Dr. Samer Hattar

And these rods and cones simply take the photon energy, which light is made of, and they change it in a way to an electrical signal that allow us to build the image of the environment in our cortices.

However, people have found, including me with the work of David Burson and Ignacio Provencio, that there is a subset of

of ganglion cells.

The ganglion cells are the cells that leave the retina, their axon, leave the retina, and project to the brain.

So these were thought to only relay rod and cone information from the light environment to the brain.

We found that a small subset of these ganglion cells are themselves photoreceptors that were completely missed in the retina.

And these are the photoreceptors that relay light environment subconsciously

to the areas in the brain that have and house the circadian clock or the circadian pacemaker, which adjusts all the clocks in our bodies to the central brain clock, that allows them to entrain to the 24-hour light-dark cycle.

In fact, they possibly have no problems in circadian photoentrainment.

They'll have enormous sleep-wake cycle.

But they're totally blind.

But they are totally image blind.

And what's really interesting is that, and this story I heard from Chuck Seisler, so I'll give him credit, that some of these people who are image blind, usually they get dry eyes and they give them a lot of pain.

And

Doctors used to think, oh, since they are image blind and they're getting dry eye, why don't you just remove their eyes?

They're not using them anymore.

And the minute they would remove their eyes, they start having cyclical sleep problems indicating that now they are not in training to the light-dark cycle and are having cyclical jet lags when their clock shifts through the light-dark cycle.

Honestly, I think the easiest thing is waking up.

Get as much light as you can.

Into your eyes.