Danny Jones Podcast - #173 - How to Improve Intelligence, Thinking, & Perception Through the Visual System | Dr. David Cook

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Over the span of his 40 plus-year career, Dr. David Cook’s focus has been on testing, monitoring, and fine-tuning vision therapy as a clinician, author and educator. As one of the nation’s leading authorities on vision therapy, Dr. Cook has given lectures on expanding depth perception to optometrists and other eye professionals at clinical seminars, study groups and optometric congresses all over the world. His book “The Shape of the Sky” teaches us that vision is something we do, and more importantly, something we can learn to do better." EPISODE LINKS: https://www.oepf.org/product/the-shape-of-the-sky https://CookVisionTherapy.com JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon  DANNY  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE  0:00 - Introduction  4:02 - What is Vision?  5:05 - Neuroplasticity  7:50 - Using vision to improve Intelligence  13:44 - Dyslexia  22:51 - Technology is making the world ‘near-sighted’  37:47 - Binocular vision  46:17 - 3D vision in super athletes  1:03:14 - Vision & personality  1:12:56 - Knowledge by experience VS acquaintance  1:20:08 - Eye games   1:33:05 - Protocols to improve reading skills  1:41:50 - How language changes perception  1:48:07 - Picasso & Rembrandt were stereo blind   1:55:59 - Color blindness  2:00:45 - Daily protocols to enhance small vision (Deep Winks)  2:05:16 - Daily protocols to enhance big vision (3D)  2:16:06 - The shape of the sky  2:20:39 - How seeing changes thinking Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some people may think that vision is boring, but in the context of life, is there anything more important than vision? I don't think so. Maybe you could tell people who are listening, give them a brief background on yourself. What are your credentials and what is your background in vision? I work with vision. For the last 40, 45 years, I've been helping people to use their eyes. or rather I use their eyes to help people train their own brains. Most of seeing is done with your brain using your eyes.

And so in that area, I have spoken across the world, written and refereed journals, written books. It's kind of what I do day by day, and I love it. Now, vision is something I feel like most people don't even think about or take for granted. why did you become so fascinated by vision? Well, I was actually an English major, and I loved English major because I loved reading, but I also loved eating. So I thought maybe I should do something that I could live off of, and so I thought about optometry. It wasn't until my third year in school that I had a professor that started talking about

what vision really is about and how it dominates our life and how it changes our life. And at that point, I just got very, very interested in what I was doing and have gone ever since. At what point did you realize there's more to this than what you thought? I mean, most people think of vision as how sharply they can see something in a lot far away. With the Snellen chart, they think of, do I have 2020 or not? Well, I had a child I work with. His name was Hal. And, you know, it was 50 years ago, so I doubt if you'll be upset. And Hal was a little boy with a crossed eye. So he looked quite different than other people. And he's had what's called 2,200 vision in that eye, meaning that he saw at 20 feet what the rest of us can see. at 200 feet. So he had essentially a blind eye. It was crossed. And I worked with him in the clinic. And we worked with him and worked with him. And he learned how to straighten his eyes. He learned

how to see 2030, which is more than enough to drive a car. If that was the only eye he had, he could have driven a car with that eye. Whereas before he was legally blind in the eye, But we didn't get him to 2020. And his eyes, they looked great, but they weren't completely straight. So I went over to his mom and I said, I'm really sorry that we couldn't do better with hell. We couldn't get there. And she looked at me like I was crazy. And she said, you just don't understand.

This is the kid that was left on the bench all the time. He was doing terrible in school. He completely changed his life. and at that point I really got it that vision is more than reading an eye chart and it's even more than all the different tests we do. Vision is as much, think of your life without vision. Think of it if you couldn't remember anything you'd seen. Think of it if you'd never had to move because your eyes were guiding you to move. I mean, it would be a very different world. A really interesting way to put this, which I just recently discovered, which we talked about briefly before we started recording today, is that 40 to 50 percent of the human brain is dedicated to vision processing, which kind of blew my mind a little bit, no pun intended.

Yeah, it's pervasive. It dominates your life. Everything is hooked into vision one way or another. Your hands are hooked into your vision. Your feet are hooked into it. Your thinking is hooked into it. Everything that you do is really hooked into your vision in some way or another. And even more so, you learned how to do all this stuff. So it's not something that's happening to you. It's something that you have learned to do a step at a time, like an infant with a mother's breast. They're getting affection. They're getting food.

Their eyes land on things. they start to learn how to see. When they enter the world, they're not seeing much of anything. Now, I think one of the pervasive dogmas in science is that there's a certain critical period when kids are young, where they develop vision and other things that sort of goes away as they age with brain plasticity. Yeah, this has been kind of confused. What it is, there's an area in life where they can lose their ability to see. It's a critical period, and if during that period you disturb their eyes somehow, that can make it harder for them to see.

So let's say a child, you put a patch on a baby, they got a scratched eye, they wear a patch. Well, during a critical period, that could severely affect how they use their two eyes together, after that. So the critical period is really the time when you can mess things up. Okay. You could put a patch on a 50-year-old and leave it on for 10 years. They're not going to lose vision. Okay. But it's been, it's gotten backwards where people look at it that there's a critical period where you can learn to see. And that's not true. The brain is always plastic. You can learn to use it. I mean, when I went to school, the brain. was cement and all it did was crumble. And so you were told that you're the best you're ever

going to be when you're younger and then it's just going to keep crumbling and crumbling and it's just going to get worse and worse. And now the brain is made out of plastic. So you can work with it just like Plato and you can improve your brain, you know, pretty much at any age, which means you can improve your seeing it at any age. Even if somebody, for example, in your example, has a scratched eye as an infant and it affects their development, it's something that can be changed in later years? Much of it can. Now, vision, there are different types of vision and part of it relates to using your eyes with everything else, using your eyes with your hands, using your eyes with your body, being able to move. Every time you move, the pictures on the back of your eyes change,

and you have to learn how movement affects you're seeing. That you can learn at any age. If you've actually lost cells in the back of your eye or in the back of your brain, then those may be cells that you can't regain, okay, certain ones, but all of the integrative type of seeing, you can learn as life goes on. Now, how does vision affect things like intelligence? Or is there any correlation between vision and intelligence or vision and language, assuming that all these things are intertwined together?

Well, vision really isn't much different than intelligence. Now, if you look at a standard intelligence test, they will have areas that they look at as mainly language. They might ask you how are gold and silver alike? And you say, well, they're both precious metals or they're both metals or they both cost a lot, that idea how words relate to each other, how they're similar. So that would be more of a language-based type of intelligence. But on the intelligence test, there's all sorts of figures that you look at and realize how they relate to each other.

There are things where you use your eyes to find your place. So even on a standard intelligence test, like half the test pretty much centers in on visual type skills. And the other half supposedly would center in on language type skills. So vision, but just in general, intelligence is kind of like analogies. You say this is like that. A cat, a house cat is like a mountain lion. they have some similarities. There's kind of an analogy there.

But you have analogies when you use your eyes. If you've learned how to walk on a sidewalk and you're very good at walking on a sidewalk, does that prepare you to walk in sand? Right. Okay. But you are going to make the analogy. Well, walking on the sidewalk is kind of like walking in the sand. Well, it is kind of like walking in the sand, but you've got to relearn how to walk when you get in the sand.

Okay, so it's still, this is like that. Walking on the sidewalk is like walking in the sand, although it's not quite, so we've got to relearn that, just like the mountain lion is not quite like the house cat. Right. There are differences. And so that's all intelligence. And, I mean, there was a book by Jerry Getman years ago, is how to improve your child's intelligence. And the whole book, it's available through Optometric Extension Program Foundation, but the whole book is about using vision to improve intelligence.

Wow. So the two of them are very, very linked. How come nobody talks about this, especially eye doctors? Well, eye doctors, the job is different. The job is to find out if you can see clearly in the distance. or if you need glasses to see clearly and to make sure each of your eyes is healthy so there's nothing going on with your eyes

that could cause you to go blind. And once they've done that, so you can see clearly and maybe up close, they would have to have you see clearly. So once they've got you seeing clearly up close and far away, meaning little things, close and far away, and they know there's nothing showing

showing up in your eyes that shows you have a brain tumor or that you're going to go blind, any of these types of things after they've ruled all of that out, their job is done. Okay? They're not really thinking about... Improvement. Vision like I am. I'm thinking about vision is you. Vision is all of you.

It is your hands. It is your body. It is your thinking. All of this gets hooked into how you use your brain, and that is vision. And vision, you take light, and you convert it into action. That's the whole visual process. Light enters the eye, and all of a sudden you're able to act. You're able to catch that ball.

You're able to read that book. All of these actions are part of vision. Back to talking about how much of the brain is involved in vision. I didn't realize that the rods and the cones and the retinal neurons in the brain take up more metabolic energy than any other cells in the body, which is, again, kind of just like points to how important vision really is. It's not just seeing numbers on an eye chart. It literally is your whole entire consciousness, kind of. Yeah, we ask all sorts of different questions on our case history, but one of them, and we see a lot of kids, probably 80% of our patients are children. And one of the,

the questions on there is your child exhausted at the end of the day. Because if you have visual interference, you're just completely wiped out after a day at school. Not just kids. I mean, I had a banker once. He was a teller. And he would go home at night at 5 o'clock, and he'd just go to bed. He was just wiped out. And we had worked with him.

and now he was playing basketball when he got home. Oh, wow. So before he had a lot of trouble using his eyes, he was putting an intense amount of energy into just focusing and keeping things clear and keeping him single. He was working so hard at it, it just completely ruined his life at that point,

and his life just completely changed. Now he goes home and he gets dressed. He plays basketball. with his friends, he has a life. Otherwise, your eight hours ends up your whole day. Your eight hours extends from morning until night. The part of this whole conversation that aligns with learning and energy and maintaining focus during the day is really interesting when it comes to things like dyslexia. Could you explain, like, how many of your patients come to you for quote unquote dyslexia and what is dyslexia okay well back that one up and we'll start with what it is yeah

what dyslexia is is that you have somebody who's bright and they're reading is a lot harder than it should be based on how bright they are and they're not blind and they're not deaf and they went to school in a normal school um and they just had a hard time learning to read even though um they were very smart um um um Most kids, they teach themselves how to read. You give them the letters of the alphabet and the sounds. You might give them Dick and Jane, or they start getting a few words that they know,

and they figure out the rest, okay? They, through the years, they just figure out kind of how to read. They start reading, and that could be like, you know, three-fourths of your kids are going to do that. Wow. That fourth that don't do that, those would be the ones we call dyslexic.

So for some reason, they're not learning to read as you'd expect. You read to them and they understand it easily. They may be great at math, but when it comes to reading, they just really have a hard time. Now, in that group, you have some that don't hear the words. Okay. So if I were to say the word, say scat, child says scat. Now I say, say it again, but don't say k. And he says at.

Okay, he didn't hear there was a stream of sound. He didn't hear there was an S sound, a C sound, an A sound, a T sound. Instead, he heard just a stream of sound that all ran together. He couldn't pull it apart and recognize it had. parts. So if you had trouble like that, you're going to have a hard time learning with phonics. And that traditionally, when you hear the word dyslexia, that's what people are talking about, that inability to kind of match the symbols on the page with the sounds. So if you're not getting the sounds, so that would be one reason for dyslexia. Other kids, when they read the letters,

they just take forever. It wouldn't matter if they're doing letters or numbers or colors. If they have to look at it, remember what to call it and get it out of their mouth. It takes forever. Okay. So this is another group of kids that would probably be called dyslexic. They have that hard time. They call it automatic naming.

They can't look at something and remember what to call it and getting it out. It's kind of like seeing somebody you know and not remembering their name. Okay, it just takes a lot to pull it out. So that group would be kind of dyslexic. Kind of like they process each word. Yeah, they just, they have, they're very slow at processing, okay? And a lot of them have both those things going on. They don't hear the sounds.

