In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I discuss the science of vision and share simple, effective tools to enhance eyesight and preserve eye health. I explain how the eyes and brain work together to process light, color and motion using specialized structures such as the retina and photoreceptors, and why conditions like nearsightedness, visual hallucinations and lazy eye occur. I also cover specific visual protocols to increase alertness and focus during work, improve sleep, and support visual health. Additionally, I highlight key vitamins essential for vision and discuss supplements such as lutein and astaxanthin for maintaining long-term eye health. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes—approximately 30 minutes—focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and full-length episodes will continue to be released every Monday. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Improve Vision 00:01:01 Eyes, Lens, Eyelashes 00:02:40 Retina, Photoreceptors & Brain 00:06:34 Eyesight & Subconscious Vision Effects 00:07:25 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:09:02 Time of Day & Retina, Tool: Morning Sunlight Exposure 00:12:02 Tool: Reduce Nearsightedness & Outdoor Time 00:12:33 Accommodation, Focus, Tools: Panoramic Vision; Upward Gaze 00:16:20 Sponsor: AG1 00:18:14 Improve Vision, Tools: View Distances; Smooth Pursuit; Accommodation 00:21:08 Binocular Vision, Lazy Eye, Children 00:23:57 Hallucinations & Visual System 00:25:09 Sponsor: ROKA 00:26:57 Improve & Test Vision, Tool: Snellen Chart 00:29:03 Support Vision, Tool: Vitamin A & Vegetables 00:30:23 Supplements, Lutein, Astaxanthin 00:32:52 Recap & Key Takeaways; Cardiovascular System Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: Who is Andrew Huberman and what is this podcast about?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. Today's episode is going to be all about vision and eyesight, a topic that's very near and dear to my heart because it's the one that I've been focusing on for well over 25 years of my career.
Chapter 2: How do the eyes and brain work together to process vision?
When we hear the word vision, we most often think about eyesight or our ability to perceive shapes and objects and faces and colors. However, our eyes are responsible for much more than that, including our mood, our level of alertness, and all of that is included in what we call vision. What is vision? Well, vision starts with the eyes. we have no what's called extraocular light perception.
While it feels good to have light on our skin, while it feels good to be outside in the sunlight for most people, the only way that light information can get to the cells of your body is through these two little goodies on the front of your face. And for those of you listening, I'm just pointing to my eyes.
As many of you have heard me say before on this and other podcasts, your eyes in particular, your neural retinas are part of your central nervous system. They are part of your brain. They're the only part of your brain that sits outside the cranial vault.
In other words, you have two pieces of your brain that deliberately got squeezed out of the skull during development and placed in these things we call eye sockets. Now the eyes have a lot of other goodies in them that are very important. And those are the goodies that we're going to focus on a lot today. There's a lens to focus light precisely to the retina.
There are also other pieces of the eye that are designed to keep the eye lubricated. You also have these things that we call eyelashes. Most people don't know this, but eyelashes are there to trigger the blink reflex. They aren't just aesthetically nice. Eyelashes are there so that if a piece of dust or something starts to head towards the cornea, the eye blinks very, very fast.
It's the fastest reflex you own. We also have these things called eyelids. Now eyelids might seem like the most boring topic of all, but they are incredibly fascinating. Today we're going to talk about how you can actually use your visual system to increase your levels of alertness based on the neural circuits that link your brainstem with your eyelids. So,
Let's talk about what the eyes do for vision. Basically, the entire job of the eyes is to collect light information and send it off to the rest of the brain in a form that the brain can understand. Remember, no light actually gets in past those neural retinas. It gets to the neural retina and we have specific cells in the eye called photoreceptors. They come in two different types, rods and cones.
Cones are mainly responsible for daytime vision. and the rods are mainly responsible for vision at night or under low light conditions, generally speaking. These photoreceptors, the rods and cones, have chemical reactions inside them that involve things like vitamin A, and that chemical reaction converts the light into electricity.
