Applied Neurology, Concussion Recovery, and the Power of Vision Training with Mike Ochsner

Mike Ochsner joins Denise Allen to share how repeated concussions led him into applied neurology—and why simple vision and balance drills can create big shifts in recovery and performance. They discuss why so many people are told “this is as good as it gets,” how the brainstem and vestibular system affect reading, driving, pain, and coordination, and a few listener-friendly drills you can safely experiment with to explore what your brain can do.

Resources mentioned:
Peak Brain Reboot (free experiential workshop): https://peakbrainreboot.com

Book – Unleash ADHD As Your Six Million Dollar Superpower: https://adhdadvantage.com

Also available on Amazon.

Click the link above to message me directly. It comes to me as FAN MAIL! How great is that? Just click on the place that says, "If you liked this episode CLICK HERE:"

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I'm your host, Denise Allen. Today I have joining me, Mike Ochsner. He experienced multiple traumatic brain injuries and went on a deep dive into applied neurology to understand and heal his own symptoms. And so, through lived experience and extensive self-directed training, he's developed a perspective on brain recovery that I think will really resonate with this audience today. So, I'm really excited to have you here to share your story with me, Mike.

Mike: Well, thank you, Denise. It's great to be on the show and I'm looking forward to having this opportunity to talk with you and talk with your audience.

Denise: Great. Can we just jump right in then and have you share your concussion TBI story and how those symptoms manifested, what caused the injury and then how you came to the solution that you did?

Mike: Absolutely. So basically, I've always been very active and racked up at least 15 concussions where I lost time and several more where I didn't lose time, but definitely had my bell rung, saw stars, had pupil impact from the head impact. And the consequences of those concussions started catching up with me. And I had vertigo almost every night. I had random pains, I had attention and focus issues, sleep issues, all sorts of things going on that were not good at all. And I ended up, I was down in Phoenix and met with a, with an applied neurology trainer. And it was basically by chance and he said, do you want to try some things? And I said, sure. And for the prior six months, I hadn't been able to do a single pushup without pain because of pain in my shoulder. And with about 20 minutes of vision and balance drills, I was able to do 20 push-ups without pain. And it didn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I didn't understand how vision drills could make my shoulder feel better and.

Denise: Doesn't seem connected at all, does it?

Mike: No, it, it doesn't. It's, it's very obvious now after the fact, but at the time and for most people there's no connection whatsoever. So, I was down there for some training, and I performed very well that weekend. And as time went on after I got home, my performance tapered back off and I did the drills and it shot back up and I didn't do the drills, and it tapered off. And finally, I realized that I need to keep doing this training, this neurology and vision training. And then I started using the training with other people who hadn't come to me because of concussions and saw tremendous jumps in sports performance from doing Basic vision and balance drills. And so that started a multi-year journey where I did live neurology training, sometimes over 150 hours a year of neurology training with Wharton, with Next Level Neuro, with Z Health, Sports, Vision Pros and other applied neurology organizations. And now more than a decade later, I've helped thousands of people with vision training, written three best-selling books that incorporate vision training into other applications, Tactical applications and ADHD, and have spoken at neurology conferences and work with neuro optometrists and several professionals in the neurology and vision training world. And it has been an, an incredible ride and I've had a lot of, a lot of fun helping people in doing it.

Denise: Nice. So, it sounds like it wasn't something that you recognized initially that you could even help. You were just suffering the consequences of the TBIs for that initial timeframe.

Mike: I didn't have any idea there was a connection.

Denise: Okay, so what were you told the reason the vertigo would be?

Mike: I. There were no answers.

Denise: So, you'd gone to doctors and they were giving you no answers? Is that what you're thinking? Okay, I think that's a common occurrence, would you say?

Mike: It's very common. It's been the recurring theme that I've seen with hundreds of people is that either nobody knew what was going on or people said that they were as good as they were going to get.

Denise: I, I've heard that a lot too. I think that happens when your symptoms don't exist as well. And for me, I thought everyone saw the way I did. I mean, I had no frame of reference that you could see differently. Right. And so I went to the doctor every year and they always told me I was fine. And there was nothing super fine about not being able to see in 3D, you know. But your symptoms were definitely life altering.