It takes forever to get out of their mouth. So those, to me, are kind of your real dyslexics when they have that. Now, you do have people that supposedly see backwards, okay? and they always are calling B's D's and wases for saw, this type of thing. Right. Well, when you're little, you have two directions. You have, it's either towards me or it's away from me. It's this way or it's that way.

Then you get into, and it's a chair. Let's say you see a chair in a room. It doesn't matter where you're looking at that chair. It's always a chair, right? You don't say, oh, that's a different chair. No, it's the same chair. It doesn't matter how you look. at the chair. Then you get into school in this two-dimensional world, and now if the chair fits

one way, it's a B, well, a B, and the other way, it's a D. Okay? So you got a line in a circle, and for the little kid, it goes this way. It goes out to the sides. As you get older, you start to say no it goes over here or it goes over there so you have children developmentally they haven't figured out which way is which they don't recognize that it be in a deer even a different letter it's a line it has a little circle on it and the circle goes outward and as far as they're concerned it's the same thing they don't know which way to go when they read instead of always starting here on the left and going to the right the start on the right and they go to the left. So that would be most traditionally when you hear the

word dyslexia, you know, it's like, well, they see backwards. Right. Okay. So that's the one that's most common that you hear about. Now, to me, that's a vision problem. Okay. You don't understand where the world is yet. You're lost on where are things. And so that type of thing is going to respond to a therapy where you learn first how to tell which side is which. You'd learn it on yourself. This is my right hand. This is my left foot. And later on, you'd learn it like, well, if I turn that way, I'm turning right. And if I turn this way, I'm turning left. Okay. They'd start to understand that right over here is different than left, which is over that way. And now they're ready to understand to be in a D. Otherwise, he's a different.

kids, you know, sometimes they spend a whole year on B&D and they get nowhere because they didn't have the lower level skills. It's like everything else. It's like climbing a ladder. If you skip four or five rungs, it can be hard. Right. It's got to be bottom up. And so that would be dyslexia. And then you have kids that we work with that see the words blur and we'll get into this, but they see the words blur in and out. They see them run together. They can read the acuity chart. They read one letter at a time and they read all the little tiny letters across the room. And yet they see the words dancing around on the page. They run around.

They run into each other. They won't stand still. This kind of stuff. Well, that could be thought of as dyslexia. If you were a dyslexia specialist, you wouldn't know that was going on. Okay. So when we look into that, now I'd look at that problem being primarily visual as a opposed to the, I can't hear the word scat and realize it's made up a bunch of sounds,

I would think of that one as being more language-based, okay? That makes sense. And then all of us, if we don't know what the words mean, of course, we get confused. Right, obviously. Okay, and that's a different thing. The idea in dyslexia, they should know what the words mean. In other words, intelligence and everything and language was all fine. they know what the words mean.

They just have all of these decoding problems. And how many adults or older people do you get with coming into you to see you with dyslexia and reading problems? Our majority is kids. We will get adults typically when they are about to get a promotion and they know now they're going to have to do more reading. Okay. They change jobs and for some reason they're going to need to know more reading. You know, when we talk about vision, I say how important it is, most people run their life around their vision. Okay?

If you have trouble looking at things and so that reading is difficult, you can't comfortably sit there and look at it so you get away from it. You don't like to read. Well, you go into sales. And, you know, I mean, it's like I sometimes tell parents, if I work with your child, they can make 60,000 a year as a librarian. And if I don't work with them, they'll make $120,000 in sales. You know, it's like smart kids, smart people. They're going to be successful one way or the other, but it'll be a different way if that looking at the print is difficult.

And so they will move their life around their vision. They will develop in a way that fits the vision. If they're smart, they'll figure out a different. way around it they'll become a building contractor they'll do fine um as a lifestyle it'll be it'll be great for them um but it won't be something that requires a lot of reading you probably aren't going to want to be a lawyer right there's a large percentage of the american population that is myopic meaning nearsightedness is it a problem that the majority of the population is becoming myopic um it's it's another one of those you know idiopaths

Pathic illness, you know, an illness that's diagnosed by an idiot. We don't really know exactly for sure yet why people become near-sided. Near-sided means what you can't see far away. We have a picture somewhere where it shows an eyeball. Well, the eyeball, if you're near-sided, the eyeball is just too long. This picture? Here we go. Yeah.

So it says pupil up there in the front. Well, that's that little black hole in the front of your eye, and you look at it and it's black. Now, the reason it isn't all red like the back of that eye is because nobody's home. Nobody has the light on, okay? And if you take a cheap flash and you flash it at somebody, it bounces off, the light bounces off the back of their eye and their pupils are bright red. Okay. So that's like the back of the eye. It's that kind of red look, okay?

And so it goes through. That's why it turns red. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. And that's why when you have a photographer, they hold the flash over to the side so that it doesn't bounce right back out of the eye. Then behind that pupil, there's a lens, which is just like a magnifying glass. So if you wanted to burn a hole in a leaf or a fly, you would have to hold the magnifying glass in just the right spot for all of the light to converge and burn the hole.

Okay? Well, in the eye, the light converges to the back of the eye. of the eye. Okay? So it goes through that lens and it converges and lands right on the back of the eye where it says phobia back there, retina all those things. They're just the back of the eye. Is the phobia directly behind the pupil or it looks like the optic nerve is kind of more directly behind it? You're using the fovea to see. Okay. That's where you're pointing the eye. And I don't know if it's just this picture. It's set up like that. That phobia has a meal. billion nerve fibers.

And these are the, when people think of the nerves in the eye, like the cells in the eye of rods and cones. And the cones are being the ones that focus on the sharpness. Yeah, you get a lot more cones, color vision, all that kind of stuff in that foveal area. And then you do on their peripheral retina. Okay. Because we're colorblind over to the side. Oh, really? Yeah, which is, again, you doing vision.

If you think about it, if you were to look at a red wall, you don't notice that it ain't red over way over to the side it all looks red okay right so we see what's there we've seen what we've learned to see there not what the backs of our eyes tell us but going back to near-sightedness the light comes in and it gets focused in front of the back of the eye so rather than focusing on the eye it focuses behind it the eye is too long for whatever reason okay now the current theories One of the theories is that sunlight helps the eyes not get too long. Right. That if you're out in the sun four hours a day, kids who were out in the sun four hours a day

were far less likely to become near-sighted early than the ones who weren't. So we don't know if you're near-sided because your whole world is up close. And there's certainly a lot of thinking like that. If you read all the time, you'd get near-sided. If you looked up close all the time, you'd adapt to that distance. But on the other hand, how many people read outside? How many people are in the sun when they read? So, again, how it all fits together, what part of it is natural sunlight, what part of it is this cramped up-close distance where you don't move your body at all?

You're still. You're looking at a fixed distance rather than all over the place. You're there for long periods of time. It's all up close. So all of these factors. But what happens when we landed men on the moon, about 25% of America was near-sighted. And by the time 9-11 came along,

it was 48% of America was near-sighted. Now, in Singapore, 90% of the population is near-sighted. And these are kids that are like inside studying. I mean, I have a niece in Vietnam, and she goes to school, you know, 8, 10 hours a day, and then she has a tutor for two or three hours a day. Wow. So it's like there's this compulsion to succeed.

And so you have people huge, huge, huge amounts of up close time and huge amounts of near-sightedness and the thing is moving here in the United States as well. And so we're putting, you know, two-year-olds, three-year-olds on little close devices inside, not playing, not running around, seeing how to figure out how to see the world, but just looking at a flat screen. Yeah, everywhere you go, whether you're waiting in line at a grocery store or sitting at a red light, just looking around at the different cars that are sitting around you, they're all. staring at their phones. Right. So you're seeing this great up-close thing, but you're not getting the action you do. Right. The body's not involved. Yeah, we learned to see. Okay, if you looked at me, you already know how much effort it would take to get to me. You know how you would have to move around the table. You know what it would feel like if you tweak my nose. You know what it would be

like to pull my hair. You know all of this information because you've done all this kind of stuff your whole life and you've learned how to see through all your movement. Now you put a kid on a screen. Are they putting pans and pots? Are they learning how all these things fit together? Are they learning how to pull wagons? Are they learning how to do all of the other things that teach them to see? Or are they learning how to sit there immobile? staring at colors on a screen. So that's when we get into what more, what vision is, we'll get more into that. But it is kind of a frightening prospect. And you're going to see a bunch of kind of awkward kids, physical therapists talk about it, where they don't have the skills that they had

a half dozen years ago. Did humans look different a half dozen or a dozen or 20 or 30, 50 years ago compared to how they look now? Just from the time the iPhone came out, which was like, what 2007 2006 if you go a couple decades before that could is there a noticeable difference in people's like their their their eyeballs or the way their faces are structured it i don't know about the faces okay okay i i only have eyes for you right right okay so but i mean like when i say that i mean like how close the eyes are positioned versus how far apart on their faces they are um as far as i know there shouldn't be any different in that okay okay if you you had eyes that were very far apart, you do have to work more to converge them to look up

close. And that's always been known. But just the averages on those types of things, I don't think you're going to see too much of a change. Although you've seen huge changes in people themselves, they're a lot bigger than they were a few generations back when nutrition wasn't as good. Oh, a lot. Bigger and more fat, yeah. So they're bigger. Yes. They're taller. So from that standpoint, the distance between their eyes is probably a little different too if their bone structure has grown. And I don't know. That's just a guess. You really have to have the figures and look at them. Yeah. Just thinking about the way people looking back to like the times of antiquity compared to the way they look now, like people are definitely changing. Bodies are different. People

aren't as like muscular. Their heads are getting bigger. And, you know, one thing I haven't really paid attention to is, is like, the way their eyes look. But people definitely looked different back then than the way they looked now. And it makes me wonder what people are going to look like in 100 years from now if we keep going the way we're going with technology, staring at our phones up close all day long. And sitting inside, not getting sunlight all day long, like, what do we look like in 100 years, I wonder. Yeah, it's hard to say. Because, like, if you were thinking about a straight genetic. type of thing, then you would kind of think, well, the genes are the same, but then on the other hand,

the fact that you have a gene doesn't mean you're using it. And so more genes start to be expressed. So even nearsightedness, that could, you think of Darwin and you think of Lamarck when you think of evolution, these changes over time. And in the one view, you don't inherit. If I become a great violin player, you're not going to inherit that. Right. Okay?

Right. But on the other hand, if I did an awful lot of up-close stuff and it's flipped a switch to where I was near-sided, now my child could have that same switch flipped, and they could be near-sighted too. In other words, you have all the genes, some of them are used,

some of them aren't. The genes don't change, but, at least not quickly, but which genes are used can change. Right. Does that make sense? It does make sense. So an example would be like if I have the gene to be nearsighted and I decide to activate that gene by just only reading books and looking at my phone all day for my entire life, there's a higher chance of that gene being engaged in my kid. Yeah. Really?

That would be called epigenetics, and that could be happening. But as I say, this is a pathology diagnosed by an idiot. We really just don't know, okay, on how all of that works. And tremendous amounts of research is going into this now, just because the more near-sighted you are, the more likely you'll run into eye problems later in life. Okay. Really?

There's a bigger chance you'd have glaucoma and so forth. So it's not to an advantage to have people way, way, way near-sided. You're more likely to have the back of your eye disengage, or they call it a retinal attachment, but to have the back of your eye kind of not stay attached to the back of your eye like it should be. Yes. These types of things, the incidence of them increase when people are more and more near-sighted. So it would be a big advantage to be three units of near-sided rather than seven. Right.

