Holy carp

Still making a lot of progress.

The reason I'm making this post here is because I had a pretty eventful week in terms of vision.

Four days earlier in the week, I pounded down some veggie smoothies that a friend recommended.  It's based on a veggie smoothie that Dr. Rhonda Patrick recommends.  You can find it here.  It's got a bunch of veggies and healthy stuff that makes sense.  It's a way of pounding a lot extremely nutrition-dense food down the hatch quickly and easily.  The ingredients, if you're curious?  Rainbow chard, spinach, kale, chaga (type of mushroom), cinnamon, creatine, garlic cloves, turmeric, avocado, blueberries, tomato, carrots, chia seeds, flax milk, and cayenne pepper.

In the site linked, Rhonda goes into detail about each food, why they're in the shake, and what they do for you.  One that particularly piqued my interest was the one about blueberries and carrots, and the impact they can have on the eyes.

Anyway.  I want to, as usual, use caution when attempting to make any causal connections.  But holy shit, this smoothie had a powerful effect on me, and it's not evident that it was a wholly positive effect.  Possibly a mix.

First I want to mention that I more or less eat the same foods every day.  Three scrambled eggs with cheese, cooked in two tablespoons of coconut oil (you can't notice it), one liter of green tea.  Then dinner, which consists of nuts, steak, and salad with a bunch of high-quality extra virgin olive oil.  That's every day.  Then one day every week or two, I drink a lot of beer and otherwise pig out on carbs.

This cyclical-ketogenic diet works very well for me.  It gives me a lot of mental energy, keeps me lean, lowers my heart rate, and oxygen requirement.  It also reduces my need for sleep.  When in ketosis, I only need seven hours of sleep instead of eight.  As a result of my extremely regular diet, I have a very good idea of what my baseline is.  By doing this, I can make small tweaks to my diet and lifestyle and more easily make plausible connections, i.e., 'I introduced this new food, and I feel this.  It's probably this that caused it.'.  By then accumulating knowledge about my body in this way, I can slowly optimize its functionality.  As far as I know, this is the only way to do it.  Everyone's body is different, so one must experiment.

Long aside aside (heh), I feel fairly certain that it was the shake.  What did it do to me?  The most obvious thing that it did to me this past week is make me really stupid for about four days after slurping down the last smoothie.  I had the worst case of brain fog that I can recall for a long time.  I was completely useless at work.  Probably should have stayed home.  It is a truly odd sensation to be looking at stuff you're used to working with and be completely ineffective at it.  It was almost a complete shutdown.  It's only today (Friday), that it appears that the fog has lifted.  wft.

I also noticed increased loudness of ringing in my ears.  I think everyone has low-level tinnitus.  Mine just got louder.  In a book I read called Brain Bugs, the author/neuroscientist explained what tinnitus is, and compared it to phantom leg syndrome.  Basically, what causes both is the feature of our neuroanatomy known as neuroplasticity.  Damaging your hearing hardware can cause tinnitus by depriving the auditory cortex of its expected signaling normally provided by that hardware.  When that happens, the area of the auditory cortex doesn't suddenly go silent.  Surrounding neurons begin creeping in.  However, the higher-level architecture doesn't remap the function of that area of the auditory cortex.  So the stimulation is misinterpreted by the higher levels, and that misinterpretation is perceived as noise, or more commonly said, ringing.  Same deal with phantom leg.   Those neurons which deal with sensing the leg don't suddenly go away.  Other surrounding neurons creep up on that area of the cortex, and give the subject the sensation of having a phantom leg.

But it did appear to have a good, positive impact on vision.  I am really starting to get powerful stereo effects, and I really feel like I'm begining to get a sense of what real feels like, and the feeling of being in the world, particularly when playing VR.  My sense of control over both of the eyes is greatly increased.  Overall, it really feels like my brain is undergoing a significant wiring overhaul.  Perhaps the ringing and severe brain fog reflect that change.

How is VT like meditation?

Think I noticed a similarity between vision therapy and meditation.  And the similarity is this: vision therapy teaches you how you're supposed to use your eyes, and meditation teaches you how you're supposed to use your consciousness.

The interesting consequence of this is that once you've properly assimilated the lessons that vision therapy has to offer, you kind of don't need to do it anymore.  You're now doing it all of the time, and it can no longer be considered therapy.  The newer, and better way of using your eyes becomes absorbed in who you are, and you don't have to manually do Brock String, or fixation card exercises.

Same with meditation.  Once you really know what meditation teaches you, you can do it anytime.  You don't have to be sitting on a cushion.  Sometimes I will think to myself 'shit, I didn't meditate today.'.  But then I realize, why can't I just maintain the mindfulness anyway?  When I have that realization, I can have a normal amazing day which normally happens on days that begin with a good meditation session.  You can meditate all of the time.  When you've absorbed the lessons, it becomes a part of who you are.

Sort of reminds me of a story I heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He mentioned in a podcast with Tim Ferriss that he used to do Transcendental Meditation, got a lot out of it, but then stopped.  But the positive effects of having learned it continue to this current day.  TM permanently changed him.  It was like firmware upgrade, which probably has a fair amount to do with how much of a badass he is.

Not dead. Still here. Still making progress.

Haven't been blogging because I honestly haven't been doing much explicit vision therapy.  But I have been making substantive progress.

I have been trying to do virtual reality somewhat regularly, which I do believe helps.  But the main reason I think that my vision is still improving is from all of those months of learning and experimenting with the fixation cards execises, playing with the eyes, and pressing down on the binocular button as much as consciously possible.

Those exercises have provided me with the feedback I needed, teaching me, even though I could never fuse, which direction to go in.  Once I learned that, I was able to use that information. So even though I'm not doing actual vision therapy exercises, I am moving myself in the correct direction, and therefore, I'm still making progress.

When am I going to get it?  I don't know.  Maybe I won't.  But I'm going to keep marching in the direction that I'm going in, because why not?  There's nothing to lose.  I'm not spending any time doing vision therapy.  I'm coasting.

Maybe it was unrealistic to expect changes so fast.