Mike: Yes. I'm very fortunate that it wasn't worse than it was. For example, with driving, when I would look at the road and then look at the radio, it would take about two seconds for my vision to stabilize and the images from my eyes to fuse together. And then it would take another two seconds to shift focus back to the road and for of binocular vision to work again. And so that's four seconds going 50, 60, 70 miles an hour where I couldn't see very well. And once I got eye alignment figured out and eye coordination and over travel and under travel, now I can shift focus back and forth multiple times a second. And the increase in safety is just exponential.

Denise: Yeah, you know Recently I told someone that 5% of people don't see in 3D and they said, oh well, then they can't drive right? And I said, oh no, they drive right. And this person said, now I'm really scared to be out on the road.

Mike: Well, there's people who can't see in 3D and then there's people who have perceptual distortions in distance and direction and don't realize it because it's either inconsistent or sometimes they're on, sometimes they're off, or it's not extreme enough that it's ever been pointed out to them when they've gone to get eye tests for glasses.

Denise: Right? Yeah. It's not something that's pointed out to people at all. I think that's part of the problem.

Mike: No.

Denise: So, you said you were at a training when you came across this person who showed you applied neurology techniques. Can you describe a little bit about how that came to be?

Mike: Yeah, it was very fortuitous. It was a, basically a connection through business where common friend knew what I was doing and knew what they were doing and thought that we should be doing work together. And it didn't have anything to do with my concussions. It had everything to do with business.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: And so it was, it was purely by chance.

Denise: So, did have you changed what you do business-wise since you came into contact with applied neurology?

Mike: My focus shifted considerably. I had done a lot using accelerated learning techniques before, and neurology was a perfect fit with accelerated learning and was able to help people get tremendous gains in, in performance with vision and balance training.

Denise: So, who do you usually work with in your business?

Mike: For most of the last 10 years, I worked in the, the tactical world, so duty, military and self-defense. And then I work with entrepreneurs, with students, with elite athletes, basically anyone who wants to get better performance in the same or less time, with the same or less effort.

Denise: Okay, and so that was kind of what you were doing before, but your focus shifted to a neurological process for getting the results, Is, that what you're telling me?

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: So, with, with military training, I worked with them on tactical skills, but because of the fact that I was using neurology drills, it was helping them with the other 99% of their lives. And so, it quickly became something that wasn't just tactical, it was for everything, every aspect of their life, because of the fact that vision is so darn important every waking hour and even when we're asleep.

Denise: Right? Yeah, well, and when you say tactical professionals do you want to just define that for listeners who might not know what you mean by that?

Mike: Yeah. It is firearms training helping snipers and long-range precision shooters be dramatically, like 2, 300% more accurate in minutes. And that kind of change would normally take days or weeks to get. And by simply improving the brain that's running the show, we're able to get much, much quicker gains in performance. And so, yeah, it was a lot of military skills and law enforcement skills of various kinds.

Denise: Okay, and is that the audience that you typically serve now too?

Mike: It has shifted just because of the fact that the vision and balance training and other neurological drills have such an impact on every area of life. A relatively typical scenario was somebody would come to me for tactical training and end up using the training that I taught them with their spouses and their family for other things that they were dealing with and that were completely non tactical.

Denise: Yeah. Can you give us like an example of what that would look like? What. What does the training look like and how is it applied to regular life?

Mike: Absolutely. So, one example was a gentleman who came to me and had gone through my instructor training. Parts of it are how to improve balance for being able to shoot on the move and how to be able to improve eye dominance and stabilize eye dominance, how to correctly assess it, how to stabilize the ego center to the dominant eye so that sighting and aiming is much more instinctive and faster and more accurate. And his wife had a stroke, and she had gotten to the end of her therapy, and she was told she was never going to walk again. And he finally said, you know what? I'm going to start using Mike's drills with you. And the long story short, two years ago, she threw out her walker in her wheelchair because she's walking again. And it was. after she'd gone through all of the traditional training, the. And therapy that she got after her stroke. And they were in a. Or they are in a, I would say, one of the best cities in the country to be in if you have a stroke, for stroke recovery. And they were part of the best medical system in that city, and they still ran into those roadblocks.

Denise: Yeah.

Mike: Another example was a gentleman who. It was after a firearms training class, and he walked up to me in the parking lot afterwards and he told me that he had been medically retired from the army seven years prior from TBIs. Well, he couldn't read. He couldn't read since the TBIs. And what he would do is he would go on YouTube and he would find videos of people reading children's books, and he would go and he'd buy that book and then he would watch the YouTube video over and over and over and memorize the timing of the page turning and memorize the book because he couldn't read it, but he wanted to be able to fake read to his daughter at night. And so again, seven years of working with army medical and with the VA and in a few minutes in the parking lot, we got him reading again. And it wasn't a me thing. It was just the fact that I knew, I could see very quickly which parts of his brain were underperforming and knew the tools to get them back online. It was like having the owner's manual for a car and being able to very, very quickly fix a problem versus not having the owner's manual and just having to guess.