There's actually, there's a guy who is a professional video game player who sits in front of his computer and competes online. And when he was, I believe, like in his late teens, he had a retinal detachment, had to go, like, get a major surgery done. He almost lost his vision completely in that eye. But to think that your retina could become detached just from playing video. video games is kind of frightening. Well, it wouldn't be attached from the video games, but if that sitting inside all day long,

engaged up with close, whatever caused it, that caused you become more nearsighted, then you're more at risk for problems as you get older. So now there is a big, big emphasis on trying to figure out what's going on. When I went to school 50 years ago, near-sightedness was hered. period. You were like kind of boot off the stage if you said no, this is a functional problem.

It's how we're using our eyes that's causing this. They'd look at you like you're crazy. It's like, oh, you guys are just weird. This is a genetic thing. You can show that if parents have it, their kids are more likely to have it. Identical twins are

more likely to both be near-sided and so forth. And And now, I don't think anybody would tell you that nearsightedness is all hereditary, especially since entire populations have gone from next to nobody nearsighted to everybody nearsighted within, you know, a century type of thing. So the majority of eye doctors, when you go and see an eye doctor, they're going to worry about your quote-unquote acuity and how well you can see the Stellan chart, right?

Like we discussed earlier. And if there's looking in your eyes, see. if there's tumors or whatever, the structure of your eye, all of the top level stuff, right, the low-hanging fruit. Why, what sort of attention is given to stereo vision? Not a lot. Okay. And the attention we give it is not necessarily all there is to it. There are different types of stereo tests.

Okay, stereo, I think it means solid. in solid seeing. Things look more solid. When you use both eyes to look at them, there's more volume to them. So stereoscopic vision is this solid seeing. It's seeing the world in a different way. But what it really is,

is seeing the distance between things more. So like if you are looking at me, I've got a mic here, but if I put my hand here and you cover an eye, So go ahead and cover an eye. Good. Now, so you're looking at my hand. So what's closer to you?

My arm or my chest? Your arm. No brainer, right? Right. Now uncover it. You may be able to see more air. Yes, I can see the gap. There's more air in there.

That is stereoscopic vision. That's two eye depth perception. Okay. And in a typical exam, not a lot of emphasis is placed on that. and your average practitioner. Some might do one test on that. But even that wouldn't tell you as much because there's different types of stereo.

I've written a paper on it, but it's like you have relative stereo. So like if I put my fingers up here of one closer than the other, being able to see that this one's closer than that one is kind of a relative thing, being able to see how far away I am from you is something quite different. So to know where a car is, for instance, is a lot different than knowing if it's rearview mirror or side mirror is closer to you.

You don't pay any attention to that. You don't care if the rear view mirror or the side mirror is closer. You do care how close that car is to you. And if that distance is getting less, well, that big seeing, that big stereo, That awareness of space in the world isn't something we'd normally test for. In fact, we don't even have a good test for it. I mean, we almost infer it from other tests if you're doing off-the-wall test. Would you say this stereo seeing the things you're describing are more or less important

than what's tested at a typical eye doctor on a Snellan chart, like the acuity? What's more important? I feel they're more important because that's what you do in the world. If you have that kind of stereo, when you look at something, you simultaneously know what it is and where it is. So like, I'll look right into this camera. If whoever's looking at me were to look right at my nose. Can you see how pointed my nose is?

Now instead, if you are thinking about the distance between you and your screen, okay, there's a certain amount of air between you and your screen, that is you now know where the television or the monitor is at the same time that you're seeing me. Okay. And so many people, and think about it, when you talk to somebody, sometimes all you're seeing is their face. You're not seeing where they are in the room. Right. Okay.

You're not opening up and simultaneously seeing where things are and what they are. You're just seeing what they are. And all of our tests as eye doctors, they're all, what is it tests? They're not where is it tests. They very seldom do tests to figure out if you're very good at knowing where things are in the world. They want to know that you can see what they are. What are those little letters on that eye chart? Okay.

And one of the reasons they want to know you can see the little letters, because if you can, that kind of rules out a lot of eye problems. If you can't see them, you could have a tumor in the back of your eye. You could be near-sighted. You could have the lens in your eye could be cloudy. There could be all these different things going on that are making you not see the little things. Okay. And so the fact you don't see them, then the red light goes on and it says, well, something's up here.

We need to figure out what it is. Okay? And we don't call it acuity deficit disorder. Okay. We say you've got a cataract, you've got glaucoma. Yes. You've got something. You've got an actual physical type of disease. And that's for eye care. And when eye care pretty much stops at the back of the eye, not always. If you had inflammation of your nerve, the nerve that comes out of the back of the eye,

then, you know, that's definitely going to make it harder to see. and that's further up. If you had a brain tumor, it could make it hard to see. You could lose half your vision. You could have all sorts of types of problems with that. So any eye doctor is going to be thinking about all of those things, and they get some signs of it. He's not seeing well.

Why isn't he seeing well? They look in the back of your eye, and the back of your eye is perfect, and you're still not seeing well. Well, why is that? was it that way two years ago no two years ago he saw fine well now we got something that's happening now so we're worried about that so they have big concerns and there's very important and i'm not underestimating that because i don't even do general i care at this point i do just enhancement of seeing um and but those those are all very important things that is what they're looking for

what they're not looking for is how do you use your eyes right Okay. And as we move along more on what vision is. Yes. Right now we've been kind of centering on a routine eye exam. It might be a good idea to look at an acuity chart even. Yeah. Can we pull up a Snellen chart?

Yeah. I think it's the first slide. Yeah, one of the things that's always, that has fascinated me so much is that so many people walk about the world and see the world as they see it. But how do you know if that's the best you can do? How do you know if that's what the world really is? Like, everybody sees the world in their own way.

And I always wonder what percentage of everyone you see walking down the street sees this inflated, depth-filled 3D world and what percent of them are just seeing, like, flatness? I think if you were talking about optometrists like myself, most of them don't. see that inflated three-dimensional world, most of them see in a different way because they got very good at that flat screen. They're very good at a flat computer screen. They're very good at a flat book. They have driving at night when it's raining and the line has disappeared, knowing where you are on the road, might be more of a concern, but they're very good at, at reading and looking up close because they've had to do that to get through school. Right.

So they've learned to see in a different way. They're not hitting fastballs on average. Right. And a lot of the bigger type of seeing they would have a tougher time with, but they would never be aware of it. Because, I mean, I've seen both ways. And once you've seen in that big three-dimensional way of seeing, you realize, oh, that's very different. than the way the world normally looks. Another thing I've noticed is that if you look at the eye,

I don't know if this is kind of like a very nitpicky thing, but if you look at the eyes of people like famous quarterbacks like Tom Brady or Michael Jordan, they kind of almost look like wall-eyed, like their eyes like rest in the very corners of their eye, like that's outside portion of their eyes. And I imagine like to see an entire football field and like thread a needle with a football Yeah. Requires a very, very high level of three-dimensional vision.

Well, if your eyes are further apart, you would have, on average, better three-dimensional vision. Okay. Because when you're looking this way, this eye's view is very different than the other eyes view. I don't know. Do you want to know a little more about that type of three-dimensional vision? It would take a second. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

If you were to put your hand up in front of you, like I, I've got my hand in front of me. Okay. And I've got it a little over. Now, if I cover one eye, I get one picture. And if I cover another eye, I get another picture. Right. It's a different picture.

And when I open both eyes, there is a three-dimensional picture. Okay. It sometimes helps if you just think about looking past it even. But anyway, if each eye has a difference. different view and the fact, like, especially if I spread my fingers like this. Now, one eye's in this and the other eye seen kind of a line of fingers. Right. And yet, when both eyes are open, there's all this air in between the fingers. Okay. The reason that's there is because each eye has its own view. So the further your eyes are apart, the more different those

two views are. The more pronounced that type of thing is, because it's also harder to use your eyes together. Right, right. So there are pluses and minuses. But, I mean, that type of thing. Now, if you have somebody who actually has an eye that turns out, like a walleye, many of these people can see where they're looking and also have it clear over here. They feel like they're looking out of, say, your left eye, but things are clearer over here. It's great if you're a kid. You know, you can like keep an eye on mom.

And when she's not looking, you know, you can pick your nose. You can do anything you want. And you can catch her. Right. Right. And then you wonder why they don't like straightening their eyes. They start getting caught. So it's like that is an adaptation that can occur to where a person sees simultaneously with each eye but in two different directions.

Good Lord. And so that is a different thing. And there are basketball players. They name's come to mind, but you'll see pictures of them sometimes when they're on that court. They know where everything is on the court and the eye is actually out. I've seen pictures of that. Where the eyeball is like one eyes out? One eyes out where they actually have what's called Strabismus.

Both eyes don't point in the same spot at the same time. But they actually have the eye out. Now, basketball, knowing where everything is on the court, it's a big, big, big deal. Okay. If you want to know where the rim is, it would help to point both eyes at it. But professional players, they playoff feel anything. Anyway, they know where they are on the court. They know how to get the ball through the basket from that position in the court.

Okay? Right. They are hooked into that court. If you were to change the shape of the court, make it a trapezoid, you'd probably really screw them up because they're used to knowing where their body is on the court compared to where they're going to looking. So they're seeing what their body as well as their eyes. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coasts.

The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters, and the personalities keep things. lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. Okay. And all this happens. But anyway, so on the depth perception, again, it's just that one eye sees a different picture than the other. Your mind takes those two different pictures. It fuses them together. It melts them together into this three-dimensional picture that has more depth in it. Right. But, of course, we all see three-dimensional. I mean, we all see depth. everybody sees death it's like when I put my arm in front of my chest what's closer my arm or my chest well darn your arms closer because it's in front of my chest and there are all these different one-eyed ways of knowing where things are okay right like like the things being bigger and smaller

shadows bigger the shadows if you you know if you look at oh a stool you'll see all of the shadows on it you should turn the lights down the shadows all disappear right so these people that um have eyes that aren't working together when it comes to driving at night. They just have all the hard time because you took away all the one-eyed ways of knowing where things are. Can you pull up a picture of Tom Brady's face, like a close above his face, so let me be looking far away? We can look at that.

So what were we going to talk about with this chart right here? Okay. So here we have an acuity chart. So if you have a hammer, everything in the world is a nail. And if you have an acuity chart, everything in the world is a fraction or everybody in the world is a fraction, okay? You're supposed to see there's that line of letters above the red line, and you're supposed to see those at 20 feet because a scientist in the middle of the 1800s calculated how big the back of your eye was and how big everything was in it, all the receptors

and everything. And he came up, that you ought to see that. And so that is 20, 20-foot line, people who have normalized supposedly see that line at 20 feet. Okay. We're about 20 feet now, right? Maybe a little bit closer? Close enough. But anyway, now, if you go up a bit, then you get to the 2040 line. I think it's two lines up, EDF, C's above the green.

Yeah, above the green. Most people see that line at 40 feet. Okay. If you have to move up to 20 feet to see what everybody else sees at 40 feet, then you have 2040 vision. So typically you can drive with 2040 vision in most states. In Georgia, it's 2060. You know, we. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you can't drive anywhere else come to Georgia. You're all set. I wonder if there's, are there more car accidents in Georgia? I would doubt it because driving has much more to do with knowing where things are than what they are. Okay, okay. Okay.

That makes sense. I mean, you might not see a little person. Right. But for the most part, driving is all about knowing where everything is compared to everything else and being able to predict where everything is where you see something moving and you know where it's going to be. Right. And those things aren't nailed by an acuity chart. Right.

Those are all where is it type things. Right. But the acuity chart will tell you if you can read the street signs. which is big if you're in a new area. If you can't read the signs on the road, you're in trouble if you go into a strange area. If you're driving right around close to home, you don't need to see the signs because you already know where you are.

