Cognition, Vision, & Corrective Eyewear

The optic nerve has a direct synapse on the reticular activating system, which in turn regulates arousal and consciousness. Dr. Huberman explains that this connection results in a unique relationship between visual habits and states of mind: visual focus on a single object produces a distinct psychophysiological state as opposed to letting the eyes rest on landscape. Allowing the eyes to saccade over a landscape allows the nervous system to tone down arousal.

Plot twist: eyeglasses affect your visual habits. Jake Steiner, who has the blueprint for reversing myopia, has observed that people who wear glasses change the position of the head, rather than move the eyes around, to visually take in an environment.

I hypothesize the following interaction - wearing glasses causes a longterm shift towards perpetual low-grade arousal, and deprives us of the psychophysiological release that vision would otherwise cue. A simple piece of curved glass causing profound and persistent changes in our mental and cognitive habits.

All my life, I assumed so much of my personality was due to some genetic innate thing.... and yes, my DNA reveals some pretty weird mental and psychological predispositions (like anybody else, I have to assume), but this realization separates something I thought was PART of me, a certain cognitive-mental-psychophysiological profile and default state, giving me distance from it.

And of course, it won't remain theoretical - my journey to reduce my eyesight yields consistent fruit: by changing habits and reducing the corrective power of my glasses, I'm down 2 diopters and still improving...