Home » Podcast » Can ADHD and Dyslexia *REALLY* Be Cured with Vision Training? How Retraining the Eye-Brain Connection Transforms Reading, Focus, Concussion Recovery & Peak Performance — with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum

Can ADHD and Dyslexia REALLY Be Cured with Vision Training? How Retraining the Eye-Brain Connection Transforms Reading, Focus, Concussion Recovery & Peak Performance — with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum

September 18, 2025

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Reading time: 8 minutes

What I Discuss with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum:

My wife Jessa’s lifelong struggle with dyslexia, the toll it’s taken on her confidence, and Dr. Appelbaum’s unique vision therapy for ADD, ADHD, and dyslexia…00:41
The fact that many cases of dyslexia are actually hidden vision problems, and how functional vision therapy goes far beyond old-school eye exercises, using the eye-brain connection to rewire reading, learning, focus, and coordination…05:58
His detailed testing that reveals hidden vision problems behind issues like dyslexia, spelling, and focus, opening the door to lasting change many people never thought possible…13:56
How his vision training intensives combine high-tech testing and daily exercises to fix hidden eye-brain issues, how screen time and modern life create visual stress, and why improving vision is key to better focus, learning, and overall brain health…20:06
How vision therapy not only eases migraines but also sharpens depth perception, eliminates eye suppression, and boosts performance for everyone from struggling readers to world-class athletes…28:15
Jessa’s eye-tracking tests showed big improvements in just five days, with faster reading, perfect comprehension, fewer eye movements, and even new 3D vision with wider awareness…32:56
How Jessa not only improved her reading but also sharpened her eyesight, and how special digital performance lenses can act like training wheels to reduce screen strain and strengthen vision over time…43:27
How many ADD, ADHD, and dyslexia symptoms overlap with vision problems, why testing vision should come before medication, and how post-COVID screen habits revealed new visual issues…47:30
Supplements that support vision health, ketones and their vision benefits, and why trendy new eye drops that promise to replace reading glasses are not the best solution…53:04
Dr. Appelbaum’s at-home program, ScreenFit, is a low-cost series of short daily exercises that improve reading, focus, and comfort on screens, showing great results for everyone from kids to older adults…58:29
How vision is affected in approximately 90% of head injuries, why symptoms like light sensitivity, screen fatigue, or trouble driving at night often signal functional vision problems, and why retraining the eye-brain connection is key to concussion and traumatic brain injury (TBI) recovery…1:02:56
How vision training isn’t just for people with problems, but also for athletes and optimizers looking for an edge, proving better vision can transform learning, performance, and even daily life…1:05:50

In this episode with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum, you'll get to explore how hidden vision problems often masquerade as dyslexia, ADD, or ADHD—and how his vision therapy retrains the eye-brain connection to transform reading, focus, coordination, and even recovery from concussions. You'll also discover how his testing and training methods, from intensives to at-home programs, not only restore confidence in struggling readers like my wife Jessa but also sharpen performance for athletes and optimizers seeking a competitive edge.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum is a board-certified neuro-optometrist and recognized leader in vision therapy, specializing in retraining the eye-brain connection to unlock human potential. Through his practice, MyVisionFirst (you can use code BGL to save 10% off selected products), and his groundbreaking online program ScreenFit (you can use code BGL to save $200), he helps patients overcome post-concussion visual challenges, developmental delays tied to dyslexia and ADHD, and the visual stress created by modern screen habits. His work goes beyond restoring function—he equips individuals with the visual tools to read, learn, and focus with confidence.

Dr. Appelbaum has also become a sought-after expert in performance vision training, working with hundreds of professional and Olympic athletes in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, and more. From golfers, tennis players, and race car drivers to Olympic fencers, swimmers, and archers, he has helped transform raw talent into elite performance by enhancing reaction time, depth perception, and visual coordination. He even consults with teams on draft and free-agent decisions by evaluating athletes’ visual potential.

Featured in The New York Post, The New York Times Magazine, and on CBS, NBC, and MindBodyGreen, Dr. Appelbaum was named the 2022 Future of Health Award recipient at the Mindshare Leadership Summit.

Tune in to discover how vision could be the missing link to unlocking your true potential—in learning, healing, and peak performance.

Discount Codes:

👓 MyVisionFirst: Use code BGL for 10% OFF selected products.

🕶️ ScreenFit: Use code BGL for 💵 $200 OFF.

Please Scroll Down for the Sponsors, Resources, and Transcript

Episode Sponsors:

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Resources from this episode:

Guest Name:
- Dr. Bryce Appelbaum

Podcasts:
- Creating Supranormal Vision, Cutting-Edge Science for Eye Health, Supplements, Red Light Therapy, and The Future of Eyesight Restoration.

Studies & Articles:

Other Resources:
- MyVisionFirst Training & Products (use code BGL to save 10% off Digital Performance Lenses & More)
- Screen Fit Program (use code BGL to save $200)
- Digital Performance Lenses
- Vision First Supplements
- Free Vision Health Guide
- Free Vision Assessment
- Ketones
- Ra Optics

Upcoming Events:

Keep up on my LIVE appearances by following bengreenfieldlife.com/calendar!

Do you have questions, thoughts, or feedback for Dr. Bryce Appelbaum or me? Leave your comments below, and one of us will reply!

Transcript

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Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast...

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:00:05]: So we had you read a paragraph, and we had an eye tracking machine with really cool software. So on Monday, you read 118 words per minute. On Friday, 132 words per minute. So a little bit of an improvement there, but that's not really the cool part.

Jessa Greenfield [00:00:21]: I know.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:00:22]: The cool part is...

Ben Greenfield [00:00:23]: Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist and passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. This podcast has been a little while in the coming. Quick backstory: I found out about this guy named Dr. Bryce Apple bottom jeans, Appalbaum several months ago, actually, from J.J. Virgin, a friend who I highly respect in the health realm. And she told me about how there's this crazy guy back east who fixes things like ADD and ADHD and Dyslexia using special forms of vision training, stuff I'd never really come across before. So, long story short is Bryce and I connected, and we connected because what interested me most in his work is that my wife, Jessa, who is obviously here making one of her few and far between podcast appearances.

Jessa Greenfield [00:01:37]: It'll be another year, guys.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:39]: Jessa's gonna get a chance to tell you more about this, but she struggled with Dyslexia for about as long as she can remember, and Bryce basically told me that he was confident he could fix it. So I said, all right. Jessa's been here for a week right here in Washington, D.C. where this show is being recorded. We're gonna tell you the story of what went down, and Bryce is going to fill you in on the very unique work that he does just so you don't have to scribble furiously during this show. All the show notes, juicy, with all the details, will be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/FixMyVision. It's BenGreenfieldLife.com/FixmyVision. So I want to start today's show with Jessa. And Jessa, I realize it's a big question, but why are you even here?

Jessa Greenfield [00:02:27]: I'm here basically because I've been struggling with Dyslexia my whole life, largely most of my life, with it being undiagnosed and just kind of being this mysterious enigma. My very first memory of school, like vivid memory of school, is sitting in a library. I remember the clothes I was wearing. I remember the kids in the circle. I remember the teacher that was in the room, and we were doing a reading circle, you know, like the cat sits on the hat or something, you know, like those reading reader books. And I just remember we all had to read a page and it was coming around to me and just being like absolute dread, terror, like just tons of fear around reading. And that's largely been my entire life for the most part. I hate reading out loud, especially to adults because kids are a little less critical and just... I grew up in a reader-based school and was basically asked to achieve something that I was incapable of achieving with the tools that I had at my disposal. And so my whole life I've grown up believing myself to be stupid, to believing that I had nothing to contribute.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:52]: Yeah. And it's created friction in our relationship in the past where like, I will try to teach you something and like the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Jessa Greenfield [00:04:03]: Because so much of it feels like criticism—

Ben Greenfield [00:04:08]: —you grew up associating, like, learning with extreme difficulties and criticism...

