Helen Irlen – Your Glass Is Always Full Through Irlen Lenses: #291

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Speaker 1:      Bulletproof Radio, a station of high-performance.

Dave:  Hey everyone, it’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that somewhere close to half of the population has some kind of visual sensitivity. Just like, say several hundred years ago, the idea of putting lenses over your eyes to correct your vision was not well understood or well-known. Today we’re just finding out that putting color over your eyes can have a very profound effect on cognitive function. In fact, today if you’re watching on our YouTube channel, you can go to bulletproofexec.com/youtube to sign up for that by the way, you can see that I’m wearing my cool Endura sunglasses and a hat, and what I’m talking about is a condition called Irlen syndrome or sometimes Scotopic Sensitivity.

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I first learned about this kind of thing because I noticed that fluorescent lights are making me really tired when I went to work for this tech company that did packet filtering, if that means anything to you, if you’re a network engineering kind of guy. The boardroom had this incredible weird fluorescent lights that shine down and I go in there and just drool on myself. It was so bad that I did all these research and I found some strange article. I think it was, in time it was like 2,000 comments from people swearing that they also had this problem and that this weird kind of glasses fixed it. I had my cool orange glasses that you’ve seen, probably if you’re a long-time fan, lots of times, I had those and they profoundly affected how I performed my work. They gave me my brain back.

Today’s guest on the show is none other than Helen Irlen who discovered this thing about 30 years ago, and has spent the last 30 years working on hacking this problem of how some people have a problem with the way they see the world. It’s entirely invisible to you if you have this, until you sit down and you do a little bit of testing. In fact, when I did the testing it knocks me out, just the visual stress. I had no idea how tired sometimes just looking at letters could be for me. I learned to read at 18 months. I don’t have a problem reading, however, apparently it does costs me more than it should and I found a way to turn it down.

With us today is Helen, she’s been on the show before but she’s here at Bulletproof Labs, and for the last two days, Mark Atkinson, who you see on the Q and A of the show and I and my wife, Dr. Lana, have sat here and got trained by Helen. We can now help test people to see if they have this sensitivity. We found one of the children in our local school … One of the mothers in our local school, who have visual stress. They don’t know it. They don’t know why their brain’s turned off some of the time and it turns out it’s related to fluorescent lighting and things like that. The science here is amazing. I learned how to do the screening and I’m here to talk with Helen. Helen, welcome to the labs and welcome to the show.

Helen: Good, it’s great to be here.

Dave:  How is that for an intro? Did I nailed it?

Helen: You did very well. I loved it.

Dave:  This is at the end of two days. I’m sitting under our bright studio lights and you tested my brain and Lana’s brain, pretty heavily today. How is this different from the normal thing? I think most people like, “Oh, vision testing, like that’s looking at one of those vision charts and you know, can you read row five? Q, R, 7, 6, or whatever?” Walk me through what you do that’s different than that?

Helen: Right, and there is a difference between vision and visual processing. What the optometrists or ophthalmologists do is they’re looking at making sure that the visual information is put on the right part of the retina. They’re giving you lenses to do that, but it’s not the eye that has to read or process visual information, it’s actually your brain. That information has to go from your eye to a whole bunch of neuro-networking simply to your brain, and it’s your brain and you see what your brain wants you to see. If somebody thinks about an optical illusion they realize it’s not their eyes that are creating that optical illusion, it’s actually the brain that creates the optical illusion.

What we have found is there are people, and I think it’s because today we’re under fluorescent lighting, we don’t have the option for incandescent lighting, there is this myth that brighter is better so everything is bright. We’re spending a lot of time on computers, iPads, iPhones, tablets, all of which for the population I work with is highly stressful.

Dave:  You started working on, I think kids with learning disabilities.

Helen: I started working with children who had reading problems and learning disabilities. I was a school psychologist and I did all the standard tests we do in terms of school psychology, to try to figure out if they have a problem, what the problem was. A lot of the children, my tests did not show up the problem at all, but when I went into a classroom the teacher would say, “Watch this child. Watch what’s happening, how the child is struggling, how the child can’t perform.” How the parent would say to me, “I have to spend hours doing homework with the child, and that’s the reason that she can even get good grades in school, but the school then doesn’t recognize there’s a problem.”

It led me, I think to think of and to say, “You know what, I don’t think the tests that we’re doing today identifies all the problems that are out there, and that a lot of people are going to grow up and continue to have problems for adulthood and into the rest of their lives. We need to ask new questions in a different way.”

Dave:  A group of people, let’s say, someone listening here, they go to the normal eye doctor, ophthalmologist, and he says, “Can you focus and use the muscles in your eye, to focus to get the lights so you can recognize the letters? If so, you’re good.” What you’re testing is, once the focus on the letters is there, when this signals into the brain does the brain know how to efficiently process that visual information to turn it into something that you can use without causing undue physical stress or other symptoms?

Helen: Yeah, and you got both the efficiency of doing it and the ease of doing it and the comfort of doing it, because the individuals who have, whose brain has to work at processing visual information, it plays itself out in achievement, performance, and physical symptoms.

Dave:  If you focus on learning disabilities, is this something for low functioning people?

Helen: It goes across the board. If you’re working with learning disabilities I’m not saying it’s the only cause of learning disabilities. You may have other contributing factors as well. About 50% of those who have been identified with learning problems, reading problems or dyslexia, this is actually a major issue or the only issue.

I’ll take it in the US today, ADD-ADHD is like the knee-jerk reaction. All teachers say, “Oh, your child’s not attending. Your child’s fidgety. Your child’s daydreaming. The child has to be put on medication.” It’s actually a third of those that is the visual information and the visual stress is causing the problem. They’re not going to get better with the drugs. The drugs may actually have no effect or make them worse.

Dave:  Something interesting happened here at Bulletproof Labs today. We have a symbol of function, people, we have me. I mean I have an Ivy League MBA and I’m a successful entrepreneur. We have my wife, Dr. Lana who has an MBA from, actually a Wharton sister school in Stockholm, as well as an MD, emergency room physician. We have Dr. Mark, an MD, who is the head of Bulletproof Coaching Program and has written books and is a well-known personal growth expert and teaches hundreds of people and use the Bulletproof Coaching Program. By the way a quick plug, we still have a few slots left for the next training and it’s changing people’s lives as trainers and amplifying what they do.

But all three of us, I think the technical term is, “got our asses handed to us” today with visual training, it’s why I’m wearing a baseball hat and my Irlen filters today, because my brain wouldn’t really be here if I wasn’t doing that. But Brock, who you probably see as a cameo every now and then on the show, who’s editing the show, he was pretty much like, “Yeah, I’m totally good. No, no big deal.” He said it with this cool Canadian accent too, it was pretty legit, but here is the deal, we have four people in the room and three of them were completely zombified by this training.

The cool thing is, Mark who is very … he teaches personal awareness and personal development had no idea that this was part of what caused stress in his body. You could just see this dawning awareness like, “How could I not have known?,” and the reason you don’t know why.