Denise: That's crazy. So why do we never talk about neurology? I haven't even heard people talking about the kinds of exercises that you're describing.

Mike: A lot of it is just the speed that information gets disseminated. So, if we look at neurology programs in the US The I believe the fastest program, the program that accredits or re accredits the most often, is still Stanford. And they only re accredit every six years. And if you look at the lag between when frontline neurology practitioners are making breakthroughs with athletes and other people, and when they end up getting enough traction that they do a study and then a study that people respect and then that gets used by universities and taught and then into the common vernacular, it's 17 to 20 years.

Denise: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's way too slow.

Mike: Yeah. And especially with neurology, the number of studies and research papers that we have access to is absolutely incredible. But it can also be limiting because a. Let's say a study is done and there's 100 people in the study and 90 of them saw no improvement, but 10 of them saw a 300% improvement. Well, what that means is they didn't adequately figure out which factors need to be in place for whatever treatment they use to work. So, for those 10 people, it's an incredible protocol or treatment. For the other 90, it's not. But if a study has a 10% success rate, it gets dismissed.

Denise: Right. And have you been able to determine what your success rate is?

Mike: It all depends on what's going on. The short answer is no, that's not something that. Number one, you'd have to define success in a uniform way. And I'm dealing with so many different people with so many different things going on that it's just not possible. What I can tell you is there was, there's one protocol that I used with over a thousand shooters and what we saw was a, an average of a 28% increase in speed and accuracy in between five and 10 minutes. And that represented an improvement that's 288 times greater than what's possible with traditional training. So basically what it was doing was it was giving people the equivalent of two to three days of live training or the improvement that you get from it in five to 10 minutes by working with balance, with vision, with stabilizing eye dominance, with getting the eyes in alignment and tracking the way that they're designed to track, getting the eyes and the ears both in agreement on which direction was straight ahead and then getting body awareness in alignment with vision and balance on which direction is straight ahead.

Denise: So, it sounds like you've developed some tools for assessing where people are really quickly.

Mike: Yeah, I had to do stuff very differently because when I am working with people in an athletic context or in a tactical training context, I'm not in a clinic, I'm not in an office, I'm with them on the field. And I basically have to be able to create change in minutes with what I have in my brain in my pockets and normally while everybody else in the class is watching.

Denise: So, no pressure.

Mike: No. At first there was, now there's not.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: It's the, the biggest key that I've found is the better I can assess what's going on before I start doing drills with somebody. The more successful the drills are, if I just start throwing stuff on the wall, then it's not very successful. But if I can see which specific parts of the brain are underperforming by their gait or, or by other things that they're doing, then it's much easier to be precise with, with the drills that I have them do.

Denise: Yeah. That's amazing. So, you mentioned that you do work with neuro optometrists. Can you describe a little bit about what that looks like?

Mike: Yeah, it's mainly referring people back and forth. So, when there is somebody who is, who needs a medical intervention, I refer them to the neuro optometrist. And when there are sport or application specific things going on or they are trying to improve sport specific performance, they get referred to me a lot of times.

Denise: Okay, so you have some doctors in your area that you work with that way or are they all over the

Mike: Place all over the country.

Denise: Okay, that's awesome. So, when you create these tools that you're using, what's the application like for the layperson? The tools are not necessarily what's being used in the doctor's office. If you're just referring back and forth. Right. They're. They're tools that you use when you're teaching people.

Mike: Well, both. Okay. Clinics use both my training and training aids. Well, let's take the Brock string, for example. 100-year-old, incredibly effective tool. But one of the challenges with the Brock string is that it gets tangled up if you put it in your pocket or a purse or a bag or anything else. Absolutely wonderful if you can hang it on a wall, but it's not real portable. And so, one of the tools I created is a retractable Brock string, which people started calling the ox string. 

Denise: Because your nickname is ox, right?

