Learning Lenses

Learning lenses or performance lenses help activate the relaxation response in your nervous system. They activate the parasympathetic nervous system allowing us to begin to come back to balance. Learn more about these lenses for kids in this episode. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

lenses, learning, eye, gazelle, lens, stress, parasympathetic nervous system, child, institute, magnification, vision, focus, nervous system, doctor, visual, cranial sacral therapy, work, peripheral vision, eye exam, late 1940s

Hey everybody, its Dr. Sam. Welcome to my EyeClarity podcast today I want to talk about learning lenses. These are glasses, and the nickname is called Learning lens or performance lens. What does this mean? Well, when you go for your eye exam, I’m talking about adults here. And you’re sitting in the chair and the doctor is flipping lenses for distance. And he gives you a prescription because you’ve got blurred vision, whether you’re nearsighted, farsighted, or have a stigmatism, what the lens is doing is it’s reinforcing the imbalance that you’re coming in with. Now up close, let’s say you’re over 40. And you’re having some blurred vision there, the doctor is going to give you a lens to get rid of the blur.

So we call these lenses, compensating lenses. These are compensating you for the adaptive response that you’re making. So what I want to spotlight here is what is a learning lens? I get that question so much, and adults want it. But this is made mostly for kids. So let me give you a little backstory. When I graduated from my optometry education, I enrolled in a postdoctoral program at the gazelle Institute. Now many of you have never heard of the gazelle Institute. Some of you that have maybe live on the east coast, and you live around New Haven, Connecticut, or you’ve gone to Yale because Gazelle Institute was on the Yale campus, for a time it was part of the Yale study center. And it was started in the late 1940s by a physician named Arnold Gizelle. He’s not really talked about much anymore, but if you google him, you could find some information. Because he’s a he’s a developmental minded physician. And he started this institute in the late 1940s, where he was studying in his research, children, their learning, and their development. And one of the things that Gazelle had an awareness about was the difference between eyesight and vision.

Remember, I talked about eye sight seeing something clearly at 20 feet like 2020. And vision is how the eyes brain and body come together? Well, that’s what Gazelle was interested in. He was interested in vision. And he was interested in it as it related to the child’s reading and learning. So he had some holistic optometrists that he brought on staff. And there was research that was done. And many things came out of the research. But one of the things that came out of the research was this idea of being able to reduce a child’s visual stress as they were learning to read. So if you think about your upclose vision as a child, well, first of all, you go through many developmental stages as a way to develop not only your eyes, but your hearing, your proprioception, your vestibular system. So there’s a developmental curve that all kids go through. And it really starts right after birth. When they start learning to motor, they lay on their tummy, they begin to creep and crawl. Eventually, they’re walking and hopping and jumping and skipping. You know, these are all things that I did as a kid, you probably did, too. And it’s a shame because today, I see this a lot where these very young, young infant toddlers are already on their electronics. And it’s the sign of the times. But what it does is it really stunts your curiosity about peripheral vision, visual focus, and the relationship between your eyes, your ears, your proprioception and your body.

Another thing that Gazelle looked at was what was the best age to start introducing all This close work to kids. again today, I see this where parents are putting these tablets in other very intensive focused situations in front of their kids. And the visual system is not developed. They’re tracking their visual focusing their visual coordination skills, depth perception, eye hand coordination, and so on. So, when I went to the gazelle Institute, in the mid 1980s, there was a whole staff of eye doctors there. They were some of my best teachers, Dick appel, John strep, Al Sutton, and even my partner Ellis Edelman, these guys were amazing, you know, they were in their 60s and 70s. And they had been around the block, they knew the art of prescribing lenses, based on the whole person, not just an acuity check, in 30 seconds or a minute. So one of the techniques that I learned at the GIZELLA Institute was being able to measure a person’s focusing response, while they were in action, in the actual reading, or near focusing. And the way it was done is there was a specialized flashlight called a retinoscope.

And what you would do is give the child something to read. And then you would shine the flashlight into the child’s eye and you’d get a reflex or a reflection on the retina, the light would be bouncing off the retina, and you would be able to see this reflex in the eye. And so we learned to evaluate what would be the optimal focusing response in the eye while we were watching them read. And then once we learned what was optimal and what wasn’t optimal, we would start adding very low magnification lenses in front of their eyes, and we’d re measure them. And invariably, most of the time, there was a very small magnification lens that created more stability in the focus, more range in the focus, more relaxation in the eye. And when we would give it to the child, we would ask them to read, and they always read better. So when they would read out loud, you could tell the difference. So we researched this, we videoed it, we studied it. And this is the place where we learned that low magnification mount low magnification lenses sometimes can be used to reduce a child’s visual stress, when they’re still in the formative stage of learning to focus and use their two eyes together.

