Vision happens in your brain.

Your eyes are just the very first part of a long chain that ultimately results in your visual perception of your surroundings.  In this guide I’ll show you how to actually engage your brain in the visual process, and how you can actually see much better than you might realize today.

Keep in mind:  This is a short version summary of the larger subject of the brain-eye connection.  Use this guide as a beginning point for exploring the subject.

Let’s get started:

You want to use vision-happens-in-your-brain in context of useful stimulus and visual reference.  

Let’s dissect the various meanings of this:

Useful stimulus is whenever you convert blur to a clear image.

If you want to be in shape, you can’t sit on the couch all day and snarfle on pizza.

If you want to be in shape, you need useful stimulus.  

fitnesses

Fix muh eyes, Jake.  Can I gets a discount?

For that particular application, you’ll have to exercise (useful stimulus), which is challenging your body past the point of it’s comfort zone.  When you are exhausted from a run or lifting weights, your body just got the message that “current muscle mass (or oxygen uptake) isn’t enough”.

Then you give your body plenty of rest, to build up the resources to do better next time.

When we look at eyesight, this kind of useful stimulus (or strain you actually want) happens when you get some blur and convert it to a clear image.

We talk about this a lot.

Reduced prescriptions.  The diopter bubble.  You want clear vision, and you want a usable distance where you get some blur.  Then you want to use active focus to resolve that blur.

So far nothing new.  Here’s where it get’s interesting though.

Visual reference allows your brain to recalibrate past blur.

Let’s see how that works.

You go outside.  Always go for outdoors and distance vision, to get the stimulus your eyes need.  

Now you want to find a visual reference.

This is always written text.  You want to find something you can’t quite read, it’s just right in that zone of a bit of blur.  The key here, the visual reference part is that you know what the text reads.

You can do that either by looking for a logo you recognize, or by getting close enough to read the text and then back till it’s blurry.

starblurs

Blink and squint till the first five letters clear up. (outside, not on this picture)

Now you blink and squint and otherwise keep resetting the visual, till your brain finds the signal and suddenly the text goes from blur to being readable.  Maybe not perfectly, maybe with some double vision artifacts, but there it is.  

That’s when you have your visual reference working.

Without blinking or changing your overall posture, now you look around with this template.  Things that were previously blurry are now in (better) focus.  You take a minute or so and just use this to experience temporary improved vision.

Once you blink, you probably lose the clarity again.

The activity is to do this repeatedly and regularly.  Not overdoing it of course, and using some of the other aspects I describe in much more detail in the program sessions.  (don’t have them?  grab my free e-mail explainer below this post)

Without the visual reference, you can’t get past the blur.  And you don’t get the stimulus you are looking for.

These are the things that you don’t get either from the optometrist, or the monkey jungle that is the Internet at large.  Indeed the key to eyesight health is not high prescriptions, and it’s also not palming or eye yoga or whatever-lens-therapy.  

monkeyjungle

Plus lens therapy, yo.

I have a video version of this quick overview of visual reference in the works as well.  

Stay tuned for that, it’ll definitely make it to a program session soon, and maybe even to the blog.  No promises on the latter.  (though you might opt to leave lots of flattering comments to sway my judgment)

Cheerios, kittehs.  Go outside, practice your distance eyeballs.

– Jake