Mike: Correct. Yes. Yeah. So, it's retractable, so it doesn't get knotted up so you can use it immediately instead of having to take minutes to untangle the Brock string. And that took about 50 different iterations of designs, all sorts of different things that some of them work to one degree or another, but this was by far the best design. And then the second part of it was the actual bead design, which they're typically wood or plaster beads. And I started experimenting with different beads. Again, about. It just happened to be about 50 different kinds. And what I found was a specific bead design that is sparkly and vibrant primary colors. And it works faster, both in indoor lighting and outdoor lighting than any other bead design I was able to figure out or test. And so, what it did was it helped me get results with people quicker instead of them being frustrated with not being able to see the X at the bead. The bead design actually helps with seeing it faster. And then I've got a series of nine remediation drills that when people can't see the X at the bead, to be able to see the X at the bead incredibly quickly, either by reducing suppression by increasing cerebellar activation or other factors going on.

Denise: Okay. Well, you know, the Brock string was my least favorite tool at the beginning. Well, most of the time, it was my least favorite tool because my vision was stuck right about 12 inches out as far as how much fusion I had. And it didn't become possible for me to do the Brock string until after I had surgery and my eyes were aligned. And then I went back to vision therapy. So, are any of those issues addressed in your new design, or is the eye alignment still, like, the critical factor for people?

Mike: So, it really depends on the situation, and that's. That's when we're. A lot of times I'll work with neuro optometrists or refer people to a neuro optometrist. And if we can't get the. The excess or the residual muscle tension calm down around the eyes to where we can get them to align, then what I'll suggest is they work with a neuro optometrist, using stepped prism lenses. And the idea there is that instead of doing 100% of the correction with the prism, you do like, maybe 80 or 90% of the correction and let the brain do the last 10 to 20%.

Denise: Yeah.

Mike: And over time, for a lot of people, the stepped prisms will allow their eyes to realign, but it's not a. It's not. It doesn't work for all eyes.

Denise: Right. Well. And that's the problem that we see with all of vision therapy. Right. It's an individual thing. You know, you've seen one person that has this thing, and you may not see another one whose situation is exactly the same ever.

Mike: Mm. Exactly.

Denise: So, when you say there's ways to get the muscles calmed down, you're talking about some of your neurological exercises that would maybe, in my case, have calmed things down to where I wouldn't have perhaps needed surgery?

Mike: I would seriously guess, based on your background, that that wouldn't have been the case. I. It sounds like you exhausted the possibilities. But for some people doing drills that specifically either turn up or turn down the volume in the ponds of the medulla can change eye alignment and get rid of residual muscle tension or balance the tension around the eyes.

Denise: Okay, so basically the answer is we don't have any answers, but we have tools that we can use. Right?

Mike: Well, it's not that there aren't answers. It's that there's no guaranteed answers that work for everybody.

Denise: That's what I meant. We can't say, oh, this will work for you when nothing else worked. But we have options that we can try, which I think is kind of always the case.

Mike: That's one of the big challenges of vision training and has been in the past is the. Especially in books, saying that this technique will work for everybody. And the reality is it won't.

Denise: Right.

Mike: And that's just something you figure out when you start working with a lot of people is how incredibly unique different brains are.

Denise: It's so true. And I get really frustrated when people say, I tried vision therapy and it didn't work for me. Because. Just because you try it for a few sessions doesn't mean that you've really exhausted the possibilities in any measure.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I've got, oh, 30 vision training books on my shelf that I'm looking at right now going back to Quackenbush's collection of Bates's articles that's 2 inches thick. And if you go through modern vision training books, the number of contradictions between them is ridiculous. It's the rule rather than the exception.

Denise: Yeah.

Mike: And a lot of them, they're just not neurologically sound. And so, yes, a lot of people have used vision training or vision therapy, but it may not have been quality vision therapy or vision training. There's a lot of very good practitioners out there, but there's stuff that is called vision training and vision therapy that it's just not real solid.

Denise: Yeah. And I think sometimes people get results with some technique and. And they maybe don't explore other techniques when that doesn't work on the next person.

Mike: Mm.

Denise: I think the point that this whole conversation makes, though, is that you have to learn what works for you or

Mike: work with somebody who can diagnose.

Denise: Sure. Yeah. And so, what can you describe a little bit how you diagnose that person out in real life on the field that quickly?