Right. Okay, but they're different things. So anyway, 2040, you see at 20 feet, what everybody else sees at 40. You go up to that top letter. That's a 2,200 letter. meaning that most people see that 200 feet away. If you have to move up to 20 feet to see it, then you have 2,200 vision.

What is considered legally blind? Okay. What we normally think of when people hear legally blind, they say, I'm legally blind without my glasses. Well, that isn't how it works. If you can see the 2,200 letter with your glasses on, and that's the best you can do, you're legally blind. How you see without your glasses doesn't say anything. Okay. Okay.

That makes sense. When you put your glasses on, you still can't see anything, then you could be legally blind, but it would be the 2,200 is the smallest that you're seeing. Okay. Okay. And so that's your acuity chart. And so people will say, I have perfect vision. I have 20-20 vision and that's good, but most people actually have 2015 vision, which

is the line underneath the red line. Okay. So most people are able to see that line. 20 feet. And if they only see 2020 at 20 feet, then you kind of wonder why not quite, why not 2015, okay, if you're an eye doctor. Okay. Okay.

And the bottom lines, the 2010 line, and I have quite a few kids that can pull out half of those letters. And that 2010 line, most of us have to move up to about 10 feet to see it. Some people can see it at 20 feet. Oh, Ted Williams was famous for his 2010 vision. So Ted Williams was one of the best hitters in baseball, which means he failed two-thirds of the time. Right. Which made him one of the best.

Okay. And he famously had 2010 vision, which means, he could see the tiny, tiny things. But he did more than that. He knew where the ball was. Right. That seems like it would be way more important. So when I work with ball players, they're both important.

You want to be able to see the seams on the ball because that tells you if you got a curveball or you got whatever. Okay. But at the same time, you got to know where the ball is. And you got two-tenths of a second to figure that all out. And the more information you take in in that two-tenths of a second, visually, the better off you're going to do, all other things being equal. At what point do they see the seams on the ball before it's thrown, you mean?

I think it's while it's just as it's leaving the hand. Okay, okay. They're watching it right then. So when we work with ballplayers, we want them to be able to see tiny, tiny, tiny, but we also want them to be able to see big, big. We want them to be aware of all the space between them and the picture. so that they get that big picture at the same time they're getting the little one, doing both of those at once.

And I have a batting coach, and he always sends me as kids that don't bat like they should. He knows how to do all the other stuff. Right. And so he's done all of the different things. Yeah. And then if they're having the types of problems, he'll recognize it because he's worked with so many of them with me. He just recognizes how they act when they're not seeing quite right. So people who are playing sports who don't necessarily see the ball correctly or don't, they don't, they aren't able to react fast enough.

Is that a problem with them not seeing big? Oftentimes, that's part of it. You have to be able to see big and little at the same time. You have to be able to see. So that's like panoramic vision? Well, it depends on the sport. I'm basketball. Yeah.

Okay. Right. That gets really panoramic. But envision. you're more interested in baseball, you're more interested in the distance between you and what you're looking at than you are and what's going on in the stands. Right. Okay.

You can just imagine some of the nasty things that have been said the ballplayers over the years. Oh, yeah. And you don't need to be zeroed in on that. You need to be zeroed in, but the distance between you and what you're looking at is important. And what kind of things can people do in sports or what kind of things to ball players do to sort of gain that extra sense of panoramic vision and as well as small vision at the same time. One thing they don't do is they don't sit there and think about what people said about them. Right.

Another words, you lose your big sense of space when you go inward. So if I have a patient, let's say I have some gadget on the wall and it's floating off the wall. If I were to tell that patient, oh, you locked your, keys in the car. That thing that was floating off the wall go flat. In other words, they'll lose their sense

of space when they introvert. When their attention goes inward, they lose the world out here, which is one of the reasons the kids come in and they look like, and they leave and they look like where they're like out in the world.

Right. Because they come in and they're kind of beat up feeling and they're inward. And then And as they get better with their vision of seeing the world in front of them, their attention goes outward. It's like people with panic attacks. If you can get them to open up and see the big spaces, it kind of pulls them out of it. Okay. Because the panic attacks, you're all inside.

We've been around a long time. A lot of bad things have happened to us, you know, starting with birth. Yeah. And then it only got worse sometimes it seems like. And so all of that's just sitting there waiting to beach up. So as you learn to get your attention, your visual attention outward, then you get out of that garbage. I imagine that's a huge problem with people like coming up to bat during baseball. That's got to be a huge, with all everyone's eyes, everyone in the game is focused on you.

It's like, well, that's just it. They have to learn to be where they are. In other words, they can't be where they're not. They can't be thinking about something else. They have to have full attention out in space in front of them. So it's like the coach would, since these kids, he'll tell me, you know, he says, yeah, this kid, he just gets wiped out. You know, somebody says something to him. He gets upset.

Boom, you lose it all. Can't hit anything. Right. Okay. So it's a matter of learning to concentrate. And even Ted Williams, he said that he really looks hard there. It's a certain thing he does. It's a way of seeing for him.

He had the 2010 vision. Yeah. But he did something with his eyes when he was batting. And he knew he knew he was doing something, okay? But he didn't know exactly what? Well, there's language. So no telling him. how are you seeing right now?

What are you going to tell me? Right. On the average. Okay. And I've been talking about seeing a big area as opposed to selecting a small area. We're going to get into that quite a bit with a lot of regular examples on the screen. Right. For now, that is pretty much meaningless.

If you're hearing it, you've seen space yourself. So you know, because we talked about it, and you see that big area, you see all that space. Yeah. Somebody who's never seen it has no idea what we're talking about right now. Okay? They just think these are just a bunch of words. If there's a hole in your perception, there is a hole in your language. You have no words to describe it. I've tested this on my wife who has perfect, she had nothing wrong with her vision. She has perfect eyes. I've done some tests on her with some of the stuff that I've messed around with. And she flunks almost every three-dimensional test. It's okay. She's probably done some tests on you. You're not aware of it. See, you're even. And I am aware of. I flunk a lot of her tests. Yeah, there you go. There's no double standards over here. Yeah. But it's, it was fascinating to me how somebody like her who has no, no, oh, at least that she's aware of, no issues with her vision. She fails all the three-dimensional tests. Yeah. So it's, it's always hard to say. It could be somebody that sees in an expanded way. all the time and doesn't even know what it's like to not see that way or it could be somebody

who sees in a non-expanded way all the time and has no guess what you're talking about when you talk about seeing things you never quite sure um and that's we'll get into it but um have you noticed you don't know what other people are seeing have you noticed a correlation between people who are introverts and extroverts versus like myopic or far-sided or three-dimensional or As far as I know the studies are all over the place on that, certainly, what were you like when you became nearsighted? In other words, like before you mean? Yeah, because it's kind of like if you're working with some extroverted salesperson who went nearsighted when they were in third grade and that's when they went near sided and they haven't changed in 10 years, well, they're still near sided. but they may be extroverts.

Their attention may be out all of the time, okay, at this point in life, okay? Right. You know, so you can't, so that's a hard question on that. In general, though we do work on that extroverting people when we work with vision. let's say you got two lines and you're wearing a pair of glasses and one eye sees this line and one eye sees this line. And those lines line up when your eyes are straight. When your eyes kind of turn a little, the lines do this. Well, the very fact that you're watching the lines to line them up and how it feels, it puts your attention out there.

You're looking at what's going on out there. It gets you out of your head. And so it gets you out of your head. And so even if you weren't even thinking about it, it's still something you're doing. When you're doing vision therapy, you are extroverting people. That's amazing. And the kids come in all the time, as I say, they're like looking in the inside of their head. They're just like instead of where they go out.

And you can see the before and after pictures. Oftentimes you can just see you've got a different kid. And that's oftentimes what parents are talking about. they say, I'll have a different kid. They're very happy. It's not like they lost. It's not like a medication that takes away from them. They can still be crabby if they want to be, and they always are once in a while.

But they act very differently. And I had a lady once, her child had a turned eye, and she would bring him in for us to see him. He was kind of a tough kid. And she told me one day the reason I really like it is because when we're doing this, he's much easier to be around at home. Really? Yeah, because he'd pull him out and he was just a much happier kid. Wow. So, again, when I say vision is pervasive, it's everywhere.

Talk about intelligence language and all this stuff. I'll play with some things on that. It is. You're talking about, you're talking about personality. Well, how much of how you see the world is personality. You see what you value. You're blind to what you don't value. So what are you seeing?

Well, is that related to personality? You bet it is what you're seeing. And so it's an amazing area to work with. And there are many mechanical models. You can say, well, we're making one eye work with the other eye. We're teaching the eyes how to change focus. And we're going to talk about that and do some drills on it. But you're working with an entire person, and vision is a reflection of the entire person.

Vision is run by your emotional centers. In other words, your autonomic. nervous system, your involuntary nervous system, the one if I walk up behind you and say, boo and you tingle all over, that is your focusing system, is run by that very thing. Parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems run your focusing system. So emotion is very hooked into vision. And indeed, when you have somebody who has an eye turn and they don't, and they're having a bad day they're i mean where they're like upset the eye goes within while they're upset um you see immediately

changes and you we've all seen it you know you had days where everything look great days where it doesn't look so good yeah it's the same thing with anything right days you don't feel good days you don't sleep good yeah your your body doesn't feel good right and your vision is off um it's just that normally if you have to if you're like this, like we all are, one day you're good, one day you're not, and you only have to be this good, you're always good enough. Some people, one day they're making it the next day they're not making it, one day they're making it. So it just kind of depends where that overall level is. How many people do you test that had no idea they were missing this part of their vision? Like for people out there that are listening to this right now, you were just explaining a minute ago, they don't know what they're missing.

Some people, they don't understand exactly what we're talking about. There's no way to describe it. It's kind of like talking to a bunch of colorblind people about the difference between red and blue. What are you going to say? One's a little brighter that have no idea what you're talking about. And to talk about that perception to somebody who doesn't. doesn't have it, they really don't understand what you're talking about. Now in my practice, I don't see general patients. Right. You see special people. We have people that talk to them on the

phone for a half hour, an hour before they ever appoint them before they make their appointment to make sure it's the type of person that if I were to see them, it would be worth their while to see me. Okay. And so they will go, you know, it's kind of like, well, I've been having trouble seeing the board. sounds like you should have a routine eye exam a routine eye exam exactly yeah you know how's reading been reading's great I'm just not seeing the blackboard

well let's start with a routine eye exam and if that doesn't solve your problems give us a call again and that type of thing but I have the opposite all the time I have people come to me who had an eye that turned in and they always will say

I don't have debt perception I never passed the debt perception tests. I don't have any debt perception. And I will use a different type of debt perception test that accentuates their side vision in a different way, and they'll have debt perception. So it's like I'll be able to find it that first day. It doesn't mean that their debt perception is good.

It just means we've got a place to start to make it better. Right. But that one happens all the time. Well, I've never had debt perception. Because they're aware they don't have the death perception. Because I've been told. Exactly. Yeah.

The doctor said, you probably shouldn't be an eye surgeon. And the way your eyes work together. So how can we explain to people who don't know if they have debt perception or not? How can we show them, can we show them some slides or can we, what can we do to help people understand? Normally, you do think. off case history anyway off of asking questions and if you have somebody that believes in vampires or is just afraid to go out after dark because they don't want to drive um then you've got somebody with a vision problem when you have somebody who doesn't go to 3d movies why don't you go to 3d

movies they give me a headache you've got somebody with a vision problem in fact there's probably no better overall screening test than just going to a 3D movie. And if you leave it sick, you've got a vision problem. You've got difficulty using your eyes together somehow. You have difficulty with depth somehow. There's something there. And it could be you and your body system, vestibular system, but integrating your movement system with your eyes, there is something there.