Within the eye, within the retina, there are then a series of stages of processing, and that information eventually gets sent into the brain by a very specific class of neurons. They're called retinal ganglion cells. Now, here's what's incredible. I just want you to ponder this for a second. This still blows my mind. Everything you see around you you're not actually seeing those objects directly.
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Chapter 3: What are the subconscious effects of vision on mood and alertness?
Now I want to talk about the other aspect of vision, which is the stuff that you don't perceive, the subconscious stuff. And then we'll transition directly into how you can use light and eyesight to control this other stuff, because it's very important. And that other stuff is mood, sleep, and appetite.
And there are ways in which you can use these same protocols that I will describe in order to preserve and even enhance your vision, your ability to see things and consciously perceive them. So the protocols we will describe have a lot of carry over to both conscious eyesight and to these subconscious aspects of vision.
And I just want you to understand a little bit more about the science of seeing of eyesight and vision, and then all the protocols will make perfect sense. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each and every night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop about one to three degrees.
And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs.
Now, I find that extremely useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night, even colder in the middle of the night, and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.
And I know that because Eight Sleep has a great sleep tracker that tells me how well I've slept and the types of sleep that I'm getting throughout the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for four years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep.
Their latest model, the Pod 4 Ultra, also has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees in order to improve your airflow and stop you from snoring. If you decide to try Eight Sleep, you have 30 days to try it at home, and you can return it if you don't like it, no questions asked, but I'm sure that you'll love it.
Go to 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 off your Pod 4 Ultra. 8sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 off your Pod 4 Ultra. So as amazing as eyesight is, it actually did not evolve for us to see shapes and colors and motion and form.
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Chapter 4: Why is morning sunlight exposure important for retinal health?
The most ancient cells in our eyes and the reason we have eyes is to communicate information about time of day to the rest of the brain and body. Remember, there's no extraocular photoreception. There's no way for light information to get to all the cells of your body, but every cell in your body needs to know if it's night or day.
Now, I talked a little bit about this in the episodes on sleep, and this episode is not about sleep, but I want to emphasize that there is a particular category of retinal ganglion cell. Remember the neurons that connect the retina to the brain. These are so-called melanopsin retinal ganglion cells named after the opsin that they contain within them. They are essentially photoreceptors.
Remember before I said there are photoreceptors and then these ganglion cells? Well, these melanopsin cells, as the name suggests, melanopsin, have their own photoreceptor built inside them. These cells, retinal ganglion cells, communicate to areas of the brain when particular qualities of light are present in your environment.
and signal to the brain therefore that it's early day or late in the day. They regulate when you'll get sleepy, when you'll feel awake, how fast your metabolism is, excuse me, your blood sugar levels, your dopamine levels, and your pain threshold. These melanopsin ganglion cells have been shown to set the circadian clock and to respond best
to the contrast between blue and yellow light of the sort that lands on these cells when you view the sun when it's at so-called low solar angle, when it's low in the sky, either in the morning or in the evening. What does all this mean? The most central and important aspect of our biology and perhaps our psychology as well, is to anchor ourselves in time, to know when we exist.
We know time at a biological level based on where the sun is. What does this mean for a protocol? It means see, get that light in your eyes early in the day, and anytime you want to be awake. So try and get as much sunlight in your eyes during the day as you safely can.
You need a lot of this light in order to trigger these melanopsin cells, which would then trigger your circadian clock, which sits above the roof of your mouth, which will signal every cell in your body, including temperature rhythms, et cetera. So first things first, your visual system was not for seeing faces, motion, et cetera. The most ancient cells in your eye
which are there right now as we speak, are there to inform your body and brain about time of day. So you want to get that bright light early in the day, absolutely essential, two to 10 minutes. Now, here's another reason to do this, getting two hours a day of outdoor time without sunglasses has a significant effect on reducing the probability that you will get myopia.
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Chapter 5: How can outdoor time reduce nearsightedness (myopia)?