Mike: Yeah, there's a few things that I used. One is gait, because that gives me insight into what the brain stem's doing. The same brainstem that is controlling gait is also in control of moving the eyes and coordinating the eyes. And so sometimes that'll give me insight. Doing horizontal smooth pursuit tests and see if it's smooth or jerky. Doing horizontal saccades and seeing if there's over travel or under travel. Same thing with vertical. Doing eye circles and seeing if there are arcs of movement of the eye that cause the face to twitch or stress tells to show up. And then there are performance assessments. With basketball, it's just shooting a free throw. With golf, it's just putting. With shooting, it can be using a laser pistol and doing eyes closed aiming and seeing where the pistol comes up in relation to their eye and the target when their eyes are closed. And that tells us how integrated the senses are.

Denise: That's very interesting. Okay. And as you were describing that, I'm thinking, okay, so the neuro optometrist or developmental optometrist does a lot of those kinds of assessments in their office. I Don't know if they do watch the person's gait as much, but the, they're definitely doing those eye assessments. Right. It feels different when you're describing doing it out in real life rather than in an office.

Mike: Well, it is different. So, people can test very, very differently in a sterile stance and a sterile context than in a sports-specific context.

Denise: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Mike: Because with, with sports-specific, you've got the additional balance challenge and because of the fact that the vestibulo-ocular reflex is the fastest reflex in the body and it's the integration of the eyes and the inner ear or motor control of the eyes and the inner ear. When we add a balance challenge, if it causes vision to go wonky, I, it, it tells us something. It, it points us to where we need to go in order to make an improvement.

Denise: Right, yeah. And I, and I think in some vision therapy offices, they are adding balance challenges.

Mike: Yes, absolutely.

Denise: And they're doing some of the walking, you know, gait assessment types of things too. I haven't been in a bunch of different offices. I've just only been in my doctor's office. But I'm assuming does happen in, you know, many of the others as well. There's so much to unpack with this, though, you know, and how all of this can help people as they understand more what neurology is controlling really, you know, and how we, if we address it, not just, you know, make the eyes do exercises, but we are addressing all these other things that it can really make a difference in a recovery or, you know, changing a strabismus situation?

Mike: Yes, absolutely.

Denise: So, do you think that we can clear up some of the misconceptions that people have around concussion recovery and visual rehabilitation, or have we done that already?

Mike: Oh, well, yeah. There's a couple of things more that I think are super important to talk about. Okay. One of them is kind of what happens when a concussion happens. The. We've got two things that happen at the same time which are kind of cruel. One is the metabolic demands of the brain go up, and at the same time, its ability to use glucose as fuel goes down. And so one of the things that we've seen in the last few years is a way to bridge that gap with exogenous ketones and seen really, really big impacts in that, myself and from others who have had multiple concussions or have had recent concussions as a way to get supplemental fuel to the brain so that it can Continue functioning at a high level.

Denise: Is that helping the brain to heal as well, to add that in?

Mike: Well, it's the core energy. So gives mitochondria the fuel that they need to do everything to prune memories, to consolidate memories, to clear out waste, for the glymphatic system to work properly at night and for tissue repair to happen. All of that requires energy. And the more effective our brain is at producing and using and getting rid of the waste from energy, the more it can do.

Denise: So, we're talking about a supplement that someone would take, right?

Mike: Yes. Drink. So exogenous ketone salts or exogenous ketone esters. And the salts are typically faster and the esters typically last longer.

Denise: And where would people typically find these kinds of supplements?

Mike: Amazon is the easiest place.

Denise: Okay, that's pretty easy.

Mike: But once the concussion happens, once a part of the brain starts underperforming, it can be a challenge to get it fully activated again. And it's relatively common for people to go with underperforming parts of their brain from head injuries for months or years or even decades. And it's just a matter of reactivating them and getting them working again to get function back that people may have lost after the concussion. Another example of this was a. A guy who came to me. He was. He's a U.S. army Green Beret, Special Forces, and he's a. An instructor. And he came to me to learn how to be a better instructor. And 18 years prior, he'd had two TBIs on a deployment and he hadn't been able to read sense. He could read a little bit, but not. Couldn't read a book because it would just get too frustrating too fast because of eye alignment issues and smooth pursuit movement and the saccade movement. And everything was. Was a little bit off, just enough that when he added them all together, reading was not enjoyable at all. So, the drills that I taught him to help his students addressed brainstem function and eye motor control. And because of doing the drills that I taught him to use with his students to help them shoot better, he was able to read again. And my book was the first book that he'd been able to read from COVID to cover in 18 years because of doing a few minutes of drills and crazy. And one of the reasons why I point out his story is because as part of U.S. army Special Forces, he has access to top-of-the-line concussion rehab facilities and resources. And he still went 18 years without fully fixing the consequences of his TBIs.