Jessa Greenfield [00:04:08]: ...yes.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:08]: And we're obviously happily married almost 23 years, but it's been even a source of friction in our relationship.

Jessa Greenfield [00:04:14]: Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. It's something that is. I don't think it. There's a part of my life it didn't penetrate, even the stuff that I was really good at. Because you basically develop this feeling of doubting yourself all the time. You're never confident that you're doing the right. Even though my mom, she's like, well, you always have this great confidence and things never seem to bother you. And one day I just flat out told her, I'm like, mom, that's a defense mechanism. I'm pretending to be strong even though I'm dying inside. You know what I mean? And so...

Ben Greenfield [00:04:49]: Does it just affect reading or does it affect like. I mean, you played sports growing up. Other things beyond just like how you deal with a book, for example, a written word.

Jessa Greenfield [00:05:02]: I play a lot of sports and I'm a coordinated person and I can. And I have a lot of strength and a lot of quickness. But like we were talking, Dr. Applebaum and me, I was never a good shooter. Any sport that requires a lot of aiming, like bowling. Despise bowling.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:20]: Cornhole.

Jessa Greenfield [00:05:21]: Well, I like cornhole now.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:24]: I heard you were throwing some aces after just a few days with Dr. Bryce.

Jessa Greenfield [00:05:27]: Yes, I was. Yeah. So aiming sports require an extreme amount of concentration. And like we will talk about later, but it's like a hyper fixation, almost like you're trying to force something to happen. And so the trying is too hard almost. That's the best way I can Describe it is even with reading, it's almost like, I can, I can. I can. So I'm going to force, force, force, force, force and make it happen.

Jessa Greenfield [00:05:54]: And the trying blocks everything.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:57]: Yeah. When I talked with Bryce before you and I had that conversation on the phone, and you talked with Jessa as well, I was always under the impression that people with Dyslexia were just, like, hardwired that way and that God made them good at other things, like Jess's incredible graphic design and the feng shui of a room and just, like, an eye for art that I could never have, but that, you know, Dyslexia was just something you're stuck with for your life. And then, Bryce, you kind of started to give me clues that that might not be the case. So you've seen stuff like this before.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:06:34]: And I kind of took that and flipped it upside down and hopefully gave you an entirely different lens to see through.

Jessa Greenfield [00:06:41]: Yeah

Ben Greenfield [00:06:41]: I see what you did there.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:06:42]: Dyslexia very often is not Dyslexia. If you even just put in Dyslexia into Google, what pops up is difficulty reading words. Dyslexia is all about the brain's ability to process language. Functional vision problems are all about the brain's ability to process visual input. There is so much interwoven there that, I mean, this was as simple as your eyes were not working well together as a team. And in talking with you, I'm sure you noticed how excited I got, because all the questions that can really separate is this a hidden functional vision problem impacting reading and learning and life, or is this the brain's miswiring and this is something that's what you see, is what you get there, and, like, to a T, you're skipping words and losing your place when you're reading. You avoided ball sports that required really careful eye, brain, body coordination. But you always said you were a scrappy basketball player.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:07:41]: But like you said, shooting was challenging. You had a difficult time understanding sense of self and space because, respectfully, your visual system was not functioning like the dominant sense that it's supposed to be. And all these gifts you developed to be able to kind of bypass what vision wasn't to cope. What I hear, especially from adults who've been labeled as dyslexic or with add or ADHD who kind of allow that to define them, will say, well, I've been forced to learn all of these other gifts and have all these superpowers. I don't want to lose those. This isn't losing those this is. Let's fill in the gaps in terms of vision development for what didn't learn naturally from the right sequencing of developmental milestones. That is what's supposed to happen with vision development. Let's actually throw fuel on the fire, allow the airplanes to take off and then land where they're supposed to and develop new wiring to support using all of your brain and creating connections that just little bypass or roadblocks that were in the way.

Jessa Greenfield [00:08:45]: That was one of my biggest concerns is I'm like, I am very mechanical, very good at the three dimensional world. And I was, you know what I mean? And I was like, I don't want to lose those skills.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:58]: Right. Fix one thing, pardon the expression, just like retarded in another.

Jessa Greenfield [00:09:03]: Yeah, it separates me.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:06]: I'm super curious because, like I flew to D.C. last night and you guys have just been holed away in Bryce's secret Batman lab for the past week doing what you're doing. I want to know how the work actually goes down. But Bryce, who are you? I mean, is your background actually medical ophthalmology or how do you describe yourself?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:09:26]: I'm a product of this work. So as a kid I had terrible visual developmental delays. My eyes didn't work well together as a team. I had double vision. I was lost in space on the soccer field. The classroom was a nightmare. A lot of what you were going through and fortunately had access to this type of work early on. And attribute all of my success in life, athletically, academically, interpersonally, to what I did to train my eyes and my brain to work together.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:09:54]: And went from being a reluctant reader, last one picked on sports teams and insecure, to this avid reader, stud with athletics and confident kid. Because I really optimized my eye brain connection. So I'm a functional eye doctor. What that means is I trained as an optometrist and I did extra training to be a neuro optometrist.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:15]: So you went to medical school optometry.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:10:21]: To get kind of just like the bare minimum baseline of eyes and intervention of disease and structure. But then beyond that, that's where all the extra training takes place to really understand the neurology of the eye brain connection, the plasticity that we all have for any brain at any age to be able to optimize and enhance vision. And then really the learning from the thousands of patients. I mean, so many specialists only take what's in the textbooks and what they learn in school and that's their foundation. We need to be learning from our work to Then continue to uplevel and evolve.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:01]: The only time I've ever come across, shockingly, like, having done the podcast for really a long time, the idea of fixing vision without even any consideration of something like Dyslexia or some of the other things I've heard you talk about, like add and ADHD, just how you can see is like eye muscle training. I think it's called, like, super old. It's called the Bates Method or something like that. And I've seen, like, a few photos of people rubbing their eyes and doing eye exercises. Is this something similar to that? Is this, like, where it came from?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:11:37]: I would say same body parts, but very different work.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:40]: Same body parts, similarities stop there.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:11:43]: So Dr. Bates was an ophthalmologist 100 plus years ago. Helped a lot of people, but it was all kind of under the impression of we hold stress in our eyes, we internalize things. And a lot of his principles are talk about sunning and palming and yoga for the eyes, which I'm sure can help a lot of people. But we're in a very different world now.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:06]: My eyes don't do Down Dog.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:12:09]: Let's teach them.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:10]: Yeah, okay, we'll do that right now.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:12:12]: We'll do that right now.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:12:12]: But we're in a digital world, and so the visual demands, the visual stress of life now goes well beyond kind of the principles of Dr. Bates. And now it's a matter of kind of like physical therapy for the eyes, but really for the brain through the eyes, where we can use our eyes to rewire the software, change how we're using vision, but really to establish cohesion and order. And in your case, eliminate the unnecessary struggling between the tracking and the focusing and the eye coordination and the depth perception systems. So your brain is actually freed up and accurate with eye movements so you're not dancing all over the place when you're reading. And your brain can process that information fluidly, efficiently, and know what to do with that information.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:57]: Okay, I'm very curious because I'm like a mechanics, boots on the street type of guy, how this actually looks. I know. Jessa, before you left town, I saw you on your laptop doing some kind of exercise. So I'm assuming there's something a patient does even before they come to see you to get things started.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:13:15]: So we had a lot of conversations, a lot of paperwork, a lot of symptom questionnaires to really figure out, does this look like it, smell like it, and taste like it? Obviously, until you do actual dialed in testing, do you know where the starting points are? What Systems are impacted. But we do a test of brain function where we're looking at visual information processing, perceptual skills that we're all supposed to learn throughout our life. Experiences that sometimes we skip over certain things and we kind of figure out where are the pain points in life. And then you took a leap, a leap of faith to come here because I know I said to you, there's no question we can help. I'm not really sure how much we can help, but it seems like to a T, this is the perfect profile of somebody who has the label of Dyslexia. But really, you guys are not working well together as a team. Causing confusion in your brain and then chaos in your life. Testing the first day.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:14:13]: I mean, we do a lot of testing in three dimensional space. We do a lot of testing in 2D space. We do a lot of testing with eye tracking software that can show you exactly what your eyes are doing when you're reading a paragraph versus when you're tracking a ball versus how this looks in a virtual world with virtual reality. How this looks in an augmented world with augmented reality. So there's a lot of high tech, but there's also a lot of really low tech.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:36]: Yeah. Was it hard, Jessa?