Now myopia or nearsightedness has to do with the way that the lens focuses light onto the retina. So remember your eye is an optical device. You have lenses in your eyes and those lenses need to move. It's not a rigid lens like a glass lens, it's a dynamic lens.
The eye can dynamically adjust where light lands by moving the lens and changing the shape of the lens in your eye through a process called accommodation. And if you understand this process of accommodation, you not only can enhance the health of your eyes in the immediate and long-term, but you also can work better. You'll be able to focus better on physical and mental work.
You will be able to concentrate for longer. So much of our mental focus, whether or not it's for cognitive endeavors or physical endeavors, is grounded in where we place our visual focus. Okay, what we look at and our ability to hold our concentration there is critically determining how we think. Now, accommodation is our ability to accommodate to things that are up close here or further away.
And the way this works is that the iris and the musculature in a structure called the ciliary body move the lens. So when you look far away, okay, when you see things far away, your lens actually relaxes. It can flatten out. And you'll notice that it actually is relaxing to look at a horizon.
Whereas if I look at something up close to me, like this pen or my phone or a computer screen or this microphone, it takes effort. You'll sense the effort. Now, some of that effort is actually eye movements because you have muscles that can move your eyes within their sockets.
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Chapter 6: What is accommodation and how does it affect focus and eye health?
but a lot of the work quote unquote is neural work of the muscles having to move and contract such that the lens actually gets thicker in order to bring the light to the retina and not to a location in front of it or behind it, so-called accommodation. Now you might say, why are you telling me about accommodation?
These days, we're spending a lot of time looking at things, mainly our phones up close and computers up close, and we are indoors. In other words, you are not giving your lens the opportunity to flatten out and for these muscles to relieve themselves of this work, but you are also training your eyes to be good at looking at things up close and not far away.
And as a consequence, you are reshaping the neural circuitry in your brain, and it is not good. You want to get outside, not just to lighten the load on your mind or to think about other things, but to maintain the health of your visual system. In other words, you want to exercise these muscles, and that involves both the lens moving and getting kind of thicker and relaxing that lens.
And the relaxation of the lens is actually one of the best things you can do for the musculature of the inner eye. So what's the protocol? You might be surprised, but for every 30 minutes of focused work,
you probably want to look up every once in a while and just try and relax your face and eye muscles, including your jaw muscles, because all these things are closely linked in the brainstem and allow your eyes to go into a so-called panoramic vision where you're just not really focusing on anything and then refocus on your work. If you are feeling tired,
it actually can be beneficial to the wakefulness systems of the brain, including the locus coeruleus and these areas that release norepinephrine to actually look up, to actually look up toward the ceiling. You don't want your chin all the way back, but to look up and to raise your eyes toward the ceiling and to look up and try and hold that for 10 to 15 seconds.
It actually triggers some of the areas of the brain that are involved in wakefulness. So if you're somebody who's falling asleep at your work, This can be very beneficial. When things are up, we tend to be alert. When everything's focused down, including our eyes, it tends to have a more suppressive or sedative type signaling to the deeper centers of the brain.
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012, long before I even knew what a podcast was.
I started taking it, and I still take it every single day because it ensures that I meet my quota for daily vitamins and minerals, and it helps make sure that I get enough prebiotics and probiotics to support my gut health.
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Chapter 7: What are practical tools to improve vision and maintain eye health?
You can actually train or improve your vision by looking at smooth pursuit stimuli. And that sounds really boring. Remember the brain follows the eye. It follows the movements of the eye. It has to deal with that. And the neural circuits within the brain have to cope with changes in smooth pursuit.
So if you're doing a lot of reading up close, you're not viewing horizons, you're not getting a lot of smooth pursuit type stimulation from your life. or you're just getting it within the confines of a little box on your phone, your vision will get worse.
The idea is that you want to use the visual system regularly for what it was designed for and smooth pursuit is a great way to keep the visual and motion tracking systems of the brain and the eye and the extraocular muscles working in a really nice coordinate fashion. So what does this mean? The tool is... Spend two to three minutes doing smooth pursuit. There's some programs on YouTube.