Denise: Yeah. So can you share with my audience one or two of these drills that they could experiment safely with on their own.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. It's a little bit of a challenge without video, but I've gotten fairly adept at doing it on audio.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: One of them, simple one that everyone knows is eye circles.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: So, what I imagine is a hula hoop in front of your face where you're looking straight at the opening of the hula hoop and you take your thumb out in front of you and you trace the hula hoop with your thumb.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: As you go around in a circle. And the reason I do that and not bigger than that is because a lot of people's eyes aren't used to going through their full range of motion. They're kind of in a visual prison from too much screen time or glasses that have only a very small area that doesn't have distortion. So, getting the eyes moving through their whole range of motion and getting the muscles around the eyes used to both relaxing and contracting is very helpful. Then after that, one of the super important drills for getting the visual and vestibular system to work together is to hold your thumb out in front of you and stare at or fixate on a feature on your thumbnail. And while you're fixating on that feature on your thumbnail, imagine that your head is in the middle of a clock and nod your head towards 12 and back to the center while fixating on your thumb. And then nod your head towards two and back to the center while fixating on your thumb. Then 4 and back to the center, 6 and back to the center 8 and back to the center and 10 and back to the center. And moving the head while keeping the eyes fixated on something is a great way to both assess and improve the vestibulo ocular reflex and the inner ear’s ability to keep the eyes fixated on something while the head is moving.

Denise: Okay.

Mike: And that one of the biggest applications for that, one of the biggest non tactical applications of that, is anytime that somebody drives or flies, when they're not in control and they're moving at more than 20 miles an hour, a little bit of sensory mismatch happens in the brain because the brain is getting different signals and it doesn't really know which one to trust. And so, there's conflict. If you think about if you were running at 20 miles an hour, you would feel wind hitting your body. Your body would be tilted forward because you're moving and your eyes would be seeing things coming at you and moving. Well, when we're in an airplane, we don't get those inputs. But the brain, our vestibular system is still telling the brain that we're moving, and it gets confused. So, in a perfectly healthy brain, our senses would recalibrate instantly at the end of a flight or during a flight. But most brains are not perfectly healthy. And so, it's really common, either during or after a flight, to have a stiff neck or a stiff back because of sensory mismatch or even joint pain. I had a situation a couple of years ago. I was in the Salt Lake airport, and I really wanted food from a specific restaurant between flights, and I didn't have much time. And I was booking it through the airport, and all of a sudden, my knee and my hip hurt so bad that I had to slow down, and I was limping. And I thought for a second, and I was like, okay, I didn't just get hit with a baseball bat. There's not a mechanical reason for this pain. It must be neurological. So, I did that drill that I just had you guys do, and the pain went from about an eight to a four. I did it again, and it went to zero. And I sped back up, and I was able to get my food and get back to my plane.

Denise: Wow.

Mike: And I've had this happen. One of the most dramatic examples was an orthopedic surgeon was in a class, and I did a lunch and learn session on vision training for tactical applications and went through that drill. And at the end of it, he was in the front row, and he was just fuming mad. His head was shaking, his jaw was clenched, his fists were tight. And I was like, oh, shoot. What did I. What did I stay wrong? What is he going to say? I don't know what I'm talking about. What's. What's going on? And so I asked him what. What was up. What was going on? And he said that he. His back had been in pain for six years and he was scheduled for surgery, and he postponed the surgery so that he could come to this training. And at the end of lunch, he was going to tell me that he couldn't continue because of back pain. And the stupid drills that I had him do that shouldn't do anything made his back feel better than it had in years.

Denise: And he was mad.

Mike: Yeah. Because he had been. Well, everybody in his system had been looking at the pain as it must have a mechanical source. So, we're going to treat it mechanically rather than maybe it's a threat response from the brain, and the brain is creating that pain to get you to stop moving.

Denise: Right. You know, it's so interesting because so often the doctors will say, oh, this is all in your head, you know, and they're actually right, but they don't help you address the problem with something.

Mike: I love problems.

Denise: I know.

Mike: I love problems that are all in my head or that are all in my clients heads. Because in a lot of cases there's a direct path to a solution.

Denise: I love the solutions too. You know, I watched part of one of your trainings and you had one where we were pulling on our ears.