Jessa Greenfield [00:14:37]: I wouldn't say it was hard. I felt like when I was doing it, I was hyper aware. Like, what am I? I felt like I was like, part of me is like, are my eyes doing? I just. Well, first of all, I was like, just relax and just do the test. You know what I mean? But. And this goes back to the self doubt thing again that I deal with so often. Like, am I doing this right? Is this producing this stuff that they want to see? And that's so. It's kind of.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:08]: You mean the stuff you did before you even came out here?

Jessa Greenfield [00:15:10]: No, the testing that we did in the clinic, even though testing on the computer, I'm like, oh, I. I think I may have done that wrong. Or I don't...

Ben Greenfield [00:15:19]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:15:19]: So we looked at areas of visual processing, like visual memory. Had you look at four symbols, took them away. Had you then draw what you saw and did that four separate times.

Jessa Greenfield [00:15:28]: Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:29]: Are these like complex symbols like a goat and a tree, or just like square circles?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:15:32]: No, I mean triangles with missing, unique shapes, with portions. Mona Lisa filled in versus not. But Mona Lisa absolutely was on there. But I remember this was exposing warts, essentially. I mean, you came in so open and so ready to just do your best, which is so needed for all this.

Jessa Greenfield [00:15:53]: Well, I never knew there was options. I just assumed it was like, okay, well, this is who I am. This is how I'm going to do. I've been doing this my whole life. I guess I'll just keep doing this.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:16:03]: But when you are looking at a 2D image or set of images, when we took it away, it was like your brain was an Etch-A-Sketch. It was just gone.

Jessa Greenfield [00:16:12]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:16:13]: And then so I started asking, like, how was spelling for you? And you're like, oh, my God, I can't spell anything. I can't remember people's names. You weren't thinking in mental pictorial images. So you're spelling words based off of how they sound rather than how they look. A lot of words are not spelled the way that they should be that way.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:30]: They're still surprisingly good in family Scrabble strategy. That's fine. I'm kind of scared about what's gonna happen when we get home.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:16:37]: Yeah, we got a new all star in the Greenfield family.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:39]: Great. Thank you. I think. So the exercises and the time in your office, Jess was out here for what, five days?

Jessa Greenfield [00:16:48]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:50]: Is that like a typical length of training protocol?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:16:52]: So we have this dialed in for these intensives. We see people from all around the world.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:56]: That's what you call what she just did. You fly to D.C. to do the intensives.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:16:59]: So we call it a vision performance training intensive. So it's five days evaluation on Monday, follow up evaluation on Friday to highlight all the wins. We've got some crazy wins. I would love to share just about reading about sports for things like that. And then during the week, there's 12 hours of customized vision performance training. So what that means is we plan your first session based off of testing and what the areas of opportunity for improvement are. And then from there, you dictated everything we did. So I've got an amazing team of docs and of therapists where literally all we need is our brain and your brain.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:17:36]: And then from there, what we do is just how much we can push you and the steps that we take. So we're in real time adjusting the level of demand of every single thing you did so that you could really engage in higher level thinking, learn from everything, rather than just getting better at skills. But I mean, even some of the. Can I share a few of the things from day one?

Jessa Greenfield [00:17:57]: Yeah. I'm an open book.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:18:00]: Even the ability to converge your eyes, which is something that happens with all near tasks whenever anything's approaching you.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:06]: That's like if I hold a pencil at arm's length and bring it towards me. And my eyes are trying to track the point of the pencil. That's convergence.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:18:12]: Convergence. Eyes pulling in the outside muscles.

Jessa Greenfield [00:18:15]: I've never been good at that.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:18:16]: And I mean, at a foot away, your eyes are converging, converging. And then you got to this point where your brain said, hold on, eyeballs, I don't know where to aim you. And you started alternating, which I looked at it, you said, I see two of these. And then I had to bring it back another six inches before you could regain fusion. So by definition, that's called a convergence insufficiency. But it has nothing to do with the strength of the eye muscles, the length of the eye muscles. It's basically a spatial mismatch. You went really at near, not so much in the distance.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:18:44]: You are aligning your eyes as if you were perceiving here to be farther back in space. So there was all this extra effort needed to eliminate that mismatch just to see a single clear image.

Jessa Greenfield [00:18:54]: Yeah, I feel not as much anymore. But before, I'd always. People were like, oh, cross your eyes. I feel confusing. My eyes feel like an image posted and almost distracted. They feel confused and almost distracted. It's kind of like, where do I look? Where do I look? Where do I look?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:19:10]: But the neat part with this was, so that's the outside muscles and how well they're working together as a team. The root cause of a lot of this dysfunction for you is actually the inside muscles, your focusing system, your combinative system. When you're looking up close, you are actually focusing your right eye in front of the page and your left eye behind the page because it was too hard to focus both eyes at the same page. We couldn't teach a brain to do that if we tried. It's not how our brain is wired. There are all these maladaptions.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:39]: This was like a compensatory mechanism that set in over time.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:19:41]: 100% and that impacted depth perception because your eyes were not pointing and acting like they're doing the same thing. So your brain couldn't turn on that information to perceive and understand space.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:52]: Okay, so beyond the convergence, I want to hear what else you found when you did the initial testing. But when I use a term like compensatory mechanism, is that because somebody is just, like, born with their eyes moving in a certain way? Is there some kind of, like, a triggering incidence that causes something like that to happen?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:20:08]: Great question. So none of us are born with the ability to read, obviously, or to use our eyes to track to converge to focus or even with the ability to see in 3D. It's all developed through our life experiences, through the sequencing of developmental milestones that are either learned appropriately through the right sequencing or learned poorly. And then it leads to these vision imbalances. So this was literally the way you figured out how to not avoid school and how to not avoid reading to find a way so your eyes wouldn't have to work together as a team to still solve the problem. And to answer your question, I mean, this is when we're under stress from the environment. You know this better than anybody. You adapt or you avoid.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:20:50]: The vast majority of functional vision problems are maladaptations. They're bad habits because we didn't learn how to use these systems fluidly, efficiently, and the way that our brain is supposed to allow them to be wired. And you born today, where screen time is the new pandemic and digital devices are everywhere. This would have come out sooner in life in a more pronounced, dramatic way. And it would have been even harder because most kids don't have the brains and the vision development to support screen time.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:23]: So this is becoming a bigger problem.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:21:25]: One in four children right now have a functional vision problem significant enough to impact learning. That's crazy.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:32]: For this newer craze of this happening, this is more screen related.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:21:38]: Absolutely. And it's also life experience related. I mean, if you think back evolutionarily, our visual system is intended to be outside in natural light, to focus far away and to scan the horizon for danger and for dinner. And now we're taking our children's development and kids are locked inside their not taking part in interpersonal connection like they used to or on screens all the time. There's all this new visual stress in place.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:11]: I'm sure like modern LED overhead fluorescent flicker lighting probably doesn't help. Or the backlit flicker on screen junk lighting.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:22:17]: I mean, again, it's making our brain process visual input, which is light is visual input. And how our brain filters and responds to light can influence so many aspects of health and happiness.