So, I mean, if I were going to, and, you know, that's why they don't sell 3D TVs anymore. It's because in a family of five, you're going to have one that has rotten depth perception. That's so crazy to me. And so that family is not going to go to a 3D movie because they're going to have one kid who's sick. When they get out of there, I have headaches. The glasses come off the first thing. Those are all things that tell you, hey, these eyes aren't working together. and it's uncomfortable to use them together.

And so that is probably the best sign there is that something's going on in that area. And it's not the acuity chart because time and again they'll do fine on that. Or if they don't do well in the acuity cart, they get new glasses, they go back to the 3D movie and they're still sick, then you've got something more going on than just the acuity chart problem. Right. there was a quote in your book or there was a whole chapter dedicated to knowledge by description versus versus knowledge by acquaintance can you expand on that i think that was bertram russell had used those words okay but um you could talk about narratives you read something it tells you how to do something

right and then you've got experience where you've actually done it entirely different types of learning Yes. You could read a dozen anatomy texts, but it's entirely different if you're doing surgery. Okay? We learn by doing things to where you really can do things, okay? As opposed to books, books give us extra information. But like when I do drills, for instance, in the book we were talking about, whatever the name. of it was the shape of the sky that's it thank you okay I have a copy of it we can show

I got my backpack yeah so in there we have a lot of games to play to kind of see how you do in all these different areas and if you do the games you understand what I'm talking about if you don't do the games you got a bunch of words so it's like when I tell parents when you when your child reads he has to work put an extra effort to point both eyes in the same spot at the same time and that extra effort tires him out well that's nice okay that sounds like a good bunch of words yeah yeah and the parent can listen and they can say yeah a lot of words there and and if they're really got a good memory they can repeat all the words yes okay yes if instead i take what's called a prism and i put it in front of them and let them see double and try to read

that way now they understand what i'm talking about when he reads, this is how he sees, and that's worth all the words in the world. So that's using experience as opposed to just the words. That really resonated with me thinking about that, because I immediately just went to thinking about everything you see on the internet are people sitting at tables like myself with microphones in front of them talking about anything. things going on on on the opposite side of the world, things going on here, stuff in the news. And all these people are explaining to the world what the reality of the world is. But these people that are talking to you only have this, quote, knowledge by description. Like they only heard something or read something or are going off some bullet points that they have to talk about for the whole purpose of entertainment.

And what I realized is I notice a huge difference in listening to somebody who has been somewhere or done something and they're talking about something that they've done or personally experienced versus like what you're used to seeing. Like people talking on the news, people talking on a podcast like myself that are just explaining something that they just understand from reading it or watching a documentary or a movie or something or from reading a documentary or a movie or something. or from reading a dozen books and getting context from a bunch of different people's angle, from reading other people's experiences and trying to translate that into something that they're speaking as fact. The guy that got me interested in what we're talking about, he said, you watch the people that lecture, they go out and lecture, some of them talk about what they do, and some of them talk about what they've read. Right.

You'll see very, very, you'll see very, very, very different. different things and so the rule is you know if you're going to lecture you ought to only lecture about the things you're actually doing right because we had like a discussion about red light and how it seems to help with near-sightedness or studies showing it but it's not something I've implemented in my office right now so it wasn't something that I really wanted to talk about right because I'd be back to telling you what I read right instead of what I saw the kid who acted different after we did this or whatever.

Right. But also, it also relates to how we see, what we see, okay? When you look at that microphone or my microphone, you see a different microphone than I do because you have intimate experience with the microphone. You know how every dial changes it. you know how it moves. I look at it and say microphone and that's it. Hey, there's a wire over there.

Shit. What's that wire about? So when it comes to seeing, like somebody comes to my office and we have this little gadget, you know, you put in front of their eyes and you say, which is better, one or two? You know, does it look better this way,

one or does it look better two? And it has these dials on it. And so somebody comes in and they look at that, and they say a gadget for examining eyes. I look at it and I know how to move every dial on it. I know all the actions involved with the thing. I see a different instrument. If I look at a sewing machine,

I see a different instrument than a seamstress wood who uses the sewing machine. I actually see something different. Okay. And so you think we're both seeing the same thing, but we're not. And the difference is that if you're really seeing something, you know the actions you can use it for.

Yes. And that's when you really start to see, when you know the actions that are involved with that thing, that apple. Oh, yeah, I know that apple. It's going to taste like this. It's going to be kind of tart, and it's going to be juicy,

and the juice is going to run down my face. And it's going to smell just like an apple. And I know how many steps it's going to take to get to that apple. And I know what it's going to feel like when I feel it. I get all of that just from the light coming into my eyes from the apple. I get all of that all at once type of feeling. That's if I've eaten an apple. Right.

If I saw a picture of an apple in a book, I don't get any of that. Right. Okay. Absolutely. So, but yeah, those are examples, but those are, we see differently. Two people look at the same scene. They see entirely different things and we'll get into that later. Like based on value, right?

Based on the value and we'll get into that whole thing. Okay. Well, let's skip forward here. Okay, vision is something we do. Okay, so if you look at this screen here, if you look over on the right side, there are these two little horizontal arrows. pointing at each other, can you look at the big picture and see those arrows pointing at each other? Right. If I'm looking for that, I can find it. You can find it. You can find the up and down arrows.

There's down below there are four arrows. You can see them, the oblique four arrows. You can see them all in that picture. You can see the horizontal and vertical arrows on the picture. So when you look at that picture, what you see is what you're doing. Okay. That isn't, and you've drawn arrows in the past. Right. You know the movements that are involved with all those arrows. That's how you learn. When you were little, you learned how to draw a circle because we think it's a big deal in this culture.

So how many circles do you see when you're out in the forest? Unless the moon's out. Right, right. That's about it. But those are cultural things, but vision is something we do. So let's go on to that next slide and go on to the next one. There we go. So there was a guy by the name of Skeffington,

who in the 1920s started to look at vision as something more than 2020. He wanted to know why, as it is, that some people who measure like they need glasses are happier when they don't have them, because that happens. You do your measurements, and then the measurements say, oh, this person should like this pair of glasses. and they don't like them. Okay? And he wanted to know about all of these things, but he thought about vision comprised.

He put four circles, and those aren't his words, but one circle has to do with space. It has to do with knowing where things are. One circle has to do with value it, and that's kind of knowing what things are. It's valuing the actions that have to do with something. Like when you see a dust,

if your job is to keep dust off things, when you see that dust particle, that means something to you. It means something to you. Somebody else does not see the dust particle. Right. Because they're not thinking about the actions involved with that dust particle.

They're blind to it. Right. Okay. And then you've got your body things and how you see relates very much to your body, which we'll play with. And then you have words themselves. And the words relate to how you see.

So if we go to the next slide, okay, so this is a good example. We've been talking about seeing big and seeing little. So if we look at this slide here, it just says consciousness is not something that happens. And just look at the slide. I don't care. We're not going to try to understand it at the moment. We're just going to look at it and answer the question. Is it all clear?

Yes. Okay. So the slide is all clear. Okay. Now look at that red sea at the very beginning. Keep your eyes on that sea. and can you read the paragraph without taking your eyes off the sea you can't it's blurry it's all blurry so when it all looked clear what you did with your eyes is you looked at one thing at a time

your eyes danced all over the screen they looked at all the different words and in your mind it was all clear at the same time right but you did it sequentially you did it one step at a time and you added that all together. And this is why when you say seeing big and everybody sees big, because they're looking around all over the place, that's different and seeing big all at once. Right. Okay. Is this what most people do? And this is, well, you have to on writing. On writing, you have to. Okay. There's no other way to do it. There's no way to see well out of the corner of your eye. But if I walked into a room, I could in a single glance, tell you where the television was related to the sofa.

I don't have to look at every button on the sofa. I don't have to look at every dial on the television to tell you where the two are compared to each other. I just need one look, but some people will take a lot of looks. Okay. Okay. So we'll keep going here. Let's do this next one.

Okay. So when you see, it's almost like you have a flashlight, and one person turns the beam really wide. and they see a whole bunch of stuff in a single glance. And another person moves the beam all over. It's like you're in a dark room and you're going to look at here, here, here, here, here, here. And others just see a little tiny area. So you like talking to somebody, you see their face.

You don't see where they are in the room. Right. Okay. Like a very narrow beam of vision. And others will see the face and they won't see any space between, them and you. Okay. So in other words, when you say any space between them and you, okay, there's space between you and I. Right. If I pay attention to that space, I see you are a little over half way between me and the wall. Okay. Okay. And when I did that, I didn't look all over here.

I was looking towards you, but I just see where you are in the room. Okay. Okay. But if all I saw, I've had patience asked me, when I talk to somebody, I never know which eye to look at. I find myself looking from eye to eye. Well, that tells me. You mean when they're looking at somebody's face? Yeah. They end up looking at a little area at a time.

They can't see both eyes at once. They don't see a face. They see an eye and then they see the other eye. Right. Okay. So they're seeing little tiny bits. They're selecting a little tiny area to see and then they add them together. So when you look at somebody's face,

you just like scanning their face? Um, or no. I could be or I could look towards you and see where you are in the room like I am right now. Okay. Okay. So I'm aware of this, this much space here. There's space behind you between you and the wall.

So you're not necessarily hyper focusing on one part of the face. No. You're just sort of like taking in the shapes. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just seeing where things are. Right. Okay. Okay.

Now, if I want to see if you need your eyebrows trimmed. then I'm going to have to really look at the eyebrow to see what needs to be done. Right. Okay. If I want to count your eyelashes, I have to look. Right. Okay, so let's go to the next one here. Okay.

Now, the people who are close to their screen, if you look at this thing, if you look in the upper right-hand corner, there's all these white dots at the intersection of the lines. And if you look in the left corner, there are all these white dots at the intersection of the lines. and what it amounts to is wherever you're pointing your eyes, that's where those white dots are. So if you just kind of look around, you see the white dots come all over. That means your eyes are looking all over. Now, if you were to point your eyes in the center where the black dots are, and you kept your eyes right on those black dots, all the white dots will disappear.

That's if you don't let your eyes dance around. Okay. Now, while you're doing that, if you opened up your side vision, For people that aren't able to view this on YouTube or you're just listening to the audio, we're looking at like this big square. How would you describe what we're looking at? There are diagonal lines and they are set up so you see the white dots at the intersection of diagonal lines, but only when your good vision points at them. Right. Your good vision is your central vision.

So the dots tell you where your eyes are pointing. Okay? So if you look to the right, you see dots to the right. If you look to the left, you see dots to the left. That's fascinating how that works. And then in the center of the screen, there are some black dots. So if you get your eyes pointed right at those black dots, your eyes aren't looking at any of the white dots.

They all disappear. And if you open up your side vision and see the outside of the screen, without seeing any white dots, you can see a black dots. big black rectangle around the edge of the screen, if you can open your side vision up that much. I can see the nine black dots and the black box around the edge. Yeah, so you're centrally looking and you're peripherally looking and you're doing it at the same time. Right. The normal way to do it would be to just look at the frame.

Right. And you'd see the white dots follow your vision around it. Right. Okay. But if for some reason you wanted to see a bigger area, at the same time, which is necessary for many people to see that perception. They have to see a bigger area to see all the space. This would tell them, oh, I guess my eyes are dancing all over.

I didn't notice that. Okay. Okay. So if we did the next one, again, if you look at the very center, you can see a big A, B, C, and D out of the corner of your eye without seeing any white dots. but if your eyes dance over to the B or the A, then the white dots come around it. Right. Yep. Okay.

So you realize if you're doing it sequentially, one at a time or you're seeing them all at once. And then the next slide here. Okay. So when I said there were four circles, that first circle was where are things? So that was an example. Where are they? Where are my eyes pointing? Right.