Mike: Yes.

Denise: And I've been doing that a little bit since then. And so can you just tell me a little bit more about what that does? Because it seems like this really weird thing to just sit here and pull on my ears. But I'm like, I know this is doing something because I feel better, but I want to describe it so that people know what I'm talking about, you know?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. This, this works with about 60% of people. And I use this drill in every class that I teach, whether it's hundreds of people in an auditorium or one person to 10 people in a class or in a session. And what you do is you start out by turning your head right and left a few times to just kind of see what your range of motion is that's comfortable and kind of assess the speed, how safe it feels, whether you're afraid of moving your neck because of potential stingers. And if there is a gravel sensation as you turn your neck. And then the next part is tugging on the ears. So, you lightly, you grab the top of the ears and lightly tug up and forward about 10 times and then straight up 10 times, and then up and back 10 times, down and back 10 times and then straight down 10 times. And then you test your neck range of motion again. And for about 60% of people, they'll see an increase in range of motion, an increase in speed, smoothness, safety. And the most bizarre one is when the crunchies go away, because that should not happen. If the crunchies are happening because there's debris, for lack of a better term, between the joints, then tugging on the ears isn't going to do anything. But if some of that crunchy sensation is being created in the brain as a mechanism to get you to stop turning your neck, then it makes sense that addressing the issue in the brain would get rid of that sensation and what's happening there. The reason that that works is if you think about a dog, a dog laying asleep and noise happens off to the side they go and they look up and their ears pop up, and their face and their eyes square up to the threat or the whatever the noise was. And that's being controlled by something called the tectospinal tract. And while we can't move our ears as much as dogs can, by tugging on the ears, we can send sensory input to the tectospinal tract, to the midbrain, and specifically the superior colliculus. And when we send sensory input to does a couple of things, it activates it and it says, hey, send us a little bit more oxygen and glucose. And when it's working at full speed, it allows us to move our neck through a greater range of motion. The other thing that happens with tugging on the ears is it stimulates the vagus nerve, which calms the sympathetic nervous system and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And that can reduce muscle tension. Excess residual muscle tension in the neck and that combination of the 2, for about 60% of people, will increase neck range of motion. Now, the other 40%, it's not a failure. Doing this drill won't loosen your neck up enough that you can turn it at 360 degrees.  Your necks only got a certain range of motion. And if you're already at that range of motion, then doing the drill isn't going to help any. And really, in an ideal situation, the drill wouldn't help at all because you'd already have your full range of motion. The other case is when there's an actual mechanical physical insult and the brain is protecting you, tugging on your ears is not going to turn off those protective mechanisms if there's an actual threat. But one of the things that happens is, especially with head injuries and whiplash and even illnesses, is that reduced range of motion becomes a habit. And once it gets habituated, the brain gets comfortable with it, and it takes effort to break it out. And by tugging on the ears, stimulating the tectospinal tract, stimulating the vagus nerve, we calm things down enough and activate the parts of the brain that we need to in order to move the neck, that we can move it again. And a lot of times with people who have had whiplash or concussions 5, 10, 15 years down the road, I'll see a 20 to 30 degree increase in range of motion in 30 to 60 seconds from doing this drill.

Denise: Yeah, I experienced that. And that's why I thought, well, this is something that is super easy to describe, and it has immediate results. And you can see that the Neurology is not lying. Right, Right.

Mike: Yeah. It's the. The challenge has been for. For decades. There's, there's a lot of things that people have used for. For decades or hundreds or thousands of years that kind of knew that they worked sometimes. But because we didn't understand the neurology, it was hard to know why it worked sometimes and not others. And one of the awesome things that's happened in the last 10 to 15 years is the explosion in neurology research papers that are available online, and the sharing of information and our ability to explain things and understand things that we kind of knew worked before but didn't know why.

Denise: Okay. Yeah.

Mike: And that allows us to. It doesn't make the technique more effective, but it allows us to be much more precise in the application of it and when we use it.

Denise: Yeah. So, you were watching me as I was doing these drills that you're describing, right?

Mike: Yes.

Denise: Can you do a little mini assessment on me?

Mike: Oh, you know, I, I wasn't paying attention to the degrees I saw you doing the drill, but I was. But that does bring up something really interesting, is that I'd say 10 to 20% of the time, people will do the drill and have a fairly large increase in range of motion, and they'll have no self-awareness of it. They'll move and they'll get to the end of the range of motion and they're like, yeah, I still have an end of my range of motion. It didn't change anything. When in reality, if you objectively test where their nose was pointed and where their shoulders were aligned, you can, you can see measurable change.

