Regenerate the retina? Is that possible? I read a long time ago a paper that talked about using light to do that with rat eyeballs. And my own vision change didn’t happen just because of the brain injury.
Vision is eyeballs + brain.
How do you tease apart what increase in my vision is from the brain and what is retinal regeneration? I guess if all the eye doctors had taken me seriously when over the course of 16 years, I kept on about how I was seeing things with my scarred eye I hadn’t before, they may have taken photographs of my retina to see over time if the scarring was diminishing. But they’d also have to have OHIP pay for it and to use machines that don’t rely on my scarred eye being able to maintain focus on its own. With no central vision in that eye, it’s a bit difficult.
Anyway, I’m back to experimenting on myself since I’m fed up with my brain continually trying to shut down the visual feed from my scarred eye. I didn’t go through all this relearn how to see and walk shit for my brain to return me to blurred monocular vision, thank you very much.
I don’t have a lot of stamina or patience with relearning eye physiology. So I read the minimum possible to refresh what I’d learned at university. I probably have some of it wrong because when I say minimum, I mean minimal. But since the only person who’ll benefit from this is me, who cares, right? It’s not like any researcher is going to come strolling along and decide to construct an experiment based on what I’ve learned and write on!
I think I understand why the light levels in my scarred eye went from dark to the same as in my good eye. Rods are on/off. And the bipolar cells they connect to are also on/off. When light enters the eye, it goes from the ganglion to the bipolar to the rods and comes. Rods respond to light levels ie night vision. But what if they don’t respond? Then light wouldn’t be detected and the brain would “see” darkness, correct? Since some of my outer retina where the rods live remains intact, then those rods would turn switch to tell the bipolar cells there’s light here and those cells would activate the frequency wave in the ganglion that then travels the message along the optic nerve to the visual cortex in the brain.
So if light levels went up over the years, then that seems to imply the rods were responding to light and telling the bipolar cells there’s light here. We know the brain can regenerate, albeit slowly; the rods probably did so just as slowly, thus why it took years.
As for the cones: they do colours and details. They give vision its amazingness. I was thinking how cones come in red, green, and blue. I always get mixed up with how colour work. Do red cones absorb the red wavelengths of light and reflect all the other colours or is it the other way around? I decided to forget about straining my brain to remember that and focus on the colours.
To regenerate the retina, all three cone types need to be restored or rebuilt or turned back on like with the rods. Maybe the most direct route to that is to use red lights to stimulate red cones; green light for green cones; and blue light for blue ones. Since I’m pretty sure audiovisual entrainment (AVE) with its light stimulation of the brain through the eyeballs, is why I began seeing better after the brain injury stopped the brain from shutting down info from my scarred eye, I figured I can use the multi-colour eye set to stimulate specific cones.
I began with green quite awhile ago, not for my retina but for pain reduction. So I was already stimulating my green cones. The thing is, was it really? I mean sub-delta is not an entraining protocol. And I don’t know what frequency the ganglions use to transmit messages down the optic nerve. The edu websites talk about these cells releasing glutamate but not the frequency of the ganglion’s action potential. Maybe they don’t know?? Or maybe they’re so focused on chemicals like psychiatrists are, they give shortshrift to the frequencies. Maybe some random reader can tell me!
At the moment I’m leaving green stimulation to the sub-delta realm, which is part of my hypothalamus fix (see my memoir). Occasionally, I’ve used green for SMR like on Monday July 17th when I began to think about doing this experiment for real. But don’t notice much change in my vision if any.
Red can cause anxiety, but way way way back when, the psychologist who first used AVE on me, used red lights for at least 2 years I’m pretty sure. It’s supposed to increase energy. I decided to switch to red lights for my morning SMR on July 18th. No anxiety increase. Phew! I used to 3 days in a row, and on Thursday, thought I noticed a microlag time from the scarred eye in responding to visual stimulation. Vision clearer but nothing to write home about.
Friday July 21st, I switched to cyan (blue + green) for my morning SMR. I’m sticking to SMR for the most part because it’s a basic frequency you can’t get too much of, as my brain trainer put it. I think it’s safe to use with most colours.
I did not expect how much cyan would work my scarred eye nor how much it would integrate both eyes against the influence of my brain. (BTW, my former eye doctor said my brain would fight my new vision the rest of my life. Oh joy.) My eye aches like it did after the eye surgery from being used to give me vision. The next day, Saturday, I tried SMR/beta with cyan. It was like a normal SMR/beta with white light. Hmmm.
Sunday morning, July 23rd, I switched to high alpha protocol with blue light. Whoa! The sight from my scarred eye was less cobwebby (when looking with the other eye closed). Like with cyan, both eyes created a stronger resistance to the brain shut down and integrated the vision better. I saw clearer with both eyes. I saw more details. And the weirdest effect was blue kept calling my attention every time I watched TV.
This morning I used blue with SMR, and like with red last week, I saw panoramic and long distance vision automatically like I had after my surgery before the brain began its growing assault against my new binocular vision.
Soooo. Lots of questions. It seems SMR and high alpha may be the desired frequencies to use. But how many times for each colour? Should I alternate: red, green, blue? Or do 3 days each in sequence then repeat? How long do I do this for? I know AVE has temporary effects, some lasting hours, others days. And I think over time, the effects become permanent. But how does that work with the retina?
They say the eyeballs are protrusions of the brain. Does that mean I should stimulate it with colours the same way I did my brain? Since I used blue with sub-delta last night, I may switch back to red tomorrow. One thing for sure, these colours are working my eye. It feels like it’s been weightlifting!
This post has been written off the cuff because I’m way too tired to edit it. Regeneration and neurostimulation consumes energy.