Where's the world? Now we talk about values. So here we have a picture of a guy sitting. on a cliff. In fact, it's a very narrow promontory on a cliff, a little tiny area. And he's sitting there and he's looking at the view. And he's seeing, so when he looks at a cliff, he sees an opportunity to look at the world. The second picture, there's a guy jumping off a cliff.

So he's, and he's in the water, he's jumping off the cliff into the water. And he sees the same cliff, but he sees it as an opportunity for a cliff. thrill. Right. If he was a hang glider, he'd say, ah, perfect place to the hang glide. Okay, that's what he'd see. This third guy, he looks at the cliff and he thinks, oh, gosh, I could fall off that. And all he sees is a hazard. Right. He sees the fear. A fear of falling. So the actions he values are not falling. And one guy values the action of the jumping or, hand gliding, and the other guy values the action of seeing the panorama, seeing the whole view, seeing all of the horizon and all that beauty out there.

And if we go to the next slide, another example, in the first picture, you've got three people sharing an apple, but they are thinking about an apple as something you eat. Have you ever seen anybody eat apples like that? Listen, if I hadn't known that works. When I was 40 years younger, I would have always killed. You're in an apple, you know? That guy knows how to eat an apple, folks. Yeah, yeah.

He's got a couple of cheerleaders with him that are helping him with the apple. But anyway, they're eating. An apple is something to eat. It's valuable because of the action of eating. The second guy as an artist, and he is drawing an apple. And to him, he's seeing all the contours of the apple. He's seeing the shades on the apple. He is converting a three-dimensional apple onto a two-dimensional apple

onto a two-dimensional page. Right. So he sees the action of drawing. And then the third one, we got a William Tell picture where a guy has an apple on his head. He's also got shot in the eyeglasses with an arrow. Luckily, it's a suction cup arrow. It's a suction cup arrow.

So it isn't that bad. But anyway, he sees the apple as a target. Okay. So what we see is what we value, and what we don't see, we don't value. At the moment, you don't value the fact that there's some different little colors on the top of your table. Okay? There's little spots of color there.

Right. You didn't value it, so you didn't see it. You were blind to it. Okay? Right. And so you see what you value. You're blind to what you do not value. And when you go to a newscast, you see what the newscaster valued.

Now, how do things like this help with? I mean, I'm sure a lot of people don't come in for asking, say, hey, I don't know where I am in the world or I can't see 3D space. Most people come in for reading or learning problems, I'm sure. How can somebody get better at reading and better at digesting knowledge from a book? Because obviously, there's two parts of it, right? There's reading the text, making sure the text is clear and it's all one line and words aren't bouncing all over the place. And the other part is actually understanding and digesting what you just read. Okay.

If you are working just to look at it, there's nothing left to understand it. You are putting all your energy in just looking at it. Right. Okay. So if you have difficulty using your eyes together, when you look at things, well, adults, they always tell me, well, I say it out loud. and then I listen to what I said, and then I translate it,

and then I know what it said. In other words, they don't look at the words and the information just comes in. They actually will talk to themselves, say the words, listen to the words, and pull it in through their ears. Wow. And they actually use different areas of the brain

than normal readers, because they are reading in a different way. They're doing it auditory. They're listening. And it goes in through their ears. It's just like when you talk to them, they understand it. But when they have to use their eyes and get it at the same time, if they're working for that print not to double up, not that they'll ever see it double. Some of them do, but most of them will just get away from it before that ever happens.

They'll just say, I'd rather be doing something else right now. Exactly. I think I will. Now, how can you make somebody get better at reading? Do they just have to value it? Do they have to, like, really want that information in that book? And then that's what, like, is that what drives people to want to acquire a better ability to read something? Because you're not just going to make somebody get good at reading if they don't care about reading, right?

Like, they're going to have to want that. They're going to have to value the knowledge or the information. Yeah, I always wanted to just see if the girl was going to kiss the guy or not. And so I kept going. that. But, you know, so I was a fiction reader and I just wanted to know how the story ended up. People, there's another group of people that are information readers. They look at things when they want to know something. And with kids, it's very important that you figure out what they're like. And if they want information, you have them read biographies. You do not have them

read stories. Some kids could care less about stories. And one of the things is if you read to them and they're just uninterested, it's kind of like, why would I waste my time on stories? What does that do? But they'll read things about baseball. They'll read things about things they want to know about. If it's real, it might be worth.

So that's part of it. But what we would do is the first thing we're going to do is get them so they can comfortably look at things and not have that. I don't want to be there feeling. Okay. And that has to do with getting one eye to work with the other. But then if they have a hard time where they look at a word and they see the first letter and they call out the word, we're going to get them. So they're very good at looking at all the parts of the word where they're able to concentrate their attention on small parts. of the world and do that easily.

We might use a target where we flash things and they have to pick it up quicker. Like we flash arrows and they have to remember which way they flashed, you know, up down, left, right, that type of thing. We do all sorts of things so they can get information in quickly. And then another big, big, big part, which fits in vision and does. doesn't is they have to know what the words mean. Right. So I think earlier we used one, the man was oxorius, which pleased his wife and amused

his friends. And oxorious, that doesn't mean anything. So your attention sticks in the word. Exactly. Yeah. You lose the whole thing. But oxorius essentially means that extremely doting towards one's wife. is what they call it.

It would be ox is Latin for wife. And it means that you do 100% everything that your wife tells you to do. So I am, for instance, oxorius. When I'm in the house, I always do what I'm told because I don't want to sleep in the garage. Okay. But anyway, so the man was oxorius, which pleased his wife and amused his friends. And then the whole sentence kind of makes sense. So that's a big part of reading.

You don't have a picture of a word that you don't understand. So if you're going to read and picture what you're reading, like there was a sailboat and the sailboat was kind of tipped over in the wind of the boat. The boat was half tipped over. There's a man in the boat, and he has a corncob pipe, and it's sitting in his lips. Well, those are pictures. You get a picture of what's going on. Okay.

Well, if you'd want, ideally, you're turning words into pictures when you're reading, you're seeing what's happening. But if you have to think about the word. You can't do two things at once. Right. Okay. Unless one of them is automatic. I can't say the alphabet backwards. and go do a pattern

and continue the pattern and say the alpha backwards at the same time. I can do one, I can do the other, I can't do them both at once. Two things that I have to think about. If you had a child and you say, look at my finger, and then you say,

what's three plus two and their eyes go all over the room, it shows you that they can't look at something and think at the same time. Wow. Okay. And so being able to just look at things and also think at the same time is a big deal. That integration of those things.

So that would be another thing we'd be working on. So looking at things was so second nature that they didn't have to think about looking at things. Now, have you heard speed readers describe how they do that? Like how they just scan the lines really quick and then process it afterwards? There's a different way to read. I read terribly. I say all the sounds to myself. I translate those sounds into what's going on.

You mean you actually say the words out loud? No. Oh, okay. In your mind. But in my mind, which is good if you're reading poetry. You want to hear the rhythm and everything. But it's very slow. You're not going to get too quick that way.

Three, four hundred words a minute. That's about it. You know, if you're going to vocalize them all. Right. And then do that extra step. Some people look at it and seem to understand what they're looking at. They skip the saying it's step and they pull the information straight off the page. How they do it, I have no idea.

But I have a friend. He's a journal editor. I took that thing down a little. Yeah, I have a friend. Just you can tilt it like this. Yeah. He's a journal editor. and he reads a book

of a day. Okay? I mean, he just... That kind of stuff baffles me how people do that. But he just sucks that information off the page. And that would not mean

that he reads out loud well. Right. You know, it doesn't mean he's a good reading performer. And we see kids all the time who are good reading performers. And you ask him, what does that word mean?

And it's like, huh? They're not reading. They're saying, all the sounds nicely. They're word callers. Knowing what the words mean is a big deal as far as language. I think we're doing language next anyway here. Okay. And language is... Okay. Yeah. So if you have this on your screen, which one of those is different? Which one of those smileys is different? The second one's different. Yeah. And the way I asked that question, I said, which one is different? Well, they're all different. None of the smileys are like the other ones. Every

smiley is different. A little bit different. But I said which one is different. And so you were only looking for one that was different. One is the most different. Yeah. So if I said how many of those smileys are a little different than the other ones, then you could see that they're not smiling the same way.

You'd see they're all different. Right. So depending on how I use language, you see differently. Words tell us what they emphasize in our seeing. Okay. Okay. I mentioned there were some little flex of color on the table. I use words to change your seeing.

Right. All of a sudden, those had value just because they had value to me. I draw a circle. Can you draw a circle? Well, yeah, I want to please mom or dad. Right. I'll draw the circle. Right.

So language emphasizes what we see. So what do we have next to anything? I guess we do. Okay, so look at this blizzard. If you're seeing this in front of you here, there's this blizzard. You can see there's some bushes in there. Looks like some snows in there. Maybe a cloud, a dark area in between the clouds.

Okay. And then if we go to the next. picture. Now, where it says ear, that's a cow's ear. This is the Renshaw cow. So if you look where it says ear, that's the cow's one ear. And the cow's eye is over there on the other side. And the cow's nose is at the bottom and his snout kind of goes down. So as I do language difference, you start to see something entirely different in there. When you try to describe where things are, I can see the cow. Yeah. Now you can't unsee the cow. Once you've seen the cow, you'll see it every time you look at it. Exactly, which happens to me. It happens to us all.

There's some things once you've seen them, you never forget them. Okay. So, but there again, language affects what we see. It's a part of our seeing. It emphasizes what we see. What's the next one there? Okay. Now, you mentioned language and vision and how are they hooked together. So on this one, why don't we try? We got a bunch of arrows here. Okay? Yeah, some arrows pointing up, some arrows pointing left, some arrows pointing down and some right. So I'm going to start and I'm going to just point my hand like I'm looking at an arrow. So I guess I'm in front of here.

I'm looking at arrows. So I go right and left and up and right and left. Now what would happen if I said the opposite I was seeing. So now I go left, right, down. Okay, so you're swiping your hand left and you're saying the word right. If you try that. Right. Left.

It's down. It's hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do. Because words and seeing are tightly bound together. And when you unbind them, it's hard. So now try it. Say what you're seeing and move your hand the opposite way. So on that first one.

And move the opposite way of what I'm looking at. Yeah, you're going to say right, but you're going to move your hand left. Right. Uh, left, yeah. Up, down. You see what I mean? It's very confusing. Okay.

So. My brain is scrambled now. Yeah, your brain is scrambled. And that's just it. And normally, words and seeing, they're bound together. Mm-hmm. Whenever you unbind them, whenever you do it differently, it is very, very, you're, difficult because you're in a whole new world you're doing actions that make no sense

based on the words the words told you an action and now you're doing a different action right okay so so speaking or seeing and words they are intimately hooked together you just can't get away from them right and i don't know if we have anything left here No, we don't. Good. Okay. But so anyway, so those are some examples. So you see what you value. And what you value are opportunities for action. I have my liquid death here. Yes. Okay. And I'm thirsty. So I saw an opportunity for action. To quench your thirst. You just murdered your thirst. That's it. I murdered my thirst. I love these things. I'll give you. I'll send some home with you. My wife will really be happy if I bring that home. Yes. I'm sure she would value that.

But you have value. You have where is it so I can grab that liquid death. I didn't knock it over. I didn't swipe my hand and missed it. Right. I grabbed it. If I were to cover an eye where I didn't have both eyes and I have to line my hand up with it, it's kind of hard to do. I can kind of do it, but it's pretty hard with one I covered.

So that where is it? Where am I? If somebody had somehow put me where I wasn't, put me somewhere else. And I was thinking, well, it's there. I wouldn't know where. I certainly wouldn't know where in the room that was. Now, I'm sure you've read the mind's eye, the book by Oliver Sacks, where he speaks about all kinds of different human impairments and how people overcome different things and learn how to walk.

And there's one chapter dedicated to Vision where he spoke about a lot of famous painters and famous artists who suffered from stereo blindness, meaning they weren't able to see this depth. And there was a lady named Margaret Livingston, I believe, from Harvard, who analyzed a bunch of, bunch of self portraits of Rembrandt and she said that based on his eyeballs he was most likely stereo blind meaning he was he could not see 3D depth which is a big advantage she was saying that there's a lot of artists like this like Picasso for example and there's some sort of connection between people like Rembrandt and Picasso being able to create these masterpieces and at the same time they're they're stereo blind yeah they're they're in our church

you oftentimes are transforming. And that thing down a little bit. Yeah. In arch, you're oftentimes transforming a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional world. Well, if you're, in other words, there's space in here. And I have to translate that on paper, a two-dimensional world. Okay?

Right. Well, if I only using one eye, now I've got a kind of a two-dimensional world. dimensional looking world. And I don't have to transfer it. So you could almost communicate it. You can communicate the depth by the monocular cues better. Right. Because you're using monocular cues to create the illusion of depth.

Wow. So there can be advantages, if that's what you're doing, of not seeing the depth, or you might be able to create something better than a photograph if you could kind of convey that sense of depth, even though you're using two-dimensional illusion to do it. So it's hard to say. In other words, if I have a sense of how the world really is,

what does that even mean let's let's say it's there's a a handsome young lady in front of me okay and I just fall in love with this young lady

and I'm going to put her on canvas well if I captured that love on canvas if I did it in a way where you loved her too when you saw her. So you looked at the canvas

and you had the kind of the emotional response I had when I looked at the lady. Okay. As an artist, if I was able to capture that extra, not just the physical, but kind of the emotion of the thing,

then that would be a pretty special painting. Yeah. You know, if you had like the Mona Lisa and she had this weird smile and you're sitting there thinking, wow, what's going on here? That's different. Well, there wasn't just,

I don't think she probably had that word smile. Right. I think that Da Vinci kind of created something there. There wasn't an exact replica of what is I told him. He was creating something more. Okay. like an artist. In other words, if I'm an illustrator,

I might be able to draw a beautiful Elvis Presley or a tiger. Get them on felt, okay? And they're just great. But that's a little different than an object that I look at and I wonder about and I get involved with when I look at it. And I start saying, what's going on here? I'm going to stop and not look like I always look. I'm going to look at this in a new way.

This is a different world. Something's happening here. And so that's what your artists do. They get you to see the world in new ways. Seeing Elvis on Velvet doesn't get me to see the world in a new way. Was Da Vinci one of those? Was he stereo blind, too? Do you know about that?

I don't remember on that. Now, like some of like Monet, has he got? older you know he had cataracts and so he had those big blurry yeah the big blurry canvases um the lilies or the things on the pond yeah um so that he was um capturing a different way of seeing as it as it came before him and i'm sure that it was interesting to him because he was in a new world right it's very interesting too with filmmakers like errol morris is one of the famous ones who's one of my favorite filmmakers who has zero depth perception he has i don't think he hasn't he had since he he had since he was a child he had very poor vision in one eye and it's just gotten worse over time

and um he has a very unique way of shooting his documentaries he has this thing i forget what he calls it now but uh basically are you're familiar with like how a teleprompter works right Like it's a screen that projects, it projects in reverse the words onto a mirror that the people can see on the other end of it. So the people seeing like a reversed mirror image of the words like scrolling. So he figured out a way to put his head inside of a teleprompter. So when he interviews people, the camera is directly in front of his face and there's just a mirror in front of the camera reflecting up above the camera and onto his face. So that way the person is only seeing his face, not the person. the lens of the camera because there's a mirror in front of it.

And it's a very unique way of recording an interview. It just invoked so much more emotion because the person is staring right into the viewer's eyes. And only somebody who has, it's like the way I think about it is maybe he's trying to make up for a lack of perception that he has and he's trying to overcompensate. by using these extra tools and trying to evoke even more emotion out of this flat image that he only sees. But people like us that people who have good stereo vision see, they don't need that extra. It's just over the top for them, which makes his film so much better and puts him so much, puts his work so far above the rest.

And even when Oliver Sacks interviewed Errol Morris, it was funny. When he asked him about stereo vision or seeing shit in 3D, he was just like, I think it's a gimmick. He goes, I think stereo vision is a gimmick. I don't understand why you would even need it. I don't think you do need it, which was wild to hear. And he thought, he even said to Sacks, he said, I think that your interest in this is kind of bizarre. Uh-huh. It'd be like talking to a colorblind person about color.

Yeah. I think that color film is highly overrated. Why is it better than black and white? Right. Yeah. Well, colorblind people, they can see color, right? They just don't understand. They don't have the language to match up with it.

Is that? I don't know what they do. There's different versions of colorblind. I'm sure there's a lot of different philosophies on how they do. There are different colorblindness. I have lots of friends who say they're colorblind, but then sometimes I'll cat, like one of my friends who always told me he's colorblind, we'll be looking at something. He'll be like, oh, yeah, that little orange area right there. I'm like, yeah, that's orange. He told me you were colorblind. I didn't know that was orange. Yeah. Well, they mix up, you know, reds and greens, for instance, that's one type of color vision. Or two types. There's two different ways they can do that. There are also monochromats that only see one color, which they're rare. really yeah i think it's one in seven males or red green colorblind um and so that's fairly common but in that whole art thing you are getting people look it's almost like vision therapy we take

and put you in a new world okay so let's say you're used to walking around and i put what are called prisms on you and the prisms move the images over to the side and now your body is telling you one thing and your eyes are telling you something else because of the prisms. They move the light over. So your eyes are telling you one story. Your body is telling you something else.

You have to wake up and see the world in a different way. Otherwise, you walk into walls. Right. So it forces you to become conscious. to wake up, to start to explore, see what's going on, and then to create in this new world. And art does the same thing. It wakes people up. Now, if it wakes them up too much, they're not going to like it.

It's too different. It's too weird. It's just like I can't put huge, huge, huge prisms on you and get you walking around. you'll just fall down. Right, right. Or if I throw on a pair of prisms that make the world backwards, you're not going to like that much. It's just too much of a change. Right.

You just be disoriented. But you're putting people in novel experiences. So if you had a cross-eyed person and you put lenses in front of them that allowed their eyes to work together for the first time, they wouldn't know what's to do with it. You might be talking about depth. They just talk about weird. Right. You know, what is that? It doesn't look the same. And my hand, hey, something's wrong here. My hands aren't quite telling me what they should tell me. Right. Right. So your therapy, you put somebody in an instrument, you put a lens in front of them and changed the world. For people who've ever had new glasses that they didn't like, they couldn't get used to them.

What happened there is the glasses changed where things were in the world. Right. Okay. You were used to moving your eyes a certain amount, and now you had to move them less, or you had to move them more than you used to, and getting used to those new movement patterns gets you all confused, and you hate the glasses. And you go back to the doctor, and they check them to see if it's the glasses. or what they ordered.

And then they say, well, if you wear these a bit, you'll get used to them. And in most cases, you do. Because as you start learning how to move in the new world, you get used to it. And because if your glasses magnify, let's say your eyes have always moved from here to here. Now they have to move from here to here.

Everything's bigger. Your eye movements all change, and you have to get used to all these. these new eye movements. So even though the glasses make things clear, they also mess you up as far as where are things in the world. Yeah, you always have to rewire your consciousness. Yeah, it's just you've got to get your body and your eyes working together again. It's even worse if one eye is different than the other. Okay, I want to kind of transition this into like into what we can do to fix this thing. So for for everyday people who are listening to this and and want to figure out a way to improve

their vision or improve their perception of the world, what are some, some daily things or some everyday things that people can do to expand their vision, expand their acuity? And you even actually, you spoke about, you worked with a seal, I believe, a Navy SEAL and a pilot to improve their vision with some rigorous grueling therapy work. where they did five hours a day of therapy and they actually improved their vision from like very poor vision to 2020 in the matter of a week? Yeah.

Okay. If we're talking about seeing smaller, we're probably talking about somebody who's nearsighted, meaning when you take your glasses off, you can't see far away. Okay. You might be able to see just fine if you move something real close to you, but anything that's further

way it's hard to see so with that what you would do is you'd take your glasses off and you would get as far from some print as you can barely see it you'd close your eyes you'd picture the print and then you pop your eyes wide open just like you're throwing your eyes across the room and oftentimes the print will start to clear up a bit and then it disappears again okay Now, when I say it clears up, it actually clears up. It actually starts to look smaller and blacker. So you'd have to have print that's big enough. Like if you had liquid death here.

Yeah. Okay. If it was that size print and you got that right at the edge of where you can barely see it, if you closed your eyes and then popped them wide open, it might come into focus for a second. If it did, then that's a way to learn to see smaller. You just keep practicing that. And is this kind of what you did with the Navy SEAL and the pilot? That was one of the big ones.

They call it deep winks. Deep winks. But it's just closing your eyes and then popping them wide open. And it helps if you picture in your mind what you're going to see. Okay. So you read the words. Imagine what they say. Yeah, you could get up close and look at it in detail.

Yeah. Move it out further. Picture that in your mind. Pop those eyes wide open and then boom, see if it'd come in a second. If it'll come in a second and then it disappears. then by working that more, you start to learn how to keep it in. And then when you move your eyes, it blurs. So eventually you learn how to keep it in,

even though you're moving your eyes and things are moving. Now, this is, and that's in that book, as far as there's a whole little section of exactly how to do that exercise. But that's more for the people that would like to see with weaker glasses. And then you go to your optometrist and you ask, I have a pair of glasses that are four clicks too weak for me,

and you start working in that. Okay, so essentially you can kind of like work your way down and power with your glasses. Power to where you get so you can see. Now, if you're very near-sighted, you're not going to just take your glasses off and see much. Right. If you can see to read without your glasses,

in other words, if you could read at normal distance, let's say you can read at 16 to 20 inches without glasses on, you probably can learn to see pretty well in the distance. Okay? If you have to move your book up to where it's 10 inches in front of your nose, then you probably can't learn to see in the distance without glasses. Right.

So it's if you're a little near side or in other words, you can become less and less depending on glasses. On the other hand, if you have Coke bottles that are quite thick, you might be able to learn how to see with glasses that are less far. Now, there are lots of books

on the market on that type of thing. The most famous one is by Bates. Better eyesight without glasses, I think it was called. He's famous for the Bates Method. The Bates method. So he had a whole bunch of exercises. The deep winks I mentioned,

they're in the book that we've been talking about. The shape of the sky, there's a section in here on that. Now, when it comes to seeing three-dimensional though, now you want to start looking at the space in between things. Okay. So let's say I have liquid death here and I have my hand here. Well, how much space is here?

So if instead of looking at liquid death or looking at my hand, I instead look at the space between them. now I'm starting to think about that. If I'm in the forest and there are two trees, and I start to see both at once, look at one, see the other one, then there's more space. I could look and see if I can see three trees at the same time. Right.

So I could open up my side and see three different trees at once or four or five so that I start to see a bigger area at the same time. if there are two trees and they look like they're so three, four feet apart, as I walk towards them, they get further and further apart. They look like they're spreading out. Right, right. If I keep thinking about both trees simultaneously, then I'm opening up that side vision. If I am looking at something and I think about how much space do I see between me and it, sometimes that will open up your bigger, space area.

And how, so this is almost the same. It seems like it's something that you have to deliberately do like a like a exercise similar to the, you just have to do it. Similar to the deep winks. It seems like something you have to constantly do for a long period of time every day until is it something that eventually can become automatic to somebody? Yeah.

And that has to do with your posture as well. If you look at my posture, I'm a typical near-sighted person, and you'll notice my head is too far forward. Right. Okay. So near-sided people typically kind of look like this. Their head starts to go like they're trying to see from the way. Okay.

So if I instead straighten up, stretch the top of my head to the ceiling, think about getting my ears so they're back over my shirt. shoulders, then the world is more likely to open up. Real. Because we said that your body was part of you were seeing. So your posture can affect things. So if you learn how to kind of stretch upward and oftentimes you get so the air is easier to see.

The air is easier to see. Yeah. That's fast. I also, that's another thing I see with a lot of gamers, video gamers. A lot of them are very hunched over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so when your posture goes normal, oftentimes your vision goes back in the correct direction to where you're starting to see more like you're looking at things.

You get the feeling like you and I are kind of together somehow. Right. In other words, when I know where things are compared to me, I'm seeing them as if they relate to me. okay when i'm just seeing how one thing is closer than another i'm not really thinking that i have anything to do with it but when i'm seeing the distance between me and it now it's like oh that so as you straighten up and you're out in the forest you're walking around you start to notice that the trees are distances from you oftentimes right so it's something that you can play with on posture okay it more like a second nature type of thing okay

But the key on all of those eventually is to do them moving. If you can't see space when you're moving, then it's nothing that's going to stay with you at all. You'd have to be able to move. You'd have to be able to walk and see the space. You'd have to be able to kind of move your head in different ways and still see that space. Okay. There's obviously neurons in our brain and our visual cortex. that process this type of seeing, right?

This sort of like three-dimensional space. There are binocular cells that one eye and the other eye stimulate the same cell. Yeah. Okay. And these things can be like these things could potentially be in us when we're young and maybe leave us for a long time and then come back way later in life, sort of be reactivated. Seeing this, seeing the big space doesn't seem to require.

require you to use those tiny, which finger is closer type cells. Seeing the egocentric, the distance between you and things doesn't seem to require that. So you will have people who have an eye that turns in a tiny, tiny bit. Yeah. They never quite use it with the other one. And yet they learn to be very aware of space. Oh, really? Yes.

Like Sue Barry. You close this book. Yeah. Sue Barry wrote the book, What, Fixing My Gaze. Yeah. Okay. And she came to our office for a seminar. We were promoting her book.

We had a bunch of optometrists there who were due vision therapy, and the price of the seminar was to buy 100 books. And so we promoted the book. She was there. And when she looked at the little stereo test that the doctors normally give, Right. She got quite a ways down, but not all the way to the end of it. There was a doctor there who was nearsighted, and he looked at the little book, and he got them all right.

Okay. We then used a different stereo target, a big one on the wall, and she knew exactly where it was. However, I changed it, you know, in a movie theater, when the things come out at you, like if you're at Disney, world and the bug comes out in your face. When it came to that type of stereo, she was much, much better than this other doctor. Okay. So he had the little type of stereo, but she had the nowhere things are in the world type of stereo. So he had like the guy who was sitting in a room reading all day type of stereo.

Right. He was, but he could pass that little test. Right. And at that point, she didn't quite do as well as he did. And I don't remember exactly how things turned out with her in the long run. But the point is the doctor's stereo test doesn't necessarily tell you how what big of an, how large of an area you look at in the world. Okay. When I look at liquid death, I can look at, there's a little ring here.

I could look at that. I could look at the whole can at once. I could see where the can is compared to the table. So one way I'm seeing a big area, one way I'm seeing a very small area. Right. And that's seeing a bigger area, and you can do that by walking and seeing the trees move by you.

That's one way to open up that side vision, is walk and be aware of the trees appearing to move by you as you walk by them. or if you were to look at a tree. Is this called optic flow, what you're referring to? That's the optic flow. Okay. Okay, so you can see that. You can see it.

Another way, if you were to look at a big tree, you could look at a pine cone on that tree. So it's a big pine tree. And you could look at a single pine cone, or you could open up your vision and see the whole tree at once and see its Christmas tree shape. Okay?

So one way you're seeing the whole big rectangular shape all at once, the other way you're looking at a single pine cone. When you see the whole tree at once, without moving your eyes all over, just see the whole, open up, see the whole tree at once. All at once, there's more air between the branches, where you get this more three-dimensional type of tree. Yes.

So it's the size of the tree. area you select to see that kind of dictates how much space there is. If you did it sequentially, like when we were reading earlier and we read one, we said, is this whole thing clear and you look at it a piece at a time, you say it's clear, and then we didn't let you move your eyes, and now it was all blurry. So if you're using that sequential type of see, you just don't see the space. But if you do it simultaneously,

where you're seeing these trees on one side and these trees on the other at the same time, or you're seeing the distance between you and the tree all at once, if you look down the path and can see the path being wide next to you and narrow far away and you saw it all at the same time, that would open up your vision. Okay.

So these are all things that anybody could do. And this is how human beings are supposed to see. This is how we were meant to be able to see the world. I'm sure this is how animals see the world, right? You should have the ability to do it, the flexibility. It depends what you're doing. Okay. So if you're reading a book, for example, should you be able to, like, see the entire book

floating in space as well as the tiny words? I can't, but you might be able to. Okay. If I mean, that might, it's not a goal I've worked on, but it. Would this be like an exercise? I see what people could do to try to train this? They sometimes tell you when you read that every 20 minute shot, look up for 20 seconds and see 20 feet away, I guess, in 2020, 20, 20.

Well, you could also from time to time, open up your side vision and see where your gadget is. So if you have a phone, you're looking at the phone, think about the distance between your nose and the phone and the distance between the phone and the floor behind it, and you, you'll start to see where the phone is in the room. Okay. So you can do that from time to time to get back into that opening up your vision. Okay. Okay.

So those are just little relaxation things and how far you go ahead. I mean the book, Shape of the Sky that we've been talking about. Yes. Now that I remember the title. You're the one who wrote it. Yeah. Did you not title it? Yeah, I titled it.

And I stole the title from a paper I'd written. You know, I liked it. So, but that book is just full of exercises that open up space. Okay. Okay. Now, what is the shape of the sky? What can you distill that down to in a sentence? Yeah, what would it be?

If I were to see the entire tree at the same time, if I opened up and saw the entire shape of the tree at the same time, it would cut out a hole in the sky. It'd be blue on the outside. The tree would be on the inside. The shape of the sky is the blue. In that blue, if you had a white cloud out there, it would spring back and you would see the cloud further away

when you opened up your vision. So the shape of the sky is the sky does have a shape. If there's a tree in front of you, part of the shape of the sky is made by the tree. if there are clouds up above you, then part of the shape of that blue sky is made by the clouds. If there's a cliff near you, part of the shape of the sky is that cliff.

If there's a building near you, part of the shape of the sky is the building, you want to open up and see what shape the sky is, not looking at the edge of things, but look towards the middle of the sky and open up and see the outside of the blue. And that's what gets you that, that spring where the trees come out towards you compared to where the sky is right um so that's what

the shape of the sky was about and do most people not see this like when i go for walks and i see the trees on both sides and i see them these trees are closer these trees are farther and those ones are farther there's just like layers and layers and then there's clouds that are on this like separate plane of existence is that not what everyone sees well if you are near-sided like i am yeah chances are you're in your mind anyway, even when you walk. You're doing something else. You're not where you are. Your whole world is kind of close anyway.

You're usually inside. You don't spend much time looking 300 yards away. Right. Okay. So if you take somebody who's a little far-sided and somebody who's near-sighted in the car, the far-sided person is going to be saying, Hey, look at that range of mountains over there. Isn't that gorgeous?

They'll be looking at a different distance. So these are things to kind of do the opposite of getting near-sided. I'm not saying they'll make you not near-sided. But knowing where things are is a big advantage for like driving at night. The other thing you can do is when you're in a car, you're driving. if you're a C. Little type of person, you will put the edge of your left fender next to the line and you'll keep it there and you'll not have to open up your vision at all. You just keep your car next to the line and you know where the car is. If instead you opened up your vision and saw both sides of the road at the same time and put your car in the middle of the lane, now you're seeing a big area. So like if it's a foggy night, kind of hard to see, you'll find it's a whole lot easier if you're opening up and seeing a big area instead of trying to put the edge of your car

next to the line because the line disappears. It gets wet out there. The line disappears. You feel kind of, uh. Right. I don't like this. But if you opened up, saw both sides of the edge of your road, then or your lane anyway. put your car in the middle of it. Now you're seeing a big area, and it's a lot easier to tell where you are. I've sought a doc I'm working with right now with the therapy. She was saying the same thing, you know, as out, it was raining, and all of a sudden, you know, that was pretty easy to do it that way.

Oh, wow. So that learning to open up your vision is a big thing about knowing where things are. Because the other way, think about it, if you're looking at a piece at a time and your eyes are dancing all over the road, that's an awful lot of work to know where things are. It's an awful lot of work and it's got to burn up a lot of energy in your brain. It's got to make thinking worse. It's got to make speaking worse. It's got to make everything worse when you do things that way. Have you, what is like a big, what is like one of the most big breakthrough moments you've seen one of your patients where they've figured this out, learn to see big, learn to see small, learn to open up their vision. And how is it? it improved like what is some of the bigger kind of corollary improvements in their life as far as like focus or learning or reading or well all the above sue barry writes it in her book um fixing my gaze yeah she's a neuroscientist and before her therapy um to get her eyes to work together she was had three surgeries for crossed eyes when she was a little girl under the age of seven

and her eyes looked good. Angle that thing down like this. Like point it downwards a little bit. Like a little bit more? Perfect. Yeah. So Sue had learned how to have her eyes. They looked real good.

But her world was kind of jittery looking. It wasn't solid. And she's like 48 and she doesn't like the way she's seeing. She's been told that she's too old to ever have depth perception. And she goes in past the critical period. Yeah, that's that misrepresentation of the critical period. Misrepresentation, right. It's not when you can be helped.

It's when you can get worse. Exactly. Okay. And so she worked and she got depth perception where she's seeing the steering wheel pop out at her compared to the background. She started to see what she did is she started to process bigger areas. And in her work, she also noticed that her thinking change. She started seeing the big picture on things.

She started seeing the different viewpoints. She could step back and see it all at once rather than just zeroing in on details. I know one of my professors, I read his books on Shakespeare, and they're all very, very, very detail-oriented. He digs into the details. You can see him talking about this detail. this detail, this detail. Another author will give you an overview of the period and start telling you how the details fit into that overview.

So learning to see big, it actually changes your thinking and that you learn to think big too. I mean, you learn to see a bigger view of things and see how the parts fit into the view rather than just seeing parts. Oh, wow. And so that in print, you know, that was like amazing when I had seen that.

But I mean, you know, oftentimes people will see depth for the first time and start to cry or this type of stuff. It's a very emotional moment. Yeah.

When you run into what it's like to see that other way, especially probably if you saw that way earlier. Yeah. And you got it back and put you right into it. Right.

Well, let me grab your book. Oh, go ahead. Show her one your book so they can, and tell them where they can find it. shape of the sky. Oh, this is available through the Optometric Extension Program Foundation.

Pull a little bit back towards your face because it won't be in focus up there. There you go. Perfect. It's the OEPF, the Optometric Extension Program Foundation. They sell the book. If you get the book, you also want to go to my website, which is cookfissiontherapy.com. Okay. And on there, I have all the diagrams that are in this book, and they're all. digital and you have red-blue glasses that come with the book. There are 3D targets in it, and on our website, those targets are much, much brighter and easier to see than they are in the book themselves. Okay? Perfect. And I'll make sure I link, I'll make sure I link to that book where people can find it online below, as well as to a link to the PDF where they can find some of those

different things that people can do to use to improve their vision, improve their vision, improve their perception small big all of it great i really appreciate you coming here and doing this man it's been fun it really means a lot