Helen: We talked about this, it’s because whatever you’re experiencing becomes your baseline of normal. You just thought, “This is normal for me.” What he did going to school was he developed a lot of compensatory strategies, so that he could continue to do things but he read backwards. He didn’t read everything. He could use his listening skills so he didn’t have to say, “I have a problem.” He was able to manage, to compensate and to get through the system but he was paying a price. He actually had no idea as you said, “This is me. This is what’s normal.” We talked about this baseline issue, nobody really knows if it can be easier or better unless it can get changed so you can make the comparison and see.

Dave:  You won’t know if you have a problem because if it’s always been there you just think everyone else is working harder than you.

Helen: Right.

Dave:  You just got to work a little harder and there’s no way that even the most sane, enlightened person can know that because you’re not going to experience someone else’s effort level. You’ll see the way they present themselves to the world. You might think they’re working hard. They might be, they might not be, but it is one of those things we don’t even have a way of saying that, “In level of 1 to 10, oh, I feel like I’m really putting in a 10.” You’re neighbor’s like, “Well, I’m putting in a 7,” and he got the A and you got the C.

Helen: You don’t know.

Dave:  It’s because he’s smarter than you obviously, right? It’s because you’re dumb, right? It’s because you’re probably going to be a failure in life. This is what happens especially when you’re at school age, right?

Helen: In school you look at the kids who sit down and read quick, fast, and easy and you think, “Hmmm, what’s their trick? What do they do? Are they sitting differently? Do they hold the book differently? What is the trick that they do that I can’t do?” Or you just have no awareness or you blame yourself, “It’s my fault. It’s my problem.”

What’s always interesting to me is people are not aware that they’re paying a price in terms of physical symptoms. Let’s take headaches for example, so many times I’ve heard when I ask the question in the right way and it’s not like, “What’s reading light for you or what it’s like under the fluorescent light?” “What is it like after you’ve been reading for a while or under fluorescent lights for a while?”

You have a child who goes, “Oh, my eyes hurt and then my head hurts and I get a headache.” The parent will just look at the child and say, “But you’ve never told me that,” and the child goes, “But you’ve never asked me.” Plus, the fact, “I didn’t know that I should tell you,” or because a lot of times this problem’s hereditary. If they say to the parent, “I don’t feel good, I feel tired, I feel sleepy,” or, “My head hurts,” or, “I get a headache.” The mom will say, “Well, of course you do. I do too. Doesn’t everybody?” This becomes the norm and you don’t know differently and you don’t know to say, “Hey, this is really a problem for me.”

Dave:  When I was a kid it always hurt to walk because I had really flat feet, got stuck with flat feet as a kid and I had Osgood-Schlatter’s on my knees, which is a thing around calcification of the knees. I just thought I was supposed to hurt. I’m like, “Why do all these masochists want to go for a walk?” I played soccer for 13 years. I used to ride my bike all the time. I ride like 10 plus miles a day. It wasn’t like I was inactive but I just thought I was supposed to hurt. I remember when I got orthopedic, I was maybe like 19 or 20 or something, and I walked across campus, it didn’t hurt. I’m like, “Oh my God.” I told someone that and they’re like, “You mean, it hurt to walk?” I’m like, “Everyone doesn’t?”

Helen: Right.

Dave:  I realized that my perception of everyone else and theirs of me is unrelated but this is what happen with Mark. This is what happened with, well, Lana knew she had some visual sensitivities because she lives with me and because I have her own lenses and because she’s been to see you before. But the extent of it, when she did a really challenging test, I wouldn’t say challenging. All we do is hold up a 3D cube drawn in black on paper and say, “Look really closely at this and count the lines,” and her brain just flipped out. She was unable to drive.

Helen: She got dizzy and sick.

Dave:  We had to postpone recording this thing so I can go pick up the kids, like that big of a deal for a perfectly healthy person.

Helen: Right, and you think about the fact that, one, like you said, “Well, you know I’m reading and it feels like this … doesn’t it feel …” You think, “Doesn’t it feel like this for everybody?” Or you learn to stop and before it gets bad, or what Lana was saying is fluorescent lights are such a problem for her that there’s certain stores, especially Walmart, which is probably the one, where she’ll walk in and within five seconds she goes, “That’s it. I’m done. I don’t need to shop anymore. I’m going to run in, grab what I need and I’m going to run out the door.” Then you don’t know there’s a problem. This becomes your norm of how you handle life.

Dave:  If it’s true that one in two people has some degree of sensitivity here and actually I believe that’s the case, I don’t know if you you can see in people don’t know they’re sensitive. I’ve talked to just countless guys and anyone and they, “You know, I go to the store and I feel like there’s no air in there, like I just, I feel like just so profoundly tired.” I figured out a while back it’s not the air in the store, it’s the lighting in the store. If I put on stalker-looking glasses and a baseball hat and I go to the store, I’ll buy everyone’s buying, otherwise I go in there and I go into a stupor after a while and I have a shopping cart full of crap I don’t even need.

Helen: You don’t want and you just as well leave it there and just run out the door.

Dave:  I’m like, “Why did I buy that?” I don’t even know but my decision-making capacity drops. One of the things that I know from the research on will power and the talk I gave at the Bulletproof Conference and just in writing the Bulletproof Diet, when metabolic demands on the brain go up they use all the available energy, whether it’s sugar or ketones from brain octane or whatever else, and then all of a sudden like, “Okay, I’m all empty.” When that happens your ability to make decisions goes down.

My experience with this is that visual stress drains my brain energy tank faster than it does in some other people, which means that I can watch out for that because that’s a source called Kryptonite, something that makes me weak. That a higher rate than half the population and maybe I’m less weak than others, although I’m probably pretty far on that end of like, “This is really bad for me.” Is eating more or having a cookie? Which is actually a compensatory strategy like something I used to do. I feel it in my gut, when my eyes get stressed I literally feel it in my stomach. I’ve looked at my brainwaves, when my eyes get stressed my brainwaves change. I get in disordered theta, kind of like a daydream state and even if I keep doing it like, “This is real,” but it’s not uncommon, it’s just that no one knows about it. But I would go like, “Okay, I’ll eat a cookie.”

Helen: Then you think, but you also don’t run around and tell people about it. It’s not a “medical condition” so you can’t go to your medical doctor and say, “Guess what, you know, I get this feeling of fatigue,” and I’ll just look at you like, “You’re crazy.” If you go to have your eyes tested and you look at the eye track and you say, and they always say, “Is this clear or not clear?” Then instead you would interject and say, “Well, it’s not that. It’s that they’re moving or they’re appearing or they’re disappearing or they’re floating or moving off the page.” You’ll just get this strange look back like, “What are you talking about?” It will get dismissed. Unless you explain these symptoms to the right person, which happens to be Irlen, they’re not going to take any account of it because they don’t know what to do with it. It’s like, “Right, one off, you’re just really strange.”

Dave:  Helen, when I was …

Helen: What?

Dave:  When I was tracking this stuff down and before I figured all these out, I went to Cedar Sinai. This is one of the top medical things in New York City. I saw a visual neurologist. I’m like, “There’s something going on here,” and he’s like, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” I’m like, “My ass, there’s nothing wrong with me. Okay, let’s just be really clear, like you might not know what’s wrong with me but I’ll be damned if when I’m under fluorescent lights I don’t drool on myself, and I can’t pronounce words and I get profound food cravings, like this is not crazy, this is something.”

I was grateful to find your work but it was also weird to find that I was not anywhere near alone and that there are people who are CEOs, there are people who are celebrities in Hollywood, like there are people at the very top elite levels of performance, as well as people in all walks of life who have this happening all the time but they just don’t know.

Helen: They don’t know it and they don’t realize the price they’re paying. They don’t realize they could have more energy, more efficient performance, and that they don’t have to live with certain physical symptoms at all. The scary thing for me is that it also can affect the health and well-being, because you’re putting chronic stress and that affects your immune system.

I look at some people and say, “Boy, you’re going to crash,” and crashing to me may mean you’re just really fatigue or you have a headache or you’re nauseous or you’re dizzy. You’re way past where you should be. You’ve really pushed your system. I have just thought that people who find it just such a benefit, “Hey, I could read easily for an hour without any problem.” Or, “It’s wonderful to just feel this constant energy all day long and I don’t do the peaks and the valleys of my energy level.”

Children don’t report and that is really frightening because we need to get in there and ask the right questions in he right way, to be identifying those children who could be so much more successful and instead of blaming themselves. One of the things I say when I test children, because it can be hereditary or it can be acquired through various things we’ll talk about. But when it’s hereditary I always can say to the child, “This is wonderful. This is not your fault. You can blame your mom or your dad or both of them.”

Dave:  I do love that.

Helen: For the first time, they’re not somebody who’s blaming them because it’s always, “Try harder, focus more, do better,” and it was like, “Oh wow, this isn’t my fault.” Then, of course I say to mom, “But don’t worry because you can blame either your mom or your dad.”

Dave:  Trying harder is not a good strategy most of the time.

Helen: Practice more. Those are the ones that get meet. Practice more. Do it again and again. Train more to make it better. It’s so much easier to identify that this is an issue and that the signal to the brain is coming in like static to the brain. The brain has to work so the visual cortex, basically part of the brain, so hard to process it, that it triggers these optical illusions, distortions, and physical symptoms. It’s so easy to just change it with colors so you’re changing the information and it’s coming in in the right timing for the brain.

Dave:  That’s definitely a biohack. It’s like changing the environment around you so that you have more control of your biology, in this case your brain. There’s also this idea, but I have less energy than I’d like throughout the day. I have these things. I have even like physical anxiety symptoms. I’ve seen some of the videos of profound people, if you take off their colored glasses and like within minutes they’re shaking and they’re like physically in pain. Then you put the lens back on and suddenly they’re lucid and they speak in whole sentences, and those are very extreme cases.

Helen: Those are extreme cases.

Dave:  But the idea is, if you look at that end of the spectrum people, there’s also these people were, like Abel James, a good friend who runs the Fat Burning Man. He heard me talking about this for a couple of years, thought I was nuts in the orange glasses. He went and got fitted for Irlen lenses and in direct quote, “It’s like I got 25% of my brain back, like it’s amazing.” That kind of levels of performance, we’re you’re like, “That’s crazy,” but one approach and one that I’ve taken, because I didn’t know all these stuff was, let’s see, $500 in supplements a month. You go on a diet, it gives you more energy, by the way, all that stuff works. There’s nothing wrong with that stuff. You can do all those things but maybe, those increase your performance, but maybe you could also change your light bulbs. It’s a lot cheaper.

It’s changing an environmental input into your body and you might have more stable energy. You still might want to increase your performance in your mitochondrial biogenesis via supplement but stop the Kryptonite. Cut off the 50 lbs. ball and chain you’re carrying with you,and any decent biohacker removes things that make you weak before you work on building new skills, before you work on training. Because it’s hard to train and it’s simple to remove things that are holding you back.

Helen: Or eliminate things. The problem with Irlen is the fact that if the only time you’re not under stress is if you’re in a dark room with your eyes closed, which means you can’t control your whole environment. It’s easier to just put on the colored glasses that works for your brain and get tested for that and then your whole environment is controlled for you and you don’t have to worry about it.

Dave:  If you look on YouTube right now, you can see I’m wearing some glasses. They’re like a light gray tint. These have several colors you put together. We did a bunch of testing. I’m going to hold this up for the camera, I have no idea if this is going to work but check this out. This is what they look like. I’m holding them to the lens. It is, looks like a light gray tint. You can still see my eyes. What does this mean? It means that I look a little different indoors and I don’t always wear them indoors. Apparently, you’ll get contacts which I’m going to try, but in many meetings I’ll do this and I’ll just say, “You know what, fluorescent lights give me migraines.” You know what happens when I say that in meetings, Helen? Can you predict?

Helen: No.

Dave:  Three or four other people go, “Good God, me too. I hate these lights. Why are these things even here?” That’s because one in two people don’t like fluorescent lights because it takes something away from them biologically. One guy, maybe gets so tired, maybe the woman sitting next to him is like, “Well, I don’t have a problem with these lights.” Then the person sitting next to her is like, “You know what, I just don’t feel good around these, like it makes my neck hurt.”

Helen: Or like getting brain fog or, “I feel disoriented or my eyes hurt or my head hurts or I’m feeling anxious.” They’re not even understanding or drawing the connection between lighting, anxiety, or any of the other physical symptoms that we talked about.

Dave:  Get this, as an employer, there are no fluorescent lights at the Bulletproof Coffee Shop, except back in the kitchen because there are laws that I have to have them, and those laws piss me off. At the Bulletproof Headquarters in Bellevue, Washington there are no fluorescent lights allowed. It’s a fluorescent-free zone. We have natural spectrum LEDs.

I’m working on getting all 12 volt halogens but you have to have a lot of control over the building you’re in for that to be allowed. I don’t know how much that cost but it wasn’t that cheap to do the swap out from the fluorescent, but look, as an employer I care about my employees performance very much. As a human being who likes the people I work with who support our mission, I like them too. From both of those perspectives I’m like, “I would like them to have lighting that works best for most people.”

The lights we have, I know there’s one or two people who don’t like, even those that are too bright. When I’m in the office they’re not the right lights for me, they’re better than fluorescent by a magnitude but they’re not as good as they could be. What we’ve done is we’ve shifted for the entire floor of people who go into the office everyday, which isn’t everyone. A lot of people work from home. I’m guessing that people who work from home are even more sensitive because they don’t like going to the office.

Helen: They won’t come in to the office, right?

Dave:  Yeah, but whatever. I’ve never tested them but we are in the process of testing every employee at Bulletproof. That’s part of our plan for 2016 to, or whatever next year is.

Helen: Make everyone Irlen-proof.

Dave:  Yeah. Just-

Helen: I can … Can we do that?

Dave:  Let’s do that.

Helen: Let’s make them all Irlen-proof.

Dave:  Absolutely, we’ll test them all.

Helen: So they can all function better and we don’t have to … and you get peak performance out of all your employees.

Dave:  Now, by the way, I have no business, like we have no business relationship. Your work really helped me, going back I think 2008 is when I first started doing this. I hadn’t met you until last year when you went to the Bulletproof Conference. We have no … I’m not endorsing you for any financial reasons. This is literally just really amazing technology and it’s knowledge that people can have. It’s not all just, “Look, I feel better when I wear a baseball hat when I go shopping,” that is essentially free. They give free baseball hats everywhere.

If you’re sitting on an airplane, you wear a baseball hat and sunglasses, if they let you on the plane because you don’t look too much like a terrorist, then you’ll probably feel better when you land. In fact, half of the people are going to. This is basic stuff but there’s other levels like that, and the Bulletproof coaches are all going to get the basic knowledge on how to spot someone who’s likely to have this so we can refer them out. Because this is one of those things toward increasing human performance.

I’m really committed to this idea that you need to make sure you have enough energy in the body. You need to remove the things that make you weak and then do more of the things that make you strong, in that order. This is one the biggest things that make you weak. In fact, the other big thing that’s part of my mission is mold toxins. What do mold toxins do to light sensitivity in your experience?

Helen: It increase your light sensitivity significantly. It moves you on the continuum. If you were moderate and you didn’t have mold sensitivities, now your mold sensitivities, you’re over the top severe. If you’re with severe, in terms of where you were and then you get mold sensitivities now you’re over, over, over the top severe. It increases your light sensitivity and your problems.

Dave:  In fact …

Helen: Yes, go ahead.

Dave:  One of the ways I know that I’ve been in a moldy building or especially that I’ve eaten moldy foods, moldy vegetables, like moldy broccoli or cabbage are those to me, one of the first signs I get, is I get a little bit of brain fog and then lights than don’t bother me suddenly it’s like, “Ooh, those are really painful.” I’m like, “Damn it. I just ate something I shouldn’t have eaten.” I know there’s mold in it. Moldy coffee also cause me to have excessive light sensitivity. That’s why I know there is mold in there. I can test it with the lab test to verify it’s not there but I started making my beans, because I kept throwing away coffee that tasted delicious, that gave me light sensitivity, and made me like want to kill people. That idea that neurotoxins can do that. Do you find things like Lyme disease or mercury toxicity make people more light sensitive?

Helen: Any of your autoimmune problems, whether it’s chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, or any of those, there is a tendency for a large percent of that population to be much more light sensitive. You’re not going to take away the disease but you’re going to sure calm things down and make it better. The other area that we’ve gotten into is head injuries and concussions related to sports, or anything that’s going to give you a head injury and a concussion, and how that affects the brain, and how that can trigger symptoms.

I just finished writing a new book, because I thought it was so important for people to understand things about sports concussions. Sports Concussions, right, How to Get Back in the … Game of Life. Because, there’s again, a lot of myths about the fact that the physical symptoms that happen after a concussion, or even you don’t have to have an identified concussion, will eventually go away. They can go away immediately and they say, “Typically within a couple of weeks it should go away.” I’m saying, and I give you specific examples in the book, how you need to create a baseline immediately, of what life was like immediately before, in terms of your performance, how you felt, what kind of physical symptoms you had and then you need to track it.

If it doesn’t go away, that’s where we come in, because we have done a lot of research showing that we can totally eliminate the headaches and the migraines and the other physical symptoms that accompany concussions and head injuries, and improve again and bring the reading and the academic abilities back up to par with where you were before you had the injury.

Dave:  You’re saying that very precisely colored lenses without focus correction, unless people already need that, can have that effect?

Helen: Yes. Absolutely.

Dave:  This is, like if you’re listening to this in your car, you’re sitting at work, and you’re going, “Holy crap.” Either one or two things is true. Helen is completely crazy or this is a profoundly important scientific breakthrough. I will tell you flat out, Helen is not crazy. You have good credentials. You have good research. You’ve been doing this for more than 30 years. You’re a school psychologist who discovered something. You paid attention. You noticed something other people didn’t notice and you use the scientific method. You have testing kits. You have hundreds of people who use your method to train people and make a difference everyday.

Helen: We’ve seen thousands and thousands and thousands of individuals in each one of the categories that I’ve talked about and have tracked their improvement. That there is 30 years of research behind it is just such a mind shift, first of all, to understand that bright lights aren’t better. That fluorescent lights can create a problem. That high contrast black print on white paper is a problem. Computer screens, iPads, iPhones are a problem. The other issue is the fact that just over the majority of the population, none of these is a problem for them, doesn’t affect them at all.

Dave:  About 52%, I’d say.

Helen: I’d say over, yeah, your 52%. My population is the majority. We don’t control and rule the world. The majority of the population creates their least stressful environment. Fluorescent lights isn’t stressful. White boards aren’t stressful. Reading textbooks isn’t stressful or reading on the computer and doing it for long periods of time is not stressful. They have no understanding that my population exists and they’re not going to do anything to take care of my population. I need to be able to come in and be able to get you guys to recognize that there’s a problem and then there’s a solution.

Dave:  In the US we have the Americans with Disabilities Act and they require you to put in wheelchairs, like wheelchair ramps. At the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in Santa Monica, it’s a historic building and it’s been retrofitted with wheelchair ramps as a part of remodeling. This delayed our opening by a month. We had to take the existing wheelchair ramp and change the angle from like 20 degrees to 18 degrees. Then that required a historic building, all those kind of stuff. Yet, I’m allowed to put fluorescent lights in there that affect 48% of the population, as opposed to people in wheelchairs, which I support.

Helen: The logic is this, is everybody who’s in a wheelchair needs to have a ramp. We don’t recognize the fact that there are people out there who are bothered by fluorescent lighting. We put positions papers to Canada, to the US, and to the Europe saying, “Don’t get rid of incandescent lighting.” We put positions papers. We heard back from all the countries, “That’s not a problem. We don’t understand it.”

Dave:  I’m stockpiling them, and by the way there are other people doing that as well.

Helen: Yes.

Dave:  With millions of them and eventually we’ll be back to kerosene lanterns, which is going to be interesting, but this is not a joke. I do not function under fluorescent lights and even LED lights, my resilience is not there.

Helen: Yes, but you’re talking to people who, it doesn’t bother them so they don’t believe it and they don’t feel that it exists and that’s the issue.

Dave:  There’s things that bother everyone listening to this and each person is bothered by different things. There are a few people, I’m guessing it’s 5% of the population who can basically breathe mercury fumes, eat Spam and grilled cheese sandwiches-

Helen: Eat whatever they want.

Dave:  Like stay up all night and drink a quarter of vodka everyday.

Helen: And they’re fine.

Dave:  They like smear toxic mold as like hairspray. I have no idea how they do that but there are people who are that amazingly resilient, but even those people when you like, “Look, let’s put you in a better designed environment and pull some of the crap out of your diet.” They still feel better but the difference in how much better they feel is a small, it’s a small percent.

Helen: I have to tell you that the reason, my backstory is the reason I discovered this is I don’t have it all. I’m the person who go, “I don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of fluorescent lighting. I read for literally hours and hours and hours on end, nothing happens to the printed page. Everything stays comfortable.” I think it’s because I didn’t have the problem at all, not on the continuum.

When I was working with my adults who was still struggling at the university level, I headed a program for adults with learning disabilities, and they were bright and they had worked really hard but they were still struggling. They started to report to me, “But this happens after a while when I read and this is how I feel, and this is how it looks, and this is why I can’t copy, and this is how I feel under fluorescent lighting.” I could play it off on myself and go, “Nope, no, none of those things are a problem.” Therefore, my performance level is very equal and I can do it quicker, faster, and easier than they can. I guess I believed them and thought it was a problem because I didn’t have it. If I had it and I had still managed to be successful I would have thought and said, “Well, that can’t be a problem, I’m successful. You can be successful too.”

Dave:  If you don’t have this problem, it would have been far easier just to tell these people that they were crazy or that they should just try harder, but you did this weird science-sy thing where you’re like, observe something and make hypothesis about it and listen.

Helen: No, I basically-

Dave:  Gathered data.

Helen: I listened. I did something strange. I actually listened and believed in what the people were telling me. That’s kind of, must be very strange.

Dave:  It’s almost unheard of these days. This kind of knowledge though, this is core, like precious knowledge about what it takes to be a human. Because if I had known this when I was 16 it would have really changed a lot of the struggle that I’ve had in my life. The amount of effort and work that went into college, all the learning, how to get around things, that apparently other people didn’t have to get around. I didn’t even know that they have to get around them like, “How do these people do that? They just must work harder than me. Maybe they’re smarter than me. Maybe I’m actually dumb.” I’ve thought all of these things about myself and it turns out, I know my IQ. I’m actually not dumb. I’m reasonably smart. When you see that though and you’re like, “Why is there a gap between my perceived intelligence, my measured intelligence, and my performance?”

Helen: Your performance, right.

Dave:  There’s a reason for it.

Helen: There’s a reason for it and that’s you need to know. The adults, when they get tested, their first reaction is really either anger or sadness that nobody picked this up before, that nobody identified this as a child.

Dave:  I love seeing Mark today. He is just incredulous. He’s like, I don’t know, about 50. I have no idea how old he is and he’s like-

Mark : My reaction to this is actually shocked, because I’ve spent my entire adult life enchanted as well, looking at this, working hard to try and work out what they’re saying. Then when I just place this across my body relaxes.

Dave:  All right, someone’s listening right now and let’s say that they’ve never thought about this before. Most people have never thought about whether the lights they’re under are affecting how they feel. It’s like the normal message that will go through your head, and I say this from experience, is sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I get food cravings. Sometimes etc., etc. symptoms, but it appears to be random, right?

Helen: Right, you can’t connect the dots.

Dave:  Right, just like, “I don’t know, man.”

Helen: You blame it on something else. You think … Soon as you leave that environment everything’s fine so you don’t think about it again.

Dave:  It’s just, it’s-

Helen: It’s gone, so it’s okay. It’s not an issue.

Dave:  Sometimes I read and I pass out, sometimes I don’t. I’m like, “Does it have to do with … Is it the brightness of the paper? Could that really be a variable? Hell, yeah! It’s a variable.” We’re unaware of the triggers.

Helen: Yes, unaware. Absolutely unaware. One of things we’ve done is we’ve created a self-test that’s online.

Dave:  That’s my next question. Good. How do people know? It’s online?

Helen: It’s online.

Dave:  I didn’t even know you do a self-test. Why don’t I know that?

Helen: I don’t know. Anyway, we have the self-test that’s online and there’s various. There’s a short one, there’s a long one, because this affects so many areas that it ends different for other people. It can affect lighting and if you’re bothered by sunlight, you’re going to be typically be bothered by not just sunlight, but bright lights and fluorescent lighting, headlights at night, and glare, the brightness of computer screen. It can affect reading and any visual activity. It can also affect depth perception, so some people think, “Oh, I’m just not athletic.” Well, no, maybe it’s related to Irlen. It can affect reading music. We’ve created a whole bunch of areas. I just mentioned some of them. We created the self-test online and you can take the self-test and see. See if this is you. Start to connect the dots. Play it out and think about it. That’s one thing you can do, is get online, do take the self-test.

Dave:  Do you have like professional ball players who wear Irlen lenses when they’re playing?

Helen: Football players.

Dave:  Football players, wow, they’re wearing Irlen lenses on the field and they’re better athletes.

Helen: Yeah and professional ice hockey players.

Dave:  Really?

Helen: Who have had concussions, that’s an area we didn’t talk about that … we did a little bit.

Dave:  A little bit but one of the things I’ve mentioned, Daniel Amen, who has spoken in the conferences like you have at the Bulletproof Conference and he’s one of my favorite brain hackers. You’ve done some work with Daniel and Daniel just came out in the movie about concussions and has flat out proven that like 96% of people who played professional football or ice hockey or I think fights, are getting brain damage and you can measure it, you can see it, you can predict it. Obviously, you and him would have a lot in common. What did you find when you worked with Daniel Amen?

Helen: Daniel Amen has done brain scans on some of the people who have Irlen and what we do with the colored lenses is we create the special lens that you wear. He’s tested these individuals with and without to look at the difference in their brain scans. What he sees is, with the brain scan there’s a lot of activity going on in areas where they shouldn’t be this much activity. Such as, obviously the visual cortex, but areas that create anxiety, irritability, fidgettiness, and that there’s a low energy area with your prefrontal lobe, it affects your ability to do attending and sustained concentration. That all normalizes once you put on the Irlen filters. It’s a way of quickly normalizing the brain’s ability to function.

Dave:  This is one of the more profound things to see and if you’re familiar what SPECT scan is, this is something that Dr. Amen works with. A SPECT scan is one of the things that probably saved my career. Going back to at least 2002 or something, I was feeling rough. I was going to school at Wharton and I was working full-time, I made a startup that had a successful exit and I was barely making it. I mean, probably in the bottom of my class who graduated. I ended up getting extra time, like approved for me, to take tests, which made me feel pretty much like not good, like you feel like you’re a failure. I was, at the time, dealing with mold toxins and I went and I got a SPECT scan as part of my like, “This is unacceptable,” like I’ve dealt with the weight, now I’m dealing with my brain. I got this test from Daniel Amen and it showed massive problems in my brain. Essentially life traumatic brain injury except it was poisoning, it was toxic injury to the brain.

Helen: Toxic, right.

Dave:  I got to be very familiar with this scan and when you look at my scan now, I did a few months ago with Daniel and he looked at my old scan, he said, “Dave, you look like someone who live under a bridge using street drugs, like one of the worst brains I’ve seen from someone who’s still functioning,” To now, where I have a smooth surface on the scan. The idea is you can see a difference in metabolic activity before and after.

When you show someone with scotopic sensitivities, someone with severe stuff and you do the before and after scans, you see a brain that’s full of holes. This is bad. These are parts where the brain’s either overactive or underactive, and it should look like the smooth kind of globe, instead you see like a piece of coral with pieces missing. Literally, you take that same brain, you put glasses on them that have a specific spectrum filter. They look like colored lenses but they’re quantified colored lenses, and then the brain changes and you see this new brain again.

This is the difference between, “Oh, I can see the letter A on the thing.” I just changed what’s going in the computing part of my brain by filtering a little bit of light at the beginning. But that is, if anyone … in any medical profession who says, “Oh, this is just seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.” I’m sorry, you explain that result. This is a radio active sugar. This is a functional brain image that shows what’s going on. There is no other explanation that there’s way more going on with color than we thought.

Helen: That’s good. I don’t have anything to add to that. That’s a great explanation.

Dave:  I’m irritated that no on told me this when I was a kid and that I sat under all those crappy fluorescent lights.

Helen: I know.

Dave:  Let’s talk about the worst lights. People are looking for actionable things they can do today. They’re not all going to go out and get Irlen tested.

Helen: If they’re not going to get Irlen tested at least do somethings in your environment. One of the issues would be, A. Bright light is not better for everybody. If you have a child that’s lived in their room and has turned off the lights and reading in dim light, don’t go in and turn on the lights and say, “Reading in dim lights is going to hurt your eyes.” That’s a myth.

Let’s change the lighting when you can change the lighting to protect yourself. What’s the best lighting? Indirect natural lighting. If you don’t need to turn on the lights and there’s enough light coming indirectly through the windows, that’s great as long as that’s not creating glare. It’s like, “No, Dave,” You go,” Glare is a big issue.” Well, you can’t have glare but as long as its not creating glare. Sit with your back to the window so that you don’t get glare, so you’re not staring out the window. Use soft lighting when you can.

Obviously, the best lighting for the brain is, and it mimics our natural lighting, happen to have been incandescent lights. That was the best mimic of natural lighting. That’s what our brain should have from Day One. In addition, there are certain other things, watch your colors because certain fluorescent colors are really triggering the same kind of reaction because they’re too bright, and they’re triggering things for you.

Many of you may have noticed that certain patterns or plaids or polka dots or stripes are really difficult because they’re either annoying or they become like optical illusions. Watch what you wear. When you can, hats are great because if you have to sit under fluorescent lights wear a brimmed hat. My recommendation is, I don’t care how it looks on the top but the underpart of the brim should always be black.

Dave:  Like that.

Helen: Black. It can be on the top. It can be red, pink, green, yellow, I don’t care but the underpart, because it will absorb the light. The worst one is white because it will reflect the light right into your eyes. You can, in terms of, one of the strategies is not to get new books. You don’t have this high contrast black print on a white background. Get used books, they’re yellow, they’re like newsprint and newsprint makes it easier to read.

Dave:  Suggestion there, if you buy used books and they smell musty, dish them.

Helen: Oh hell, yeah.

Dave:  Those are from moldy houses, the mold triggers light sensitivity.

Helen: Let’s get it all in there. You got to watch yourself and protect yourself from your environment. This is called, you know, somehow or rather today, we put ourselves into the most abersive environment for a lot of people.

Dave:  By the way, fluorescent lights and moldy books aren’t going to kill you but they might take you out of your high performance zone and that’s what we’re talking about here.

Helen: Constantly, you want to perform and you want the peak performance. I thought about … Paper, it’s interesting, why do we have legal pads on yellow? Why do we use yellow highlighters? It’s the worst color. It’s the brightest color and it affect more people negatively.

Dave:  It’s because no one likes attorneys so we make them use it.

Helen: No.

Dave:  Sorry.

Helen: But, my guess is using, think about using something besides a yellow highlighter. Use a different color of highlighter, maybe blue or green.

Dave:  Just pause for a second.

Helen: Go ahead.

Dave:  If you’re thinking about this like, “Okay, this crazy person just told me to change the color of my highlighter,” but if you’re one in two people, and you’re like. “Okay, I would never do that. I wouldn’t try that. It wouldn’t make any difference.” You know what, you might be entirely right, but for the person sitting next to you, it’s actually a useful piece of information, because we are all the same.

Even if there’s two people who both have scotopic sensitivity, one of them may not really care about fluorescent yellow highlighting and the others one like, “God, you know, they always did irritate me, when I read that I lose 8% of my cognitive function after half hour of doing it,” and the other one doesn’t. These are things that won’t harm anyone to switch to a blue or a green.

Helen: Green or something like that. Think about the paper color. You don’t have to print off of the computer on white. You can get reams of different colored paper, blue paper, green paper, purple paper, an aqua paper, and try printing on different colored papers so you can not read on the computer. You can print it off and read on different colored papers. You can change, we do have an app that lets you, on androids, create your own color.

Dave:  Brock, will you grab some of the overlays and a sheet of white paper.

Helen: Also, the thing for the app.

Dave:  If you’re watching on YouTube, and you should, bulletproofexec.com/youtube, some of these thing are more visual than others. I’m going to pick an overlay here. These are things … I just watched today a little girl, who’s she’s about eight, just completely transform. She’s like, “Oh yeah, my head hurts when I read like that.” Helen took one of these sheets of, like transparent papers, she makes them one side’s math and they’re special designed colors. She put it over the paper so the paper looked, in her case like a light purple color, and all of a sudden like her body relaxed. You can see, and her eyes relaxed and she’s like, “Oh yeah, the letters don’t move around the way it did before.” Was she dyslexic?

Helen: She could have been. I don’t know if she was actually identified but if this way-

Dave:  She was never diagnosed.

Helen: She was never diagnosed but she said, “Oh things would swirl … were swaying on the page and they stopped swaying, and my headache went away,” and she was so excited.

Dave:  From a $3 special designed plastic thing it’s not like you have to go out and get the expensive glasses, but you may benefit greatly if you do. You just don’t know but this is the sort of thing, it approaches the Costa-free. It’s less than a cup of coffee, right?

Helen: Right, and they are available on amazon.com.

Dave:  What do you call these?

Helen: These are colored overlays.

Dave:  Just colored overlays for Irlen.

Helen: Just type … You can go on to our website which is www.irlen, I-R-L-E-N.com, and you can purchase them that way or you can purchase them on amazon.com. We have also skins that you can put up on your computer. They stick to the computer or actually you can cut them, so that if your a tablet bothers you or your phone bothers you, you can just put them on that. We have a app which you can use, that’s the one I talked about.

Dave:  On android.

Helen: On android and that’s again, all those things are available on-

Dave:  What’s this app? Is it free or do you charge for it?

Helen: It’s really inexpensive.

Dave:  A dollar or something?

Helen: Yes, a couple of dollars, that’s all.

Dave:  That’s called the Irlen app but it’s only on the-

Helen: Use to androids and only androids you can use it. There’s all these things to help you change your environment. The only difference between doing all these and getting your own spectrum filters is then you don’t need any of these. Irlen Spectrum Filters take care of it across the board, you don’t need overlays, you don’t need colored paper. You don’t have to worry about your environment. You don’t have to worry about fluorescent lighting or your computer screen. It just makes it totally easy because it keeps you pain-free and stress-free 100% of the time.

Dave:  I don’t know what else to say to people other than, this is pretty darn big. When I look at things that affect large percentages of people, I look at calling that out. If you look on the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap, in the middle of it there’s a set of suspect foods, like Lactins. Well, 20% of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by potato and tomato family, bell peppers, things like that. I put those on a list like, “These might be making you weak. They might be causing all sorts of problems or not.” It depends, it’s one in five.

When you look at mold toxins and Moldy the Movie. I made that movie because 28% of people get permanent autoimmune stuff from mold and other people, all people get oxidated DNA damage and it can affect mood and it can do other bad things. About one in four people, basically are at serious risk of losing 40 years of quality of life and probably 20 years of lifespan from living in water-damaged buildings even for a few months. I was just looking at a study of that.

What we’re looking at here though, is approximately a little bit less than one in two people, who have some level of sensitivity. Some severe and disabling, some it’s just an irritation but like, “Let’s remove your attentions from our lives.” Like let’s build a world where the lighting in the average store … Do you run a store? Do you like selling things? Then do what we’re talking about here and you’ll sell more but the lighting in the average store, and especially the average school and government office and institution is set-up for people to feel good. That just-

Helen: That makes sense to you and it doesn’t make sense to the people in power because it doesn’t bother them. We-

Dave:  Some things bother everyone, right?

Helen: Yeah, but it doesn’t bother everybody. You can fight the establishment or you can just make it so that you can exist in whatever the establishment creates, because they think this is the ideal environment without problems. That’s how I see it. I’ll go out and I’ll fight the establishment but when the establishment says, “No, we’re not going to do anything. It’s not a problem.” I mean, you talk to the government today in the US and you’d say, “Food additives, food dyes, food preservatives are a problem.” No, they don’t agree. Absolutely, it doesn’t affect anybody as far as they’re concerned. It has to affect everybody for something to be done and that’s really an issue.

You’re responsible for taking care of yourself. You got to be responsible for identifying those issues that become problematic for you, that are holding you back and take care of it. Because the government’s not going to take care of you. I have to tell you, some of those compensatory strategies out there for children who are struggling with reading, to me, are not that helpful. Extended time, books on tape, you can’t do that for your whole life. Wouldn’t it be better to just make it so that you can, you don’t need extended time? That you don’t need to have books on tape. That you can read it easily yourself. That you can do it quick and fast and you don’t need the extended time.

Dave:  Helen, you said something there. You’re responsible for yourself and you are responsible for yourself but you’re also responsible for the people around you. We live in a world where the people around you are part of the world you interact with and you can have a positive factor or a negative effect on them. If you can’t regulate emotions because of toxins, bad diet, because you’ve been abused and you haven’t dealt with your trauma, because you have traumatic brain injury, because you have mold toxins, or because fluorescent lights took you out of your zone. It doesn’t really matter but you’re going to be a jerk to the people around you. One of the things that Lana and I are working right now, is if we can pull this off, we’re working to get testing for our kid’s school, for all the kids.

Helen: You want to screen them for Irlen as well?

Dave:  We want to get them tested for Irlen because if it turns out that one in two of them, if we’re playing odds or somewhere around there, are having problems with that, let’s see what’s that going to do to the quality of life at school for my kids. Their quality of life will go up because the kids who were having behavioral problems because of poor lighting will probably get better.

Helen: We talked about the behavior problems that can get triggered by lighting.

Dave:  Let’s talk about some of that. I’m sure there’s a lot of parents listening who are going, “Oh my God, is that my kid?”

Helen: We have to say that you have a lot of children that the lighting is triggering anger. They’re striking out. They’re misbehaving. They can’t stay in their seat. They’re being labeled as distracted. They’re being told to put them on medication. That they’re daydreaming in class. That they’re not paying attention. Gee! Wouldn’t it be nice if it’s just the lighting? All we had to do is figure that out and you now have a nice child.

I have one story about one of my clients who, he would just get so angry and aggressive after being under fluorescent lights, but he didn’t realize it, that as soon as he got to of class he just hit the first person that came near him, literally, and he was labeled a bad kid. Thank goodness, there were like seven high schools because he got rejected by one and kicked out. Went to another high school, got kicked out of that because he got in so many fights. Went to another high school, no idea, he had no idea, he just thought, “This is me and this is what I’m like.”

I met him when he was trying to get to college now and had been on academic probation two or three times, and was sent to see me and the program I had created. We found out that things in the environment moved for him and it just started to build and that building just-

Dave:  Fight or flight, right?

Helen: He just became explosive and we were able to stop that and things moved on the page and stopped them. He was able to read. He got out of academic probation and he graduated with very good grades.

Dave:  That’s pretty amazing. For every one of those you find, there’s probably-

Helen: A hundred and thousands and thousands more. Absolutely.

Dave:  One of the functions of Bulletproof Radio here is to take these things that should be in the instructional manual for humans and let people know about it. What do you do in a situation like a husband and wife? Let’s say husband is affected, wife isn’t, what happens in those environments?

Helen: They fight about the lighting, seriously, like, “My wife loves bright lights and the lights are all on and I go in and I turn off all the lights and then she turns them all on again.” They do fight about the lights.

Dave:  Right now, there’s a group of people listening going, “Oh my God.” If that’s the case, one of the two people has some kind of sensitivity. What would they do about it? They go to take the online self-assessment, one of them probably has a problem and then-

Helen: Take the self-assessment. Identify yourself.

Dave:  What’s the URL for that again? I don’t believe we’ve mentioned it.

Helen: It’s www.irlen. I-R-L-E-N.com.

Dave:  That’s just the main URL, is there a special one for the test or no?

Helen: No, just get on and says self-test.

Dave:  It’s just going to be on the front page.

Helen: You can go take some different self-tests.

Dave:  irlen.com, all right, that’s a good deal. Now, that is, that’s so cool and I looked back on, on all the relationships I’ve been in, in the end, definitely I’m picky about my lighting. Here’s another thing that I used to do that will drive people insane at work. I would stand up on my cubicle, it helps that I’m tall and I would unscrew the posted light bulbs above my desk. Because they are Kryptonite, they are evil and you leave them in the socket but loose so that …

Helen: Right, you leave them, so you turn them up but you don’t destroy the whole circuitry.

Dave:  Then I put a halogen light in my little lamp in my office, or in my, I’m like, “All right, I’m good to go,” of course, then a week later facilities changes the bulbs and I’m like, “I’ll do it again.”

Helen: The bulb is back.

Dave:  You’re like, eventually, you think these guys are going to figure out, they change the fixture. No, no but what’s going on there is basically, these people protect themselves. There are probably people in your office who do the same thing. The guy who go into his office the lights are off. It doesn’t mean anything bad it just means-

Helen: It just means he’s got Irlen.

Dave:  It means also that at least he had the capability to figure out that the lights sucked. You can turn them off instead of just taking it everyday.

Helen: In one place that he has control of … he’s been able to control his environment, think about the people who say, “It’s really strange but I like to wear my sunglasses outside,” inside, I mean. “I wear them inside. I wear them when I go shopping.” They have Irlen as well.

Dave:  All rock starts have Irlen?

Helen: You know that’s a good question. Is it just the look or I always wonder about some of that. Do they … is that an effect? They want to look cool? They think it’s good or is it the lights that are coming at them when they’re on stage that really bother them?

Dave:  I, absolutely, someday hope I get a chance to meet Bono just to ask him.

Helen: Ask him.

Dave:  I just wanted, Bono, if you’re listening, man, I want to know.

Helen: Let us know, are you light sensitive or not?

Dave:  It wouldn’t surprise me, right, because he is famous for all this different glasses and wear them indoors and all that stuff. I don’t want to be famous for that but it’s just a weird story. I was randomly invited to a celebrity poker tournament and I was in a place with some lighting that bother me so I wore my orange glasses. I’m like, I think twice as tall as Bono but I actually heard people going, “Is that Bono?” I’m like, “Okay, I’m a computer hacker guy,” and the fact that I was once confused with a rock star I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Helen: That’s great. Wonderful.

Dave:  I think it’s amazing but it was just because I had on extremely unusual orange glasses. Since then I’ve switched to, like your eyes over time change and adjust, I’ve switched to ones that are a bunch more sane-looking than the bright orange ones. This was going back seven or eight years ago. These are a little bit more of a-

Helen: But you’re still calling them your rock star glasses.

Dave:  I tell people, “If I’m going to wear them on stage I’m just in training to be a rock star.”

Helen: Rock start glasses.

Dave:  But also, I’m lucky I’m in a position to do that. I did have a time, locally here in Canada, I had to sit in court for a few hours to buy my house because it was in foreclosure. I sat there and I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s a government building, like this thing is full of the cheapest lights.” I put a nice hat and my orange glasses and sure enough, within two minutes the judge is like, “You know, in the back there, take that hat off, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” I just said, “I’m really sorry, Your Honor. I’d be happy to wait outside. I have a medical condition fluorescent lights cause migraines. I’d be happy to wait outside.” He goes, “Oh, well then keep that hat on. You can sit back down.”

It actually worked in my favor because they said, “Well, why don’t I just move your case to the front?” We were actually, we were out there in 10 minutes but if I had responded in the wrong way, it’s considered disrespectful to wear a hat, especially in some meetings like that, where you’re just not going to. I can push the lines but there are still times where I’m not going to do that.

Helen: You’re going to do it. The other thing is I have some lawyers and some other people where the glasses are really hard for them, because people need to see their eyes. We created a concept where we ill actually can tint contact lenses.

Dave:  I’m going to order some.

Helen: That’s even better because it blocks out and filters … I shouldn’t say blocks out but filters all the lighting. All your lighting is filtered. You even get better protection and better results and it doesn’t change the color of your eyes.

Dave:  I’m actually sad to hear that because I wanted bright orange eyes.

Helen: I told you if you want to do that we can do that but most people don’t want to do that.

Dave:  People are so boring.

Helen: I know.

Dave:  Now, I think I’m out of questions for you this time it’s because we spent two days training together. I’m excited that I now have the tools to be able to go out with Bulletproof coaches and Bulletproof staff, and very quickly spot whether someone has this going on. I’m not qualified to show which lenses are going to help them but just to say, “Look, this is a direction to pursue versus this is not a direction to pursue.” People listening you go to irlen.com. They can check out your self-assessment which is another way. It’s not as good as an actual AV test.

Helen: But it’s a big start.

Dave:  It’s a great start and people should go there. Like I said, there’s no endorsement contract. There’s nothing like that. This is something that helped me survive in Silicon Valley in a major way and something that has kept my brain in a resilient state. I would have used a lot more effort in the last eight years than I have because of your work. I’m just grateful for you and I think that this can impact 50% of the population. When we’re done, making people know about this, it will be considered like smoking to have fluorescent lights.

Not to mention, that they reduce employee productivity and they’re bad for the environment because they’re full of mercury and they’re mostly made in China. There’s a whole reason that these fluorescent lights got to be popular in a lot of those economic nots, not necessarily what was best for humans. When I say economic as in it was cheaper to make the light bulbs in China than it was to make them in the US.

Helen: Meccanomic decisions.

Dave:  Thank you GE, we know what you did.

Helen: Yes, go blame GE, but the issue becomes, one, have we become so high-tech today? Even if you try to avoid fluorescent lighting you can’t avoid your computers and your tablets and your iPhones.

Dave:  You don’t want to avoid them, they’re useful.

Helen: But they’re also creating stress and it’s the stress that we’re dealing with. We’ve created a high-tech environment. We’re putting young children, as young as kindergarten and first grade now on computers. In the US they will take all their tests on computers. Some of the children are going to do very poorly and it’s not because they don’t have the knowledge or the ability, but because the computer screen is too bright and is creating difficulties and physical symptoms.

Dave:  One thing that made situation huge difference for me for many years, is I turned down the brightness and change the color temperature on my monitor. You can actually just dim it.

Helen: You can do it. Again, if you’re in control. Kids can’t do, they won’t let them do it in school, because situation many different children use it so they don’t have control. You can-

Dave:  They’d tape the thing over it.

Helen: We have … They can take the colored overlays on the computer, because they can take it or not. Some of the child who doesn’t need it and we have clings now, where it will actually stick on the computer or you can cut them for the tablets or for your iPhones. There’s a lot of things so take a look at the store that’s at irlen.com and see all the things that we have that will help you.

Dave:  The clings by the way, are compatible with the Zen Tech filter. The Zen Tech filter is something that we manufacture at Bulletproof, that goes on the iPhone and your laptop and everything else. It cuts out a very narrow spectrum of blue. You can’t see that it’s cutting it out. It cuts that out because that’s the spectrum that messes with your sleep.

If you’re going to look at your phone before you go to bed or after the sunsets, filtering that out affects melatonin production and it affects oxidative stress on the surface of the cell membrane in the eyes. This is a different type of filtration. Actually, it’s a similar type of filtration but it’s a different end goal and this a biological, not a neuro processing goal.

What the Irlen filters are to do is to make your brain process what’s coming into them better. What the Zen Tech filter is there to do is to keep melatonin being produced by the brain and to prevent some of the stress in the eye itself. Helen’s doing brain stress and we’re doing something to improve sleep quality but you can stick the clings on top of a Zen Tech and it wonks fine.

Helen: It works fine. The two together are great.

Dave:  Awesome. Well, I think I’m out of cool things to say and I’m so grateful you came into Vancouver Island to Bulletproof labs. After this you’re going to go to a float in our floatation thing, as I understand it.

Helen: Oh, really? That sounds interesting.

Dave:  I heard this was true.

Helen: It’s an interesting rumor, let’s see.

Dave:  All right, thanks, Helen. Thanks for your work.

Helen: Thank you, Dave, love you dearly.

Dave:  I love you.

If you love today’s show, you know what to do. Head on over to Irlen, I-R-L-E-N.com, and check it out if this is topical and relevant to you. If it wasn’t, someone sitting to your left or to your right is statistically very likely to benefit from this information. Tell them to download this episode and you could also send them to bulletproofexec.com/youtube. To find it, you can go to our podcast page.

There’s a few other things, the entire transcript of this, with links, will be posted on the Bulletproof website. You can download the PDF or sent it out to a friend. You can also go into the transcript, you can click on the transcript anywhere, it will tale you to Youtube and how you the 30 second video where I said exactly what was there already or what Helen said what was there. You can send the 30 second clip to your friend.

If you’re getting the point here, the point is that this info is part of the human operating manual. This is controlled. We have a 01:10:56] biology. What I’m asking to do here is just to share it with people who are going to benefit from it, because that’s what this whole thing is about.

Thanks for listening. Have an awesome day and the next episode, I hope will be as good as this one. I’ll do my best.

Helen: I hope you find yourself or help somebody.

Dave:  Have an awesome day.

Helen: Bye.