Denise: Yeah. Well, and I was, I was curious about the others when I was doing the circles too, because I think that I have a spot on my left side because this is my weaker eye, where there's kind of a little bit of a break, you know, like, I don't. It's not super smooth as I'm doing those particular exercises, and I can see the value in doing that more.

Mike: One of the really interesting things with eye circles is that if there is an arc like that where you're having a challenge, one of the first things I'll have people do is work the opposite arc. So if the challenge is high and to the left, I'll have them work low and to the right.

Denise: Okay. You know, that makes a lot of sense too, because I've been doing somatic yoga and that's kind of what we're doing. Cross body movement, opposites. That same thought process applies. Yeah, that Is. That's fascinating. What would you want people to understand based on our conversation today?

Mike: Yeah, the. The big thing is a lot of people think that there's limits that are based on either things that have happened to them or their age. That in reality we have a lot more control over than we think. And for me, understanding and using applied Neurology backed 10 years off of the clock and it was life changing. And for a lot of people that I've worked with, it's been similar where they had shocked changes up to aging or because of an illness or injury that they experienced, not realizing that there were actually things that they could do and ways that they could have more control just by going further upstream and working in the brain.

Denise: Yeah. I'm just curious based on that because I totally feel that. I mean, I didn't gain 3D vision until I was 54 and, you know, nobody expected that to happen. And I've talked to people who've had results even later in life for people who have these kinds of challenges and have been told there's nothing they can do. What I hear you saying is that there's not an age limit to getting results and there's not a problem that doesn't have a way to find an answer. Is that accurate

Mike: with qualifications? Yes. Well, let's just say somebody is 90 years old versus 20 years old. Their theoretical 100% is going to be different. But most people are not anywhere close to the potential of what their brain can do. And it's not because they aren't working hard enough. It's because there are basically parking brakes being applied in various parts of the brain and there's drag on the system. And things that shouldn't take a ton of energy are taking a lot of energy because there's conflict in the brain and just like I said, underperforming parts. If we can release those parking brakes and get things working efficiently, then all of a sudden, a lot of things change.

Denise: Yeah. What I love about this is that the ways that you get the shift are quick and simple. And they build and they don't take.

Mike: They compound over time.

Denise: Right. And they don't take a lot of fancy equipment. Right.

Mike: Yeah. That was a necessity for a lot of the things that I do. And it really drove me to look at how things had been done in the past and see if there was another way to do it.

Denise: Yeah. It's so interesting. Well, I hope that we've given people enough meat to kind of understand where we're going with all of this. And that it will perhaps spark thought processes that hadn't been in place before, that we can actually do something different than what we've been doing. And applying those neurological principles could really be a helpful thing for people.

Mike: Yes. So, if people are interested in seeing more of this, I've got a video presentation@peakbrainreboot.com that people can watch for free. And it's an experiential follow along presentation or workshop. And so, people will get to experience change in real time doing drills and then learn why they worked and learn how their brain works. And then I've got a book, “Unleash ADHD As Your Six Million Dollar Superpower.” If attention and focus happen to be an issue for anyone or their family and it's at ADHDAdvantage.com.

Denise: Okay, great. And I will put those in the show notes also for people to  find those. You've got a lot more stuff on your website as well. So, I'm thinking that if they want to continue this discovery, that's something that  you'll be very happy to continue with them.

Mike: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I've got over 50 different courses and products, and those two entry points are really the best ones. to see how things work. To get a taste free in the case of Peak Brain Reboot and very affordable and low cost in the case of the book.

Denise: Right. Yeah. I found the book pretty easily. I think it was on Amazon. Does that sound right?

Mike: Yeah, it's on Amazon and It's also on ADHDAdvantage.com right?

Denise: On your website.

Mike: Yes.

Denise: Great. Awesome. Do you want to add anything else before we stop?

Mike: We have covered a lot and I thank you so much, Denise. I think this will really help people.

Denise: I do too. Yeah. Thank you for taking the time to share all this with us today.

 Thanks for listening to the Healing Our Sight podcast today. I'd love to connect with you. You can leave a comment by clicking the link in the show notes. I love receiving your messages. You're also invited to join the Healing Our Site Facebook group. Let me know what resonated with you and how I can better serve you.