Do Your Eyes Work For You?

Is your vision blurry, hard to focus, or do you see double? This can cause a number of symptoms that we never connect with like: Pain, Balance Issues, and Brain Fog.

First you must rule out what your eye doctor evaluates. Optometrists check for visual acuity or the length of the eyeball focal point. Eyes too long from front to back have a shortened focal point creating “nearsightedness.” Eyes too short from front to back have an elongated focal point described as “farsightedness.” They also check for pathologies or damage in the eyes.

Once these things are ruled out, the rest is all from your Brain and what Functional/Chiropractic Neurology can do.

How Eye Problems Cause Pain

Pain like headaches, face pain, jaw pain, and neck pain can all come from the inability of the brain to move the eyes conjugately or together smoothly. The brain must fire quickly and equally to 12 eye muscles. Those muscles are also connected through reflexes to different head, neck, and lower body muscles.

In a needle E.M.G. (Electromyography) test, the needle inserted in the top of the neck records the nerve firing on the same side that your eyes are looking towards. Even though one is not moving their neck to the right, the brain fired the nerves to the muscles of the right side of the neck.

This muscle is called the Upper Trapezius, which is the culprit behind headaches that radiate up over the ears and end with pain in the temples. When the eyes are moving incorrectly they can cause a profound effect on head, neck, and face pain due to the connection between the eyes and neck muscles.

Balance Issues and Spatial Awareness

Balance Issues are part of a family of special awareness problems in which the brain receives information from our feet, eyes, and inner ear/vestibular systems improperly or unevenly.

An example is when an Optometrist diagnoses a patient with an Astigmatism. It is a real description of a malformed eyeball when the eye is not evenly round. I believe when a patient reports eyestrain, headaches, and blurry vision that an Astigmatism is over-diagnosed when the problem is originating from the Brain.

The inner ear gives us the sense of where we are in space. It tells us that we are spinning, tilting, and/or moving. It gives us information in 2 ways. One can fix our eyes on a target and move our head without looking away or move our head and eyes together at the same time. Both require an extreme amount of neural recruitment to perform these tasks.

Try walking in a straight line and then quickly look to the side without changing course—it’s harder than it looks.

Brain Fog and Mental Fatigue

Brain Fog happens to many of us. Dementia is a very common “buzz word” in the news today. There are many descriptions about how we feel our brains are slowing down at moments. Forgetting people’s names, events that happen, or even why we walk into a room and try to remember why.

Brain fatigue is also very similar, commonly explained as a problem of shutting down or weakness. These symptoms can originate from lack of processing light, too much screen time, scrolling/flashing effects, or looking at an object up close. These sensory inputs are received through the eyes and processed in a filtering area called Thalamus.

The Thalamus: Your Brain’s Filter

This part of the brain is in charge of taking all the information coming in and blocking less important things so that we can focus on the task at hand.

An example is a study conducted to measure children’s test-taking ability under fluorescent lights versus incandescent lights. The study showed the same children taking tests under incandescent bulbs scored significantly higher than when under fluorescents.

The main factor was how fast the bulbs flashed. Incandescent bulbs flash at 50 to 60 times/second vs. fluorescents at 120 or more times/second. The faster the flash rate the harder it is for the filter in brain to process it down.

The eyes also have to filter depth perception, high-definition pictures or videos, and movement in the peripheral. That is why one would get nausea or car sick. The lack of processing movement or staring at our phones for too long slow us down.

In more involved cases, headaches and insomnia are results of constant brain fatigue. Let alone the depression and anxiety that increase when Thalamus slows down its filtering.

The Eyes as Windows to the Brain

The eyes are the window into all parts of the brain. When they move or process dysfunctionally, this can create many problems that we are not aware of until it is really bad.

Beware of unnecessary surgeries, medications, or claims that your brain will adjust to them. Always get a second or third opinion. A few very specific brain exercises can restore your life back.

Get your eyes looked at by a professional who will look at you—not just at your prescription, but at how your brain controls your eye movements and processes visual information.

“I Won’t Crack You Up, But I’ll get On Your Nerves.”

-Doc Brock