Do you have the vision?
Written content taken from the Huberman Lab Essentials podcast Protocols to improve vision and eyesight by Andrew Huberman, Ph.D*
Eyesight is vital. It is up there with the ability to move, to get up out of chairs or to walk and run. Eyesight and movement are the main ways that humans are able to take care of themselves and others. Preserving vision is one of the most quality of life enhancing things you can do.
What is vision?
We think of vision as eyesight: perceiving shapes and objects, faces and colours. Our eyes are responsible for much more than vision, including our mood and our level of alertness. Whilst it feels good to have light on the skin - to be outside in the sunlight - the only way light information can get to the cells of your body is through the eyes.
Eyes, lenses and lashes
The eyes (neural retinas) are part of your central nervous system; they are part of your brain! They are the only part of your brain on the outside. In other words, you have two pieces of your brain that got squeezed out of the skull during development and placed in these things we call eye sockets.
Lenses focus light precisely to the retina.
Eyelashes trigger the blink reflex. It is the fastest reflex you own.
Eyelids can increase alertness due to how they link with your brainstem.
Eyes are the only part of your brain on the outside.
Eyes focus light, trigger reflexes and link to the brainstem to increase alertness.
Light, rods and cones
The job of the eyes is to collect light information from the environment and send it to the brain in a form that the brain can understand.
Light gets to the neural retina and we have specific cells in the eye called photoreceptors. Photoreceptors come in two different types, rods and cones.
Cones are responsible for daytime vision.
Rods are specialised for vision at night or under low light conditions.
Colour
Take an example of a colour like green. You have cones cells in your eye that respond to the equivalent wavelength of light that is reflected off the green apple. You don't actually see the green apple, no green light actually gets to your brain! You see light bouncing off the green apple, the light goes to your eye and you perceive the object as round and green.
Retina
Senses black / white with 120 million rod cells and colour with 7 million cone cells.
Brain
The brain communicates with the eyes. The brain is constantly making guesses which are usually right. How do we know these guesses are usually right? Because when you reach out to grab a glass, most of the time you grab the glass, you don’t miss. The brain makes judgements about the world around based on a visual impression, and because the eyes are slightly offset from one another, we also get depth perception.
4. Occipital lobe functions: vision, visual processing and colour identification.
Picture source: Neuroanatomy Workbook: Summer Sparks, TFC Publishing 2021
Mood, sleep and appetite
Specific eye cells, retinal ganglion cells (neurons in the retina), communicate to areas of the brain when particular qualities of lights are present in the environment. They signal to the brain the following:
When it is early or late in the day
Regulation of feeling sleepy or feeling awake
Speed of metabolism
Blood sugar levels
Dopamine levels
Pain threshold
The most important aspect of human biology is to anchor ourselves in time. The most ancient cells in your eye are there not to see objects, but to inform the body and brain about the time of day.
TIP: get light to the eyes early in the day or any time you want to be awake.
Protocol:
Get bright light early in the day for 2 to 10 minutes.
Getting 2 hours per day of outdoor time (without sunglasses) has a significant effect on myopia (being short-sighted).
The eye is an optical device.
Eye lenses are not rigid, they are dynamic. The eye can dynamically adjust where light lands by moving and changing the shape of the lens. This process is called accommodation. Most of our mental focus is grounded in where we place our visual focus – what we look at and our ability to hold concentration.
Improving this process of accommodation will have both immediate and longer-term benefits: better focus on physical and cognitive (learning) skills and improved concentration.
TIP: Practice accommodation for a few minutes every other day.
Protocol:
Bring something in close, like a pen. You will feel the strain of your eyes. Move it out and you will feel a relaxation point. Bring it back in.
Eye muscles
Muscles in the eye (a ring-shaped structure, located behind the iris) move the lens. When you look far away, your lens relaxes. You will notice that it is relaxing to look at a horizon. If you look at something close up, like a phone, it takes effort and you can sense this effort.
Most of the ‘work’ the eyes are doing is not moving in the sockets, but neural work of the muscles having to contract such that the lens gets thicker to accommodate the light coming in at close range. Spending a lot of time looking at things close up – phone, computers, being indoors – does not give the lens opportunity to flatten out and relax.
As a consequence, you are training your eyes to be good at looking at things up close and not far away. You are actually reshaping the neural circuits to the brain.
TIP: Get outside to maintain the health of your visual system, in particular to exercise the muscles that relax the lens. Look at a horizon or do nothing, let your eyes go soft.
Protocol:
For every 30 minutes of focused work, look up into the distance and relax your face, eyes and jaw. Allow your eyes to go into panoramic vision.
To combat tiredness:
Raise your eyes and look up to the ceiling (relaxed jaw); hold for 10-15 seconds. This triggers areas of the brain involved in wakefulness.
How can you improve your vision?
Spend at least 10 minutes per day viewing things off in the distance – well over half a mile or more, beyond the four walls or the doors and windscreen of the car! Distance viewing is good for your eyesight as it keeps the lens muscles strong and has a relaxing component.
Our visual system is attuned to the motion of things around us. Our eyes do something called smooth pursuit – an ability to smoothly track the movement of individual objects through space and at different trajectories. If you are doing a lot of reading up close, not viewing horizons, then you are not getting enough smooth pursuit stimulation.
TIP: You can train your vision by looking at smooth pursuit stimuli.
Protocol:
Spend 2 to 3 minutes doing smooth pursuit. Look on YouTube for smooth pursuit practice.
‘Lazy eye’
The young brain up until the age of about 7-12 years is extremely vulnerable to differences in ocular input between the two eyes. Even a few hours of occluding (covering up or eye patching for ‘lazy eye’ amblyopia) one eye early in life can lead to permanent changes in the way the brain perceives the outside world. It shuts down the visual pathway.
TIP: If one eye ends up having less strength than the other, isolating and strengthening exercises can help.
Protocol:
Cover one eye (do not just shut that eye, as this will waste mental energy).
Focus the eye on an object. Focus on this object for at least thirty seconds.
Repeat this activity three times. Then do the same thing with the other eye.
Source: London Ophthalmology Centre
Binocular vision
Binocular vision means using two eyes together in order to send messages efficiently from both eyes to the brain for seeing patterns, 3D, visualising and rotating images. Binocular vision and peripheral vision help you understand where you are in space.
TIP: Young people need to get really good binocular vision to build strong visual machinery in the brain so they can visualise everything from the feelings of other people (empathy), to mathematics concepts, to being able to read for meaning.
Protocol:
Affix circles at eye height on a wall.
Stand about arms-length away from the wall facing the circles.
Hold a pencil in between the two circles.
Keep focusing on the pencil top, but bring it very slowly towards the eyes.
In the background you should see the circles merge to form a third set of circles in the middle.
Source: Fit2Learn
Exercise
Blood flow is critical for the neurons of the eye. Eye cells are the most metabolically active cells in the body (they require the most energy) and blood flow is needed to get them the energy and nutrients.
Doing endurance and strength training work regularly is going to support your eyes, brain and vision. Having a healthy cardiovascular system will deliver blood and oxygen to your eyes.
Note: There are two main concerns around weightlifting and the eyes; retinal detachment and increased risk of glaucoma.
Weightlifting by itself won’t damage your eyes, what might damage your eyes is poor breathing techniques. So pay attention to breath work too!
Source: LEP Fitness
*Andrew Huberman, Ph.D is a professor of neurobiology an ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
