape of your eyeball. Right. So the eye muscles also have a contribution to your focusing near and far and either the middle distance. So there's definitely things you can do.

Okay. And some people on the chat were talking about using can see to help. Oh, I also get some haloing when I drive at night. So I try not to drive at night. It's not serious, but, you know, I prefer not to. So the can see. Somebody said that that could help with the haloing as wearing. As well as wearing yellow glasses at night?

Yeah. Yes, for sure. I mean, halos are usually a sign when you do have a cataract or lasik. So what you said you had the cataract surgery. You still have halos?

I didn't before. Now I do with the. With the new lenses.

Oh, that is strange. And there's no secondary cataract. I mean, that's unusual. Usually the halos will be gone after the surgery. Okay. Don't know that the glasses would probably be helpful. I would say that's a good idea to do.

One other thought for anyone considering getting a lens replacement. With an implanted lens, you can get lenses that do not block ultraviolet light. That would be a really good idea given that we know ultraviolet light in the eye is a signaling molecule or signaling wavelength that can affect molecules very deep in your eyes via creating something called melanin. So there's, there's a need for that. And I, I don't think they should make UV blocking implants because there are times you need some. You just don't need too much. So just because too much of something is bad doesn't mean none of it is good. So I consider that to be a mistake. So if you have a choice, there's a reason to allow UV light into the eye. Do you agree?

Yes.

The eye doctor about that and apparently no mind blocked the uv.

Yep. Not much to do about it now. But for everyone else listening, if you have a choice. I got my mom to get the non UV blockers when she had a lens implant. So I like to think I did. At least I did it right once.

Okay, thank you very much.

I don't know about the C can. I mean, I've heard different things. Some people had success, but there's also. I found a new study with a new. And I'm trying to remember what this thing was called, but there's a new drug out there that they think could revolutionize cataract treatment. It so has to do with the proteins because the proteins in the lens clump up when you get cataracts. And that's something to do with the proteins. So I have to look it up again. I forgot the name of this, but it's not out there yet. It's just research right now.

And I just added. And a couple of questions came up and I'm interested too in the chat. Floaters. Do you know anything you can do for that?

I mean, floaters, good nutrition, clean nutrition, everything that Dave already teaches and also stress definitely has to do with floaters. So floaters are basically little debris as we age, right? The vitreous humor, which is the gel like structure in the inner eye behind the lens. It's. It's called vitreous humor. Has nothing to do with being funny. And that shrinks a little bit, right? So that shrinks a little bit and sometimes little pieces of that basically break off and that they float around. So that's what floaters are. But if you have a good detoxification system, all these things will help you reduce the floaters and reduce stress. Just overall, all the overall things that you're learning will be helpful. There's no like vision, you know, quick fix that you can do to get rid of them, you know, in terms of like, oh, do sunning like five times a day, that will get rid of them. But all the protocols will help you.

Thank you very much.

There's one thing about floaters, I'd love to share my knowledge and then have you tell me that it's wrong.

Okay.

No, go ahead.

If you, if you know something that I don't know, I'm always happy to learn to.

People who have chronic infections tend to get more floaters, and I certainly had more than my fair share of those when I was a kid. And you know, there's stuff floating in the vitreous humor and there's some evidence that taking high dose proteolytic enzymes, things that, that digest protein like serrapeptase or nattokinase, over time may reduce floaters. And there's now a company that actually has a laser treatment. They can go in and they can shoot the floaters, which sounds really intriguing, but the risk of that procedure is higher than I want it to be last time I looked. And so I would be a little bit, a little bit careful with that one. But if you're really being tormented by floaters, there is a laser treatment to go in and shoot them like asteroids.

I think that the thing is with those laser treatments, every time you go into the eye, you destroy the homeostasis of the eye. And that's why they say even cataract surgery now you're at higher risk for other eye diseases. You know what? Because even though cataract surgery is really, really safe, it's probably the only surgery for eye diseases that actually, you know, recovers your vision. Because for the other eye diseases that pretty much can't do much. So I would, I would not advise it. Unless, like Dave said, your floaters are so bad that they just, you know, you can't take it anymore. They're just all over the place like bunch of worms in your eyes or something. But otherwise I would definitely not do something invasive for floaters.

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