Jessa Greenfield [00:22:32]: That's what I'm saying. Like this isn't just your eyes. This is a whole psychological.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:22:36]: This is all brain.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:37]: Yeah. If you're a parent listening in, highly advisable to install on the device that your children are using. One of the screen break tools that actually pops up and says, hey, go look. It's. I have that installed on my computer. It's called Iris. It has like screen break. It'll adjust the temperature of the screen and it even has little Eye exercises that pop up just to remind you.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:54]: Because even for me, Sometimes it'll be 90 minutes and I've forgotten to look away from the screen.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:22:59]: And when we're on screens, our thinking, our attention, but really our vision all become locked up.

Jessa Greenfield [00:23:05]: Which is what I dealt with.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:23:07]: And I would imagine, you know, how you're functioning now is different than how you're functioning as a child because these bad habits have been stepped on and embedded over time. But I mean, there's like, breaks are important. Getting outside and navigating the three dimensional world is so important. I mean, do you know how many kids now are shown pictures of clouds rather than actually going outside and like laying down and looking at clouds and visualizing and developing the brain pathways that allow for depth and higher level thinking and so much to then manifest?

Jessa Greenfield [00:23:40]: Yeah, I believe it.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:43]: Imagine just taking a multivitamin and never eating vegetables. I always thought, and maybe this is stupid, but for the longest time, until I forget who I interviewed about vision, I thought when you looked at far off objects, your eyes were straining and working hard and the muscles were contracting. And then I found out, oh, wait, paradoxically, it's the stuff that's super close up, that's easy to see, especially a screen that causes the most eye strain.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:24:03]: Yeah, but even when you were reading the letter chart day one, I remember sharing with you, your pupils were dancing a little bit, they were fluctuating. And I look at pupil function as a clear window into autonomic function, how well we're responding to our world and that fight or flight response that often gets tapped into in our natural resting position looking far away, our focusing system, the inside muscle should not be engaged yet. In order to read the letters on the chart, you are trying to adjust that focusing system like an old school camera lens that wasn't on autofocus, it was on manual focus just to take in far away. So everything we're talking about, it's not eyesight, it's vision. And I think we need to separate those two.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:50]: Okay, she gets migraines sometimes. Is that you think related to this?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:24:55]: Absolutely. Because migraines should be a diagnosis of exclusion. A lot of things can cause migraines. But your migraines were, I'm going to say were, because I know they're better and we'll see how much better they are moving forward, we're behind one eye, worse with reading and screens. To me, that's brought on by visual stress. And if we can eliminate what's causing that and allow these systems to operate more fluidly and efficiently together. The pain, the signaling from your body that you're in danger or to disengage is, at a minimum, no longer not the same response. In many cases, no longer needed.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:35]: Did you guys find anything else out that was just, like, weird or broken or dysfunctional on the initial input?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:25:42]: I'm gonna say...

Ben Greenfield [00:25:43]: I'm making you sound all "She's not that messed up!"

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:25:47]: I'll share this with love here. So when we talked about that spatial mismatch, that was. Was there. If you think about a laser beam coming out of each eye representing line of sight, if your laser beams are pointing at the same place, you're seeing a single clear image. But if they're not, or they're acting like they're not, the brain has three options. You can see double, you can fuse the images together to get rid of the double, or you can do something called suppression of binocular vision, Ignoring input from the eyes to get rid of the double. We had all these pockets of space where you were picking left eye and ignoring right eye, or picking right eye and ignoring left eye. Which was your brain under a fight or flight response to figure out which eye do I use? How do I process space? And that's the same thing as somebody going like this, covering an eye and not allowing the brain to process both eyes information at the same time.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:26:39]: So you are using right eye more for near and left eye more for distance because it was harder to use both eyes for both distances. And I know you said, you know, in tennis, oftentimes, like, you had to auditorily tell yourself, keep the eyes on the ball.

Jessa Greenfield [00:26:54]: Oh, almost all the time.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:26:55]: And I would say...

Jessa Greenfield [00:26:58]: I literally say it to myself when someone's serving to me, like, "watch the ball."

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:27:02]: And you really didn't know where the ball was?

Jessa Greenfield [00:27:06]: Yeah. Especially if the point got real fast.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:27:09]: And even if you know where the ball is. We're now with tennis, you have to anticipate where the ball's going to be. So that requires dynamic processing of this information. And, I mean, you went from like 40 to 50% accuracy in terms of depth perception to 100% in five days.

Jessa Greenfield [00:27:25]: Yeah. That's crazy.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:26]: Total rabbit hole. Have you ever worked with, like, a pro athlete?

Jessa Greenfield [00:27:29]: He does!

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:27:31]: Every sport imaginable. We do. One of the most fun things I do is I work with teams to help them decide who to draft or take as a free agent based off of, you know, what, vision development, visual cognitive development, where the gaps are. And then when there's a mess, I'll say "Take this guy if they're talented," because, oh, my God, we close this gap, you're going to get that much more return on the investment and performance is going to be optimized. So even without functional vision problems, any brain can be optimized and enhanced.

Jessa Greenfield [00:27:59]: That's what I was thinking. I was like, anybody reaction time, peripheral benefit from this? Anybody can.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:03]: So while we're down this rabbit hole of athletics, what do you think about. I think it was Steph Curry who I first saw using these strobe goggles that they somehow confuse the brain in a way. And I think the Golden State Warriors, they use some of these different biohacks. But what do you think about those goggles?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:28:19]: Really cool stuff. It basically slows down what's called the frame rate. So it's kind of like a strobe. So you can have these goggles flicker with both eyes, with one eye, and there's lots of tools like this. But if somebody were throwing a ball to Steph to catch, and he's seeing the ball here, here, and here, because space is eliminated and time is eliminated, you then take off the goggles and it's almost like you can slow down the ball and prepare yourself to respond more quickly. A good parallel would be in baseball in the batter's box, they use the donut on the bat to make the bat feel heavier. You take off the donut and all of a sudden the bat feels so much lighter. It's the same bat, but the sensation in real time is as if there's an upgrade that's just in short term.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:29:05]: We can actually train the brain to slow down visual input, to react more quickly and efficiently and effectively so that you can get into a flow state in sports, where flow state from a vision perspective is heightened awareness of central and peripheral information simultaneously so that you can not only again know where the ball is, you can anticipate where it will be and prepare yourself to react that much more in real time and accurately.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:32]: Yeah. What else did you guys find out on the initial intake?

Jessa Greenfield [00:29:36]: Well, he knows a lot more. They just kind of made me do exercise.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:29:38]: I would love to share some data if that's okay, because I know the main pain point was reading.

Jessa Greenfield [00:29:45]: Yes.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:29:46]: So we had you read a paragraph, and we had an eye tracking machine with really cool software look at how many eye movements you made, how many times your eyes backtracked, the size of each eye movement, how long you stayed on each word, and then comprehension with everything. Can I share before and after?

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:04]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:30:05]: So on Monday, you read 118 words per minute on Friday, 132 words per minute. So a little bit of an improvement there. But that's not really the cool part.

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:14]: I know.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:30:15]: Cool part is comprehension went from 70% accuracy to 100.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:20]: Oh, wow. Did you notice that by the way?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:30:22]: The amount of...

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:22]: Yes, I did, because I.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:24]: What were you guys reading?

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:25]: Page first one was about a lady. I can't even. The one I didn't score very well on a lady about. I think she was in orphanages or something like that or something with children and.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:39]: Uncomprehendable lady.

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:40]: Yeah. I can't remember her.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:42]: Okay.

Jessa Greenfield [00:30:42]: And then this second one was Frank Lloyd Wright. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:47]: Okay, so she went straight from 70 to what?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:30:49]: 70 to 100% accuracy. But that's not the cool part. She went from 100%. Sorry. 103 fixations. So 103 eye movements to 56.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:02]: I'm assuming less is better.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:31:03]: Half the eye movements to read a paragraph in five days with improved comprehension and speed.

Jessa Greenfield [00:31:10]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:31:10]: Regressions. How many times your eyes backtracked? 38 to 19.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:16]: Literally. Like when you're reading and you go backwards to something you read before.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:31:20]: So most people think with reading it's, you know, you're making an eye movement to every single letter of every single word. And if that's the case, you're reading super slow and not efficiently. Typically, depending on the size of the word, you're kind of making eye movement to the middle of the word. And you have your peripheral vision, your side vision open, where you can kind of say, all right, from the first letter here and the last letter here. And the memory bank I have. I know that from all the sight word practice I did as a kid and all the reading I've done, I have this memory bank, and this word is probably this. And then I move forward with reading. The three most important eye movements are tracking, focusing, and eye teaming or eye coordination.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:32:00]: Those were the three biggest gaps between where you were operating and where an adult should be operating. Which is why I was so psyched of, oh, my God. Not only are you going to be reading by the end of the week, but you're gonna be reading well and hopefully finding enjoyment because there's less unnecessary struggling. And I know on Friday we pulled a book out and hopefully that you didn't feel on the spot or anything, was like, just try reading this and see what you notice.

Jessa Greenfield [00:32:27]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:32:27]: You mind sharing what you shared with me?

Jessa Greenfield [00:32:30]: We were reading the story of Narcissus. Narcissus. Narcissus, the guy who looks into the water.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:32:36]: The alchemist.

Jessa Greenfield [00:32:38]: But the story within that book was. Yes, was that story. Yeah. And it was about him looking into the water because he was so beautiful and falling into the water and drowning. And then a water. A flower comes up. The narcissist, I think it's called the narcissus. The flower.

Jessa Greenfield [00:32:56]: But that was what we read.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:32:57]: Yeah, but eye movements were accurate. You can converge to the right place, your brain can focus and make it clear, and then it's freed up to actually think about what you're reading.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:08]: How do you know, by the way, that. Do you have some kind of a software program or video camera that's tracking?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:33:15]: So we had the eye tracking software on the computer screen that actually measures exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:19]: Oh, so she's reading on the screen.

Jessa Greenfield [00:33:22]: And I'm tracking things and looking at things.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:33:25]: And then, I mean, in treatment, it was literally creating the firing and wiring of these pathways to establish what you hadn't developed naturally on your own. And we did a lot of work with your focusing system, not only just with each eye on its own, but teaching you how to pick the eye that was being ignored in the presence of the eye that was being more dominant. We did a lot of work where we raised your awareness where your eyes were pointing so you can know what it felt like, what it looked like, and the depth that ensued when the brain turned onto the information the eyes were sending it. And then could see in 3D.

Jessa Greenfield [00:33:58]: Right.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:33:58]: And then we would take, you know, with. With a clear single image, ask you to move forwards and backwards and keep it together or projected on an overhead.

Jessa Greenfield [00:34:08]: That's the stuff I feel like I noticed the most like I noticed the most was the three dimensional stuff even. Like I would go to your office and then I'd walk back to my car and I felt like everything was just wider. I don't. That's the best way I can describe it. I was just like The world is...

Ben Greenfield [00:34:26]: Like better peripheral?

Jessa Greenfield [00:34:27]: Not just peripheral, but it's just like. I don't know, like when I would run or something, like I would. It sounds so weird, but I count. I'll like count to 100, you know what I mean? And it just. Cause I get really like.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:34:39]: So the normal stress response for the visual brain when we're in this fight or flight scenario is our pupils widen and we get this tunnel vision effect. And you were going through life like you're looking through paper towel holders, really tunneled in with your periphery collapsed. So the fact that you could see that unlocked and opened up pretty quickly.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:02]: Yeah, there's gotta be a link. Cause I mean, If I had to watch the world through, let's say paper towel tubes, there's gotta be some link between that and sympathetic overdrive. Like some kind of like a cortisolic response relation to the endocrine system. Like is she going to find herself just more relaxed? Not that you're a super like stressed out.

Jessa Greenfield [00:35:24]: But I can be, I can really hyperfixate on...

Ben Greenfield [00:35:26]: Do you find that people start to. get like less stress overall or an HRV or something like that?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:35:32]: In almost every scenario and even like the mental health component of this, I mean you shared a lot of that with me that I will keep private. But think about driving over a bridge when all of a sudden you're aware of everything over here in danger. It makes you pull in even more. I mean the amount of people we work with who say this saved my life because I avoided the avoidable accidents because I could notice as I'm looking straight ahead, oh my God, there's a car coming from this position. I don't need to even move my eyes there to be able to respond and react to it. Or trusting what you're seeing, like fear of heights. Motion sensitivity so often related to a faulty mismatch between that central focal visual processing pathway and then that peripheral one. So if you're not in fight or flight all day, I mean, imagine how much more, how much differently your body would function.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:22]: Yeah, yeah. I have another question for you. But, but was that everything on the results screen that you just went through.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:36:28]: As far as like for the reading paragraph? So we went regressions went from 38 to 19. So half. I think one of the cool parts that a lot of people really look into this workforce improving eyesight. If we think of eyesight as a symptom and vision and the eye brain connection as the problem, we Address the problem, the symptom gets better. So you went from 2030 to 2020 in the distance.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:58]: 2030 means what someone would normally be able to see at 30ft. She can only see at 20ft.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:37:04]: Flipped. What somebody normally could see at 20ft, she could see farther back. Excuse me. Correct.

Jessa Greenfield [00:37:11]: Correct.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:37:12]: She had to get closer.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:13]: Right?

Jessa Greenfield [00:37:13]: Okay, yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:37:15]: But that was more discrimination. That was not knowing where to look. That was in the distance at near. You went from 2040 to 2020. So you basically saw things twice as small, which most people would say that if you're 40 or over, which in.

Jessa Greenfield [00:37:31]: A decade, you'll be there, oh no, I'm there.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:37:34]: Then your focusing system becomes more rigid and less flexible. The lens inside the eye hardens all that is true.

Jessa Greenfield [00:37:40]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:37:40]: But just like any muscle and any system in our body, if we stop using it, we lose voluntary control. You have proven that you can improve near eyesight at any age by establishing the right visual skills and abilities and systems to support where this is and how to engage with it. So the need for reading glasses dropped by about eight years in terms of what we would expect for kind of.

Jessa Greenfield [00:38:06]: Looking forward to the cool frames.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:38:09]: But we talked about digital performance lenses.

Jessa Greenfield [00:38:12]: Yes.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:38:13]: Which would be glasses.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:14]: Digital performance lens.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:38:16]: Dpls. That's what we call them. So these are glasses just for screens or near activities.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:22]: You say digital. I know my listeners are gonna freak out and ask about if you're putting like EMF on your.

Jessa Greenfield [00:38:26]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're just regular glasses.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:38:29]: I mean, clearly no EMF is going near any Greenfield because...

Ben Greenfield [00:38:33]: Not near our brains. That's not gonna happen. What's a digital performance lens?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:38:36]: So these are glasses that have a really specific type of prescription in there that are therapeutic, not compensatory. They don't do the work for you. They relax the focusing system and change the brain's processing of near information so that your response to stress is different. And so I think the analogy I gave you was like, this is like doing a squat or deadlift with a weight belt versus without the weight belt gets you to engage your core so your form is better. This relaxes your focusing system so the inside and outside muscles of the eyes can be in better synergy.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:10]: So theoretically, if you had glasses like this, you could use them as training wheels to get better vision. They're not like a crutch.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:39:18]: They're definitely not a crutch. And if there's learning that takes place through them, then absolutely that could improve vision. There's also really high quality blue light filter in there. But these are way more than blue light protection. These are changing how the brain is processing visual input.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:32]: Is this something you invented or something you buy at the store?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:39:36]: So I would say this is something that, with 10,000 data points, we figured out what the right prescription is for about 80% of the population. And that other 20%, we can calculate it. We just need to do the testing. But it's the weakest lenses possible that give the most improvement in terms of balance to allow for performance to stay steady or enhanced with time.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:58]: So if somebody works with you, the glasses are part of the package.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:40:03]: I think this is something that once we do this work, once the brain's been rebooted, if it's a part of you, if it's integrated, if it's automatic, if it's unconscious, if it's efficient. Unless there's a head injury, this work is yours to keep. These glasses make it so that screens are less terrible and causing less strain and stress so that you're less likely to adapt and more likely to keep what you have.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:26]: Okay, Got it.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:40:26]: Does that make sense?

Ben Greenfield [00:40:27]: Yep. I was at dinner in Orlando before I came up here, and I was sitting by a guy whose daughter had worked with you, but she, from what I understand, had a lot of success working with you for ADD, ADHD-like symptoms, what's the link between that and vision and how do you work on that? Is it the same protocol?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:40:47]: If you cannot control your eyes and their ability to focus, then you cannot control your mind and its ability to focus. And as simple as that sounds, it's not like there's a blood test that says, oh, you have ADHD or you have Dyslexia. It's based off of symptoms and behaviors. And so many of the symptoms of ADD, ADHD, Dyslexia, learning disabilities, even some Autism Spectrum Disorders have so many of the same symptoms and behaviors of functional vision problems. Yet a reactive medical model will just slap a label on...

Jessa Greenfield [00:41:18]: And then medicate you. So if you can do this, you can remove medication. Potentially.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:41:28]: So very often we've seen it countless times. I think the take home is at a minimum. You cannot diagnose add, ADHD, or Dyslexia without ruling out and/or addressing vision first.

Jessa Greenfield [00:41:41]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:41]: How common would you say vision? Like, if you could put a percentage on it, if you can. How common would vision be, the underlying component for ADD, ADHD?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:41:49]: Vast majority.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:50]: No way.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:41:51]: There's a visual component.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:52]: People don't talk about this?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:41:54]: No, I mean, they're starting to. And I mean, the link, even between the amount of people who have ADHD and Dyslexia, the percentages are nuts.

Jessa Greenfield [00:42:03]: Those normally go hand in hand.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:42:05]: And so vision is a common denominator for both of those. There's a reason why Dyslexia wasn't really diagnosed before the 80s. I mean, it used to be thought of as a problem with education. Like, you didn't learn how to read.

Jessa Greenfield [00:42:20]: Oh, yeah, that's.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:42:20]: And that was the education system. And now Dyslexia is 15% of the US depending on what you read. ADD and ADHD. I mean, you guys know that there's so many environmental factors that influence brain function and how we can attend to our worlds and feel confident in space, but vision is the low hanging fruit Functional vision in all of these scenarios.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:43]: Yeah. I was listening to a Tim Ferriss episode with a guy named Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, I think is his last name and they were talking a lot about presby- I think it's presbyopia. Am I pronouncing that right?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:42:58]: Yes.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:00]: What is that? And is that a part of what you treat also?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:43:03]: Presbyopia, that's the age related changes that we talked about that happen where the lens inside of our eye becomes harder, the muscles controlling that become more rigid and less flexible and 99.9% of eye doctors would say it's inevitable. You always need reading glasses and there's nothing you can do about it. I thought that my entire career until about literally five and a half years ago when Covid hit and we saw these entirely new visual profiles emerge where one of the most common ones were, is somebody who's over focusing their eyes and under converging their eyes or focusing one of their eyes in a different plane than the other, both of which you have, head. Those are responses to our environment, adaptations to the stress. We've now figured out protocols learning from our patients because there is not research or literature yet to show this is even possible. Where with enough opportunity for learning for the brain and very little time between the learning, when there's a reboot that's forced and needed, you can then develop better rapport with space, slow down the changes in real time, stop or even reverse some of the changes.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:44:23]: And in our intensive protocols, I mean we have about 90 to 95% of our adults who do this boot camp, see an improvement in near acuity, less of a dependence or no dependence on their reading glasses, or needing weaker reading glasses because they figured out how to take in space more easily. Now it takes work. You have to keep it up. If you don't do the work after.

Jessa Greenfield [00:44:49]: I did it this morning.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:51]: Good. I was gonna say I almost walked in on you had like strings and stuff.

Jessa Greenfield [00:44:54]: Yep.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:44:55]: But if you don't use it, you lose it. That's true for so many aspects of health. This is the equivalent of if you get in great shape, then you stop working out. You're not gonna stay in good shape.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:06]: Yeah, that makes sense.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:45:07]: So you can get in great shape with your visual system, but it's gotta be important to you and you have to know the right work to do.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:11]: Why'd you see the higher incidents of the vision issues that you hadn't seen before post Covid?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:45:16]: Screens, I mean like digital devices have now taken over our world when all.

Jessa Greenfield [00:45:21]: The kids Were on zoom call meetings.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:45:25]: The average 8 to 10 year old in the US spends six hours a day on screens. The average adult is 7 hours and 4 minutes. That number is climbing. And certain studies will say it's even higher. Our brains are not designed to handle that much strain and process that much visual information. And we're staring at these 2D devices all day long, blasting high energy light at us for hours on end. You know, about how the light influences brain function and body function, but we're now talking about how that influences the eye brain connection and how we're using these inside and outside muscle systems in synergy.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:59]: Okay, so are there things. Because this is where the biohacking mind goes. I might rapid fire a few things that you hear, Bryce. Supplements. You see supplements that say they can fix vision, stave off vision loss. Do these supplements, many of which have things people may have heard of before in them, like lutein and zeaxanthin. Do these work? Do you recommend them? Do you use them as an adjunct to what you do?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:46:24]: So supplements.

Jessa Greenfield [00:46:26]: I took a fistful every morning.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:28]: Oh, you did?

Jessa Greenfield [00:46:29]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:46:29]: Oh, yeah. We gave her a whole protocol.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:31]: I saw a couple bottles of ketone IQ on the counter.

Jessa Greenfield [00:46:34]: Yep.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:46:35]: So supplements absolutely have a role. But similar to biohacking, like if you're not taking care of the rest of your body, you can only go so far with supplements.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:44]: What was she taking?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:46:45]: She was taking Ketone iq to really optimize the time we had with you. We had you taking omegas, we had you taking lutein and zeaxanthine, we had you taking magnesium L threonate. We had you taking glutathione in a very unique form.

Jessa Greenfield [00:47:03]: We've had it topical.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:04]: Oh Glutaryl, yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:47:07]: Glutaryl is awesome.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:07]: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:47:08]: A lot of antioxidants, A lot of...

Jessa Greenfield [00:47:11]: Ashwagandha

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:47:13]: So to answer your question, Ben. If supplements are improving vision and that's it, there's probably a lot of systemic inflammation and neuroinflammation that's within the eyes. And so we're helping support that for macular degeneration, which is the sweet spot of our eyes becoming damaged from a lot of different reasons. Absolutely. Lutein and zeaxanthine and certain carotenoids can support and help. And there's even studies that say can even improve eyesight. But in general, I think supplements shouldn't be thought of as that's going to improve my eyesight. It should be It's giving me the right foundation to support health.

Jessa Greenfield [00:47:54]: I feel like it's the same thing with your body. I'm like, you take supplements and you take the Aminos. But you got to go do the workout.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:48:00]: You got to do the work.

Jessa Greenfield [00:48:01]: You still have to do it.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:03]: Ketones even related to macular degeneration, which I know is, from what I understand, common in diabetics, because the eyes are like an extension of the brain. And ketones from a neural standpoint are an incredible fuel that can replace glucose and that the brain can use as a more stable source of energy. They create less reactive oxygen species. The energy is more efficiently used. So it makes. I never thought until I saw those bottles yesterday on the counter that you'd think I'd have put this together, but if ketones are good for the brain and the eyes are a part of the brain, then why wouldn't some form of ketosis or exogenous ketones be good for the eyes?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:48:40]: Anything that's good for the brain is great for the eyes. The eyes emerge from the brain in utero. Exactly. Without things getting messy.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:46]: They're literally part of your brain you can touch, Right?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:48:50]: You don't want to do it.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:50]: All right.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:48:51]: And you got to be careful what you touch.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:52]: All right, so supplements. What about. And this came up because I heard them talking about some new FDA approved eye drops in that Tim Ferriss episode I just mentioned. What about eyedrops? I know there's different kinds. I know there's even peptides now that you can do as eye drops. I don't know somebody else who does like methylene blue eye drops. Do you use anything in the eyes like that?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:49:12]: So that podcast is awesome. And Dr. Goldberg is like the man in terms of structure intervention of eye disease research. I mean, he's cutting edge with everything. The drops that attempt to eliminate the need for reading glasses, there's been one that's been out for a while. My experience and a lot of what I've read and heard from people in this industry is that it causes a lot of headaches and eye strain, and it's attempting to attack a functional system in a structural way. So making it so that the focusing muscles have to lock in. And the equivalent of that is like walking around with a muscle flexed all day.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:49:52]: Tension over time. Unless you're trying to get super buff, that's what causes so many symptoms, especially with the visual system. So those types of eye drops, I would strongly talk you out of. And I would say let's at least start some home exercises that are specific for the focusing system. But eye drops, I mean, our tear film becomes drier and more irritated as we age, as there's hormonal changes. When we're on screens, our blink rate drops drastically. The average person blinks 15 times a minute. When you go to a screen, it goes to like three times a minute.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:50:26]: And the blinks aren't even full blinks. Which means your tear film starts to be produced not in its normal consistency. The watery layer comes at higher volume. The oily layer becomes less protective. Then your own tears drain faster. So people with dry eye notice their eyes water and tear and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. But they're actually creating this negative feedback loop where it's drying the front surface more.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:50]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:50:51]: So artificial tears can be really helpful, especially non preservative free ones. Omegas can be amazing for so many aspects of brain function, body function. There are eye drops with omegas in them that are awesome, but if you take a high enough dose I don't think you really even need. But especially for dry eye microbiome and gut health, I mean, we now are starting to have the research come out on how much that influences the eye brain connection.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:21]: Interesting.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:51:21]: And so, I mean, clearly it's all connected.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:24]: Yeah. Yeah. I always start to like get super self conscious about my blink. Right. When somebody starts talking about blink rate. I start counting. So somebody is listening in, let's say I'm listening. I'm a working professional. I got five kids that are all spread across elementary and high school. Yeah, I am super busy, maybe making enough money to get by. I'm listening to the podcast right now. Me and maybe one of my kids, we have vision issues. And what I'm thinking right now is there's no way in hell I can figure out how I'm going to get to D.C. and stay here for a week and take all the time out of the schedule and come out and do something like this.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:11]: Is there any hope for that person? Is there something they can do at home?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:52:14]: Absolutely. And this week long intensive is for people who are committed and motivated and have the time and the ability to put life on hold. And most of the people we see have big time issues. But we also see people come in and say, I just don't want to wear reading glasses. Can you help with that? Or I want to improve my pickleball game. Or I want to be able to not have motion sickness. Or I want to be able to trust what I see and not be hesitant.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:39]: If you can make people better at pickleball, they're buying a ticket to D.C. right now. A lot of people...

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:52:43]: Pickleball's fastest growing sport in the US There's a lot that can be done at home. I mean there's simple vision exercises that everybody can do. Just like movement is so important for our body. I mean we could talk.

Jessa Greenfield [00:52:53]: Even some of the stuff they came home with, it's like beads on a string. And I'm like, she was like sending me home with it. I'm like, I could make that, you know what I mean?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:53:01]: But it's what you learn from that, it's what that raises to your awareness.

Jessa Greenfield [00:53:05]: I guess that's, I'm trying to say is how accessable it is.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:06]: You know, what to do. Like, is there, do you have YouTube videos or anything like that that tell people what to do? Or is there like some at home?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:53:13]: Yeah. So we have a program called Screen Fit, which is an at home vision training program designed to teach the specific visual skills needed for reading, for driving, for learning for life. And it's a do it yourself program. It's kind of like doing body weight work instead of going to the gym. You're going to get in better shape faster going to the gym, working with a trainer and all the equipment. But not everybody has access to that. So this is our way to make this accessible. There's two different courses.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:53:40]: Each course has 30 lessons. Each lesson is like 10 or 15 minutes to do and it walks you through a specific vision exercise. You then put it down, you don't need equipment for this. And then you do the exercise. If you did this five days a week, which is a lot, that would be six weeks.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:59]: Five days a week but for 15 minutes

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:54:01]: Not even some are even five minutes. And these are exercises you can do.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:04]: Is that what you're going to need to do? Like when you get home, do you keep doing homework?

Jessa Greenfield [00:54:07]: Yeah, they sent me home with like a homework pack and like all the things that I would need.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:54:11]: So Jessa is different though. For our intensives, we have a three month formal home program where we have you in a customized virtual reality program. We have specific eye exercises you worked on with us and we're going to be increasing the level of demand each week. But Screen Fit, like that'll be a good maintenance program at the end of all in probably another three, six months.

Jessa Greenfield [00:54:32]: When you told me that you had that, that actually was very encouraging to me because there's a lot of people who like they don't. Their mom or dad both have to work and you can't drive your kid to the clinic and you can't afford the clinic or you know what I mean? And Just the fact that it is available to the masses. And you said hopefully an app.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:54:55]: So it's low cost, low barrier to entry. Yeah, We've had as young as five and as old as 89. Go through it successfully.

Jessa Greenfield [00:55:02]: Yeah.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:55:02]: With this is crazy. 100% of people who've finished the program seeing a reduction in symptoms. And this is like in the thousands in terms of users because it's so methodically sequenced and trained so that we've put people through it who've had massive eye turns, who've had multiple head injuries, who've had lazy eyes, who've had big time functional vision problems to make sure. Is this making things worse? And more so let's do the right sequencing of learning so we can build a foundation. This is basically like saying, here's the start line. You're taking your first step over the start line. And for a lot of people who don't have big time functional vision problems, screen fit is money. It helps so much and it's something you can all as a family do together.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:51]: You said head injuries just now with TBI concussion syndrome and the issues that people deal with after that, does any of that affect vision or is any of it affected by vision? Is there any link between the head injury and the Vision piece?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:56:05]: In 100% of cases?

Ben Greenfield [00:56:08]: 100%.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:56:09]: 100%. So Vision, not eyesight, is represented in every lobe of our brain. There are more areas of our brain dedicated to processing vision than every other sense combined. Two thirds of the neurons coming into our brain originate from the eyes. You cannot have a head injury and not have vision be involved. It's just a matter of at what level. And so I'm a big believer that while symptoms often improve after head injury, the problems don't. We just learn how to bypass or work around them.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:56:39]: Unless you're actively engaging and closing those gaps.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:42]: So you could have no add, ADHD, Dyslexia, headaches, anything, get a tbi, concussion or other head injury and develop those compensatory mechanisms while you're healing.

Jessa Greenfield [00:56:52]: I know a kid that that's happened too.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:54]: Stuck with you for the rest of your life unless you figure out a way to retrain your eyes.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:56:57]: Any listener who notices light sensitivity, sensory overload in crowded places like a mall or grocery store, tired, strained eyes on a screen, difficulty driving at night, and just everyday life has become really overwhelming and hard. I mean, that's diagnostic for a functional vision problem.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:16]: And yet what you're saying is a lot of times people who have that have had some kind of a head injury in the past.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:57:21]: I mean, it's often the. You hit your head on the countertop or at a playground accident when you're younger, but you never got the eye brain connection checked, because if you went to a doctor and if they looked at eyesight, they're very likely not looking at vision. And eyesight and vision are two completely different things. So you're missing this huge opportunity for a completely different life. And we have studies that say if you've had one head injury, you're more likely to have additional ones. The return to learn, the return to work, the return to screens and life now absolutely is like stepping on an open wound with functional vision problems because your brain's not operating the same way it was previously. And I really do believe that with pretty much any concussion, with the right work, right motivation, and right compliance, you can get back to previous level of function, some cases a way better place. And I really do think that.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:58:17]: I don't know the timeline, but in the future, we're going to be looking at this eye-brain connection as the missing piece to head injury recovery, to brain health, to optimization of so much systemic function. Because vision influences productivity, critical thinking, decision making, mental health. I mean, it's. I'm biased, I know, but I agree.

Ben Greenfield [00:58:45]: I have a lot of listeners who are just looking for every last advantage they can get. They're the optimizers, the biohackers. What if somebody doesn't have, or at least doesn't think they have vision issues? I'm gonna put myself in that category. I feel like my vision's pretty good. No issues, no headaches, no straining, none of the things you've just described. Would somebody like me or somebody who just wants to go from, like, good to better notice something if they were to do these kind of exercises?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [00:59:15]: I would say one of the things I think that my team in our clinic do so well is we identify areas of opportunity for improvement so that if we're designing a customized program, you're not doing the program to improve test results, even though test results better improved, to make sure we're doing the right stuff. But we're identifying goals that we're trying to accomplish. So we work with, I mean, Navy SEALs, snipers, Olympic athletes, pro athletes in every sport imaginable, many of which who don't have problems but want to get an advantage. And even if you took a percentage improvement in a couple areas, that has a cumulative effect, which can absolutely influence performance in a really positive way. So I would imagine, like, I know you're a big hunter, you know, if you're up all night.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:02]: Uh big, recreational

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:00:03]: If you're sleep deprived, if there's poor lighting, if you're sitting there looking through a scope for way longer than you should, fatigue sets in because, well, you're superhuman, but because you're human. And we can train vision to be that dominant sensory system that's guiding and leading and giving you an advantage and not deteriorating as other areas of your body, you know, can't function at the same level.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:32]: Yeah, interesting. Okay, so I'm gonna link to this stuff at BenGreenfieldLife.com/FixMyVision. Just what it sounds like. If somebody wants to do the my screen time or they want to come out here and do an intensive, is it as simple as just like going to your website and you've got some kind of a contact form?

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:00:55]: Ya so we, so the website is My Vision First. That's the name of the clinic and the practice. I'm so grateful that vision is becoming the sexy thing now because we're realizing how much this influences so many areas of life. And I've had a lot of people in the functional and integrative medicine space say vision is the new microbiome. I think that's kind of catchy. And I believe that too, where we're going to start to realize this has at least plays a role with so much of life. But absolutely, I mean, everything doesn't really.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:24]: Roll off the tongue that well, vision is the new microbiome, but...

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:01:27]: Not at all...

Jessa Greenfield [01:01:30]: Yeah, you say it enough, it'll become that.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:01:31]: But I mean, we have it set up so like, we set up lots of calls, we make sure there's a lot of filtering done because functional work is not the goal for a structural problem. So somebody who's got glaucoma, we're not doing vision training for that. Somebody who's got diabetic retinopathy. I mean, we have to address other things first. But with those scenarios, you could lose peripheral vision and peripheral awareness and you still have to function in life. So to be able to work on orientation and mobility type work. Spatial awareness, type work, reading when you're losing the capacity that you had. I mean, that for many people can be life altering.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:14]: Jessa you have like a book you have scoped out to read. When we get home, there's been one burning a hole on the shelf?

Jessa Greenfield [01:02:20]: Yeah, but I'm not gonna tell you.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:23]: I'm just. Maybe we. Maybe for the first time since we've been married, we can Go through a book together.

Jessa Greenfield [01:02:28]: We've attempted and we've got a lot of time.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:30]: We've tried. It never really works out that way. Yes, it's a huge problem. I'm a total speed speed, like, I'm five books a week speed reader. And so.

Jessa Greenfield [01:02:38]: Yeah. And I'm like a book every quarter.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:02:41]: What I'm so excited about for you is just normal human behavior is we avoid stuff that's hard for us. Yeah, you've avoided reading your whole life because it was really hard.

Jessa Greenfield [01:02:49]: Oh, I can't even relate to people, like, have you read this great book? Or people even want to be in a book club. I'm like, that sounds horrible.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:02:56]: Just to be able to. Have to be able to read at night. Not as an excuse to help you fall asleep faster because it's so fatiguing and draining, but as a way to learn and to hopefully connect with this guy and do other things there. I mean, that would be awesome.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:08]: We can curl up in bed and read together, man. It's going to be amazing. Theodore Doshkovesch, or whatever his name is, is. And we'll just. We'll go through massive novels for the rest of our lives. Incredible.

Jessa Greenfield [01:03:18]: Yeah. Let me pick her first book together.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:20]: She just, like, fixed our marriage. We're just going to read books all day long.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:03:23]: So it's really marriage counseling in the form of vision.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:27]: So, folks, BenGreenfieldLife.com/fixmyvision. I'll link to Bryce and all the work that he does, and I'll, of course, keep you all posted as Jess and I get home and she gets back to normal life. And perhaps sometime in the next two or three years, she'll make another podcast appearance. Jessa, Bryce, thank you so much for doing this.

Jessa Greenfield [01:03:46]: Yeah, thank you, Dr. Bryce.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:03:47]: My pleasure. And thank you for sharing your story and being open, because if you help one person, this is totally worth it. You're helping lots of one persons.

Jessa Greenfield [01:03:57]: I've said this to you, but I'm like, if there's one kid who doesn't have to go through the amount of, I don't want to say suffering, but hard, hardships. If it just helps one kid, that would be the most amazing thing to me because it affects you long term.

Dr. Bryce Appelbaum [01:04:14]: Totally. And if you're. When you're reading, you're doing it well and you're not losing your place and you're remembering what you're reading and there's enjoyment from it. Was your Dyslexia actually Dyslexia, or was it a hidden functional vision problem causing the exact same behavior.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:30]: Wow. I've learned a ton of and I'm kind of curious about the strings and the beads. I'm going to see a lot over the next few months. But in the meantime, everybody, thank you for watching again. BenGreenfieldLife.com/FixMyVision Dr. Bryce Applebaum, Jessa. Catch you guys on the flip side.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:45]: To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:58]: In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the market makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.

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Ben Greenfield

Ben Greenfield is a health consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of a wide variety of books.

What's Blocking You From Living Boundless?

Thoughts on Can ADHD and Dyslexia REALLY Be Cured with Vision Training? How Retraining the Eye-Brain Connection Transforms Reading, Focus, Concussion Recovery & Peak Performance — with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum

One Response

Brianne says:

September 23, 2025 at 7:07 pm

This might be the most life changing podcast you’ve done yet. I had no idea all of this stuff was connected. Wow. Thank you Jessa for sharing! You may have changed my family’s lives.

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Can ADHD and Dyslexia *REALLY* Be Cured with Vision Training? How Retraining the Eye-Brain Connection Transforms Reading, Focus, Concussion Recovery & Peak Performance — with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum