Having the eyes outside the skull orients the organism to the time of day. So they’re part of the central nervous system. Your eyes get extruded from the skull during the first trimester, and then they reconnect to the rest of the brain. During development, the eyes are part of the embryonic forebrain. They are not connected to the brain they are brain. Something that most people don’t appreciate is that the eyes are actually two pieces of brain. Why is the visual field so connected to this brain state? All the neurons from your neck to the top of your pelvis get activated at once and deploy a bunch of transmitters and chemicals that make you feel agitated and want to move. This focal vision activates the sympathetic nervous system. How does this visual mode affect the body? This is a primitive and ancient mechanism by which stress controls the visual field. Your eyeballs rotate just slightly toward your nose, which sets your depth of field and focus on a single location. You see one thing in sharper relief, and everything else becomes blurry. Your visual system goes into the equivalent of portrait mode on a smartphone. The pupils dilate, and there’s a change in the position of the lens in the eye. One of the most powerful changes is with vision. When you see something exciting or stressful-a news headline, a fraudulent credit-card charge-heart rate increases breathing increases. But if the stress response is spontaneous or excessive, it can start to feel pathological. If you need to run and catch your train, you want all the things that go along with stress to go pursue that train. Sometimes that’s well matched to the demands of life. It was designed to be a generic response to mobilize the body. Stress is generally a high level of autonomic arousal.

In between we have lower levels of stress alert and focused, sleepy and asleep. At the very other end of that continuum is a full-blown panic attack: heart racing, pupils dilating, hyperventilating. At one end of this continuum would be somebody in a coma. Stress is one position along the continuum of what we call autonomic arousal. Scientific American spoke with Huberman about how it all works.

This growing understanding of how vision and breathing directly affect the brain-rather than the more nebulous categories of the mind and feelings-can come in handy as we continue to face mounting challenges around the globe, across the U.S. In 2017 Mark Krasnow of Stanford, Jack Feldman of the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues identified a tight link between neurons responsible for controlling breathing and the region of the brain responsible for arousal and panic. And a small but growing body of research makes the case that altering our breathing can alter our brain. In 2018, for example, his laboratory reported its discovery of brain pathways connected with fear and paralysis that respond specifically to visual threats. He has spent the past 20 years unraveling the inner workings of the visual system. Huberman’s assertions are based on both established and emerging science. Both these bodily processes also offer us easy and accessible releases from stress. It is about how our eyes and breathing change in response to the world, as well as the cascades of events that follow. Stress, he says, is not just about the content of what we are reading or the images we are seeing. We are a nation and a world under stress.īut Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who studies the visual system, sees matters a bit differently.

Uncertainty and division continue to dog the aftermath of the presidential election. faced its highest daily COVID-19 case counts yet. We are living through an inarguably challenging time.

Autonomic nervous system lens