And sometimes, the results were so unbelievable that it became kind of a staple in this brand of optometry where we would base the prescription that the child would use only for close up. And it would be a way that would enhance their performance. So it did not create dependency, it did not create weakness. Because eventually, what we saw after about a year that the person would absorb or internalize what the lens was doing to their brain and their eyes. And they didn’t need the lenses anymore. And we would use this as a technique to prevent myopia, astigmatism. And we also used it in conditions like crossed eyes, or lazy eye. So it was a wonderful tool. But the key is, you had to know how to test the person to see whether or not this learning lens would actually make things easier. So it was all about performance and reducing

I stress. Now today, all of my older mentors and colleagues have moved on they’ve passed away and there is a small but vibrant breed I have eye doctors that know about this. Unfortunately, what’s happened is because the eye exam has become so technologically driven, and the eye doctor is pressured into seeing so many people per hour that this type of testing is not done. So in prescribing a learning lens, unless you had some kind of training like me or knew about the gazelle Institute, you’re probably not going to know about this and apply it. So there’s one more point I want to make. And that has to do with the relationship between stress and our vision. So many people professionals have written about stress, and how it affects the body. And, you know, we could talk about things like the fight flight situation, or the fight flight freeze situation.

People like Dr. Steven Porges, who invented something called the polyvagal theory, talks about the evolution of the nervous system. And stress and trauma play into that I’m not going to go into the polyvagal theory. But I would look up Dr. Porges. Because his discoveries and his writings are amazing. And my discovery of him came much later, when I started to study things like cranial sacral therapy, and continual movement. But stress in the eyes, one of the conditions that I see quite a bit is something called the non malingering syndrome. And this is the scenario, it’s usually around the first grading period, October, November. And mom brings her child in. Because the child has failed, being able to read the eye chart like can’t even see the big E on the eye chart. And yet, the child has never worn any distance glasses. And so everybody thinks the child is faking it. So what’s amazing is, I know this now, because I’ve seen it enough. And when the child comes in and can’t read the eye chart, what’s happening is their peripheral vision goes from being you know, out here to being in here.

So they’re seeing like out of two pinholes. So I would say 95% of their peripheral vision is gone. And there’s nothing neurologically wrong, there’s no disease, there’s no tumors, it’s all stress. And this is where those learning lenses, those low plus lenses come in, because I’ll put them on the child and immediately, you’ll see the face change, there’ll be a relaxation in the facial muscles, or even more, they can actually say I can start reading the chart. And I can lend the parents a pair of these. And within 48 to 72 hours, they won’t need the lenses anymore, because the low plus lens, the learning lens has done its job it is accessed the parasympathetic nervous system. So this is probably the most important thing I’m gonna say today, that when you wear a low plus lens, it helps activate the relaxation response in your nervous system. So we have two parts of the nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Now in the sympathetic nervous system, that’s our active state. That’s our state when we’re, you know, learning running, moving, or if you know, we’re under stress, that’s where we produce cortisol, our adrenals are working hard, you know, everything is turned on, or active.

And we need that. However, if we’re in a constant state of sympathetic response over time, our system cannot sustain that high level of stress. And we begin to shut down as a defense strategy, because we can’t live In high stress constantly, and because the visual system is so connected, and so related to our nervous system, that it’s one of those primary senses, that begins to shut down as we go into our stress. And this is where both the low plus lenses which start activating the parasympathetic nervous system, doing some therapies like cranial sacral therapy, or, you know, some, some gentle things that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, we can then begin to come back to balance. And I’ve talked to many school nurses over the years, they’ve never heard of this, but then they start seeing the results of how these low plus lenses can be helpful now, just like MSM hydrops, where people say, Oh, they didn’t work, you know, they have intense floaters.

MSM doesn’t work. The learning lenses are the same way, they are not the magic bullet, okay? Which means that they may not work for everybody. And if you are nearsighted or farsighted, and you have an astigmatism, the strategy there would be to wear a slightly reduced prescription. Because if you just tried to wear the low, low plus lenses, and you already had a prescription, it’s not going to work in the same way. So once you start wearing a prescription, then the learning lenses are not for you. And I have to disappoint a lot of the adults who write me and they say, Give it to me, I want it and it just isn’t the right thing. There’s other tools that we can use. Like for example, color therapy might be another option to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, especially the blue and purple colors. So that’s the learning lens situation. The Gazelle Institute, you could Google the gazelle Institute. It’s very different now. Within when I went there, when I went there was very focused on vision. And it’s it’s not doing that right now. So that’s our show for today. I’m gonna get back on the trail. Until next time, everybody. Take care.

Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.