Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. This is one that I recently shared on Instagram which went surprisingly viral, being read, watched and shared by tens of millions of people in a matter of months. It has been translated (by fans) into many languages, turned into a song, and even performed at churches and funerals.
The piece was inspired by the thought of a soul being given instructions before incarnating on Earth – a reminder of our higher purpose in this crazy world.
Instructions before visiting Earth
In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.
You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.
This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.
Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.
But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.
At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.
On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.
So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.
As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.
Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.
You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.
"Hope itself is like a star—not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity."
— C.H. Spurgeon
At 54, I had accepted that my vision problems were irreparable. Then I heard about a doctor specialising in brain-eye connections
Five days ago, my plate of spaghetti was a blur. Today, I can read the small print on a restaurant menu with relative ease. My distance vision is also sharper. The difference wasn’t down to a pair of reading glasses, newfangled lenses or surgery, though: it’s thanks to three hours a day of tailored vision training over a week.
Many medical professionals would argue that eyesight cannot be improved. Before this week, I’d have been inclined to agree with them, particularly in a 54-year-old woman with a long history of myopia who is now experiencing inevitable age-related changes to her eyes.
But US-based neuro-optometrist Dr Bryce Appelbaum begs to differ. When I first heard Dr Appelbaum talking on a podcast last year about the brain-eye connection and the link between brain injury and vision problems, it dawned on me that when it comes to my own eyesight, I might have been missing a big part of the jigsaw.
Dr Appelbaum at his clinic in Maryland, just outside of Washington DC Credit: Marisol Maltos/Bold Frame Photography
At this point, I was resigned to living with increasingly bad eyesight. However, after listening to the podcast – and remembering a head injury I suffered from a horse-riding accident in my childhood – I emailed him. I then filled in a questionnaire and met him online. He said that he was confident he could help.
“If I see a changing prescription in an adult and a history of brain injury, that’s a red flag,” he told me. “It’s a sign of a functional vision problem.” Since I don’t live near Dr Appelbaum’s MyVisionFirst clinic in Maryland, his five-day Vision Performance Training course was my only option. I booked my flights.
Understanding the brain-eye connection
Dr B, as he is affectionately known by his colleagues and patients, has treated thousands of people with eyesight issues, around half of which have previously suffered some kind of brain injury. One patient he works with, Justin Levy, was born with cerebral palsy and experienced a bleed on the brain. He underwent 14 surgeries and has had to learn how to walk from scratch four times. Despite these challenges, he underwent intensive vision training and was able to read an entire book for the first time at 39; he can finally see the world in 3D. The team also help stroke victims, children with autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia, as well as those in their 70s and 80s who don’t want to resort to using reading glasses.
He makes an important distinction between vision and eyesight, though. While eyesight is the ability to see and distinguish details clearly, vision is how the brain coordinates and processes the information we receive through the eyes. The latter, he says, can be improved at any age.
“My area of expertise is getting the brain and the eyes to work together as a team,” he says. “Traditional eye doctors are solely concerned with 20/20 eyesight. Patients do an eye test and are given prescription lenses so that they can read those tiny letters at the bottom of the eye chart. But vision isn’t just about seeing clearly. It’s about how our eyes move together and how the brain processes visual information. It’s how we derive meaning from the world around us and direct appropriate action.
“So, poor eyesight can often be a symptom of a vision problem, and glasses can help us to see clearly, but they won’t address vision, which is a brain problem,” he adds. “The good news is that for so many of these problems, improvement is possible.”
When my vision problems began
From the moment I heard Dr Appelbaum speaking, I realised that I probably didn’t just “become short-sighted”. Brain injury could absolutely have played a part. Aged nine, I was riding a horse which bolted. I lost my balance, my foot became hooked in the stirrup and I was dragged along the ground. I was knocked out and when I came to, my lip was split open and teeth were knocked out, while others had been driven up into my jaw. I had extensive surgery, but never saw a neurologist. Shortly after the accident, I was packed off to boarding school and found myself struggling to read the blackboard.
Emily Hohler has been wearing glasses since the age of nine, after she fell off a horse and suffered a head injuryCredit: John Lawrence/TMG
Naturally, I was given a pair of friend-repelling 1980s NHS glasses. As a child, being terrible at any sport involving hand-eye coordination meant I became a bookworm. Alongside increasingly strong prescriptions, I lived with an omnipresent low-level headache. In my 20s, I developed frequent, debilitating migraines and was plagued with anxiety and overwhelm when in busy places. Supermarkets and places with converging lines made me nauseous and unsteady.
When contact lenses finally became too painful to wear, in 2013, I had Lasik surgery, a laser treatment that reshapes the cornea to improve how light focuses on the retina, which allowed me to see sharply but worsened my night and contrast vision.
In the years following surgery, my myopia slowly made a reappearance and by 50, I was also starting to notice that I could no longer read small print without the help of a bright light and a magnifying glass. Reluctantly, I booked in with the optician and was prescribed two pairs of lenses: one for long and one for short sight. Yet each time I wore a pair, I noticed that my eyes felt weaker after wearing them, so I avoided doing so whenever possible.
My week-long vision training
Fast forward to a visit to the MyVisionFirst clinic in Bethesda, just outside Washington, