Open Your Eyes And See - Introduction

A Personal Vision

I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in improving the body's physical performance. This interest was a gift from my father, who was stricken with polio when he was five years old and rehabilitated himself so successfully that twenty years later he scored a hundred percent on the extremely demanding New York City Fire Department physical examination.

Later, after a year of vision training permanently corrected my eleven-year-old brother's lazy eye, my confidence in the body's ability to help itself deepened, even in the mind and heart of a seven-year-old. By the time I was sixteen, I knew that helping people to see better -- not with drugs or surgery or eyeglasses but by making the most of their own vision system -- was what I wanted to do in life. I am one of the world's fortunate people because that is what I do every day, helping my patients -- who range from illiterate inner-city schoolchildren to world-class athletes -- overcome the self-imposed limitations of their vision.

I use the words self-imposed deliberately. Until recently, vision scientists believed that eye dysfunction was hereditary and that the only help for it was to wear eyeglasses. (Dr. A. M. Skeffington, who developed a model of vision incorporating many aspects of behavior, was a distinguished exception to this rule.) Now we know that some of the most common vision disorders, particularly nearsightedness and farsightedness, are not hereditary but learned -- and that the way we use our eyes is a habit, like constant frowning or clenching the teeth.

We owe much of this new understanding of vision to the development of sophisticated and inexpensive new equipment which has enabled neuroscientists to explore aspects of the brain and its functioning that used to be entirely mysterious; and as the brain has yielded up its secrets, so too has the eye.

Embryologically unique, the eye is actually an outgrowth of the brain; the tissue of the retina is a specialized brain tissue. While other sense organs grow to the brain, the eyes grow out from it, vigilant outposts that provide it with eighty percent of the data it receives from the outside world.

Much of this visual input is processed by the central nervous system through channels that have been well mapped for years. What the new research discloses is the large part that the autonomic nervous system, which processes our unconscious intelligence, plays in how we see. To understand this fascinating hidden part of vision, it helps to understand a little part of the brain itself.

Unlike the eye, the brain isn't much to look at -- approximately three pounds of little gray and white cells. But handsome-is is handsome-does; and in terms of performance, the brain is magnificent, a miracle. Its largest portion is the cerebrum, which fills the upper part of the cranium and supervises the work of the central nervous system: conscious mental activity and all voluntary movement. Walking, talking, reading -- all our conscious acts are accomplished through the central nervous system.

Much smaller, but critical to our every heartbeat and every breath we draw, is the midbrain, headquarters of the autonomic nervous system, which masterminds all our unconscious, life-supporting activities. Nestled in the center of the skull is the autonomic nervous system's head ganglion, or nerve mass, the hypothalamus. This structure weighs about as much as a ten-carat diamond and is a thousand times more precious. It regulates blood pressure, eye pressure, heartbeat, body temperature, the emotions, hunger and thirst, sexual activity, and the immune system! It controls the eye's focusing muscles, called the ciliary muscles.

Luckily, all these unconscious functions run on automatic pilot. It's impossible to imagine what it would be like consciously to tell our heart to beat, our lungs to breathe, and our eyes to refocus as often as three hundred times a minute. It couldn't be done.

On the other hand, it would be very useful to be able to step in during a crisis and consciously slow the heartbeat down or lower the blood pressure or clear out negative, painful emotions.

This actually became possible in the 1960's , with the development of a process called biofeedback. The brilliant pioneer in this field was Professor Neal Miller, whose efforts led to the creation of an instrument that was able to translate unconscious bodily activity -- blood pressure, for instance -- into lights and sounds. Then, by altering the pattern of that light or the rate and pitch of that sound, a person can alter the frequency of brain rhythm and thereby lower blood pressure and a variety of other functions.

This dramatic opening of a door of the unconscious came about just as I was studying for my doctorate in optometry. Soon afterwards, when I entered a doctoral in experimental psychology, I immediately tried using biofeedback to reduce nearsightedness. I was my own first patient and a great success; my myopia was reduced from 20/70 to 20/20, an improvement that has lasted for more than twelve years.

Twenty years ago, I perfected a vision-training instrument that uses biofeedback to help the patient learn to voluntarily control his ciliary muscle. In nearsighted people, this muscle has, by overfocusing, become locked into a spasm, making the focusing lens too strong. People who become farsighted unconsciously make the opposite decision and underfocus. The decision about what focusing is appropriate is made by the autonomic nervous system and until my biofeedback vision-training instrument came along, there was no effective way to alter that decision.

Today the story is much different. Hundreds of doctors around the world are using biofeedback vision training, and I have treated thousands of patients. I have also accumulated much information, based on my patients' experiences, about the relationship of vision to other bodily functions regulated by the autonomic nervous system.

One connection that immediately stood out was the hookup between vision and the emotions. In virtually every patient I found that visual dysfunction is imbedded in the emotions, as an inappropriate, unconscious response to a situation that is in some way threatening. Most patients quickly notice the connection.

"I remember that I became nearsighted in second grade," a young woman recently told me, "but I can't remember exactly what brought it on." So I probed a bit, gently, and after a while she came up with her answer, a typical one. "If I didn't get every word instantly and entirely right when I first started reading," she recalled, "my mother would right away lose patience and say things like 'What's the matter with you!' and 'How can you be so stupid!'"

Needless to say, reading was no fun at all for her. Indeed, it soon became torture, as her feelings of resentment, failure, and dread put the magical pleasures of reading farther beyond her reach. As we continued her training, she experienced many similar flashbacks. Memories that have been locked away in synchrony with the spasming of her ciliary muscles were released gradually as the muscle relaxed.

Eventually, she was able to see quite well without glasses. In my experience, unless the patient achieves this awareness of the root of his vision problem, it is likely never to be completely resolved, although considerable improvement can be made.

Learning-disabled children give us an extreme example of how unconscious emotional pressures -- in a word, stress -- can interfere with healthy eye function. These children withdraw from very early cognitive learning, the three Rs of primary school. When a learning-disabled child looks at the printed page, his emotional overload becomes so great that he physiologically and psychologically withdraws, his brain-wave pattern slows down, and he retreats to the very edge of his vision system to escape from an intolerable impasse.

A ten-year-old patient had an amblyopic, or "lazy", right eye and a slightly farsighted left eye. Because of the resulting poor fusion ability, poor focusing, and short attention span, he was a very bad reader. We gave him training to improve his eye fixation and focusing abilities, and eventually prescribed eyeglasses to help him relax his focusing muscle for reading and television.

After an examination in mid-treatment, I measured the muscle tension in his forehead and right jaw muscles. At that moment there was no excessive tension in either area. Then I took a book off the shelf and approached him with it. It might as well have been a loaded gun, for I could see even without measuring the terrific increase in his facial muscle tension.

Eventually, he did learn to read with relaxed eyes and body muscles. His father hired a reading tutor, and in less than two months his grades were much improved. So was his social demeanor.

In every individual, the way the brain thinks is the way the eye sees. Alter the behavior of one and the other will mirror the change. Vision now becomes something more than seeing clearly; it is part of an entire bodily process, a reflection of brain activity. If we were to sort ourselves into categories according to how we use our eyes and brains, we would arrive at four basic groups.

PARALLEL PROCESSORS

This category includes people who achieve the very highest level of visual and mental performance. They are able to absorb everything in their entire field of vision, both center and peripheral, simultaneously, and process it with great ease. The finest athletes fall into this group.

FLIP-FLOP PROCESSORS

These people are high achievers, too, who can take in both center- and peripheral-vision data, but cannot do both simultaneously. They flip-flop from center to peripheral and back again, a less efficient process than parallel processing but much superior to the functioning of the last two categories.

SERIAL CENTRAL PROCESSORS

Into this large category falls almost everyone who wears glasses: people who process visual information centrally but receive very little peripheral data. When they are concentrating, they probably will not even hear another person speak to them, and if they do they are likely to resent it.

SERIAL PERIPHERAL PROCESSORS

These are the learning disabled, people who are primarily receptive to peripheral data and who can almost never, without professional help, become focused enough for long enough to attend to a central serial task like reading. If forced to make the attempt, they retreat even farther into the periphery and its attendant distractions.

No matter what category we fall into, as we improve our ability to take in simultaneous central and peripheral data, our other mental activities will also become more balanced. But, a word of warning, don't try too hard to achieve this. Conscious trying involves yet more input from our cognitive system, when what we want to do, most of us who are reading this book, is to become more receptive to our unconscious intelligence. A proper balance between this and our ordinary awareness makes all our endeavors easier and more successful.

As Western science begins to grasp that it is possible and very useful to have access to our conscious intelligence, a yoga master might well ask, what took you so long? For thousands of years, dedicated practicers of the discipline of yoga have been able to participate in the body's unconscious functions -- to such an extent that they were sometimes accused of trickery. A yoga adept is able to lower the temperature of his body, slow his heartbeat, calm his mind, and focus his awareness. Biofeedback now helps us do the same things without the years of discipline required by yoga.

What sages of the East discovered intuitively, we have now begun to confirm cognitively. Neurophysiologists are exploring the function of the brain chemically, anatomically, and functionally. They have identified some neurotransmitters, the sites for some brain chemicals, and some sites for synthesizing the neurotransmitters. And although there still remains more about the brain that we don't know than we do, one thing is certain: the more we understand about it, the more the interrelatedness of the body as one system becomes clear.

The writer Aldous Huxley, who struggled throughout his life to improve his severely impaired vision, observed in his book, The Art of Seeing, "In the process of seeing, mind's eyes, and nervous system are intimately associated to form a single whole. Anything which affects one element in this whole exercises an influence upon the other elements."

The various components of the nervous system act in a dynamic and generalized manner. What happens in one part of the body happens in others as well. Vision connects, through the hypothalamic function, with the emotions, the respiratory and circulatory systems, the digestive system, and the immune system. An imbalance in the vision may subtly affect the breathing, the peristalsis of the bowels, the emotions, the vascular system. Equally, correcting such an imbalance may improve the breathing, the digestion, the circulation of the blood, and so on.

Current research indicates, for instance, that not only does what we eat affect our vision but that our vision affects what we eat. We know that posture and vision are related. We know that many children who are learning-disabled are simply very farsighted (some Downs Syndrome children have I.Q.s as high as 140). We know that smiling increases alpha-wave activity in the brain. The validity of guided imagery, deep relaxation, mediation and biofeedback in treating cancer and other diseases has been shown. It is not unreasonable to expect that by correcting visual dysfunction, we also subtly correct imbalances in other autonomic nervous system functions, even the functioning of the immune system.

I hope that as you read this book, you will learn to use your eyes not only as a window to the outside world but to the world inside your body as well.