You can just look up smooth pursuit stimulus. Practice accommodation for a few minutes, maybe every other day. Just bringing something in close. You'll feel the strain of your eyes. Doing that, move it out. You'll feel a relaxation point. Move it past that relaxation point where you will have to do what's called a vergence eye movement to maintain focus on that location as it moves out.
Bring it back in. Practice that, practice accommodation, and then be sure to give your eyes some rest. get outside, look at a horizon or do nothing. Just kind of let your eyes go soft. I guess what the yogis would call soft gaze. Practice a little bit of smooth pursuit.
You don't have to be neurotic about this, but if you do this often enough, meaning every other day, every third day or so, you can be the strange person on the plane or in the classroom doing this, that people might chuckle or look at you funny or tease you, but that's okay because you'll be able to see when they are losing their vision. so you'll get the last laugh.
Let's talk about binocular vision and lazy eye. The young brain up until about age seven, but maybe even extending out until about age 12 is extremely vulnerable to differences in ocular input between the two eyes. My scientific great-grandparents won the Nobel Prize for discovering so-called critical periods, periods of time in which the brain is more plastic, more able to change.
Those two guys, David Huebel and Torsten Wiesel, thank you, David and Torsten, forever changed the face of visual neuroscience and forever changed the way we think about of the young brain. It used to be thought that you wouldn't want to do a surgery on a young kid because of risk of anesthesia in young individuals.
But we now know that you need to repair these imbalances that even a few hours of occluding one eye early in life can lead to permanent unless something's done. Permanent changes in the way that the brain perceives the outside world such that when that eye is opened up again, the brain actually can't make sense of anything that's coming through it. It shuts down that visual pathway somehow.
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Chapter 8: Which vitamins and supplements support long-term eye health?
This is probably why when people go into these cave retreats, something I've never done, I don't think I ever will do, where it's completely black, pretty soon they start hallucinating. They start seeing things even though there's nothing there. The visual system is desperate to make guesses about what's out in the world. It's like the eager beaver of your brain. It's like, what's out there?
What's out there? What's out there? So it turns out that hallucinations are an under activation of the visual system and then a compensatory, a compensation by which the visual system creates activity and hallucinations. So if you're in the dark long enough, you start to hallucinate and see things. So that's a little note about hallucinations.
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality. I've been wearing Roka readers and sunglasses for years now, and I absolutely love them. They're lightweight, they have superb optics, and they have lots of frames to choose from. Roka and I recently teamed up to create a new pair of red lens glasses.
These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down. They filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights, which are the most common indoor lighting nowadays. I want to emphasize Roka red lens glasses are not traditional blue blockers. They do filter out blue light, but they filter out a lot more than just blue light.
In fact, they filter out the full range of short wavelength light that suppresses the hormone melatonin. By the way, you want melatonin high in the evening and at night. It makes it easy to fall and stay asleep. And those short wavelengths trigger increases in cortisol.
Increases in cortisol are great in the early part of the day, but you do not want increases in cortisol in the evening and at night. These Roka Red Lens glasses ensure normal, healthy increases in melatonin and that your cortisol levels stay low, which is, again, what you want in the evening and at night.
In doing so, these Roka Red Lens glasses really help you calm down and improve your transition to sleep. Roka Red Lens glasses also look great. They have a ton of different frames to select from, and you can wear them out to dinner or concerts, and you can still see things.
I don't recommend you wear them while driving just for safety purposes, but if you're out to dinner, you're at a concert, you're at a friend's house, or you're just at home, pop those Roka Red Lens glasses on, and you'll really notice the difference in terms of your levels of calm and all the sleep stuff I mentioned earlier. If you'd like to try Roka, go to Roka.com.
That's R-O-K-A.com and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's Roka.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. One of the things that you can do to improve your vision, and it's also kind of fun, is to put a Snellen chart in your home. A Snellen chart is that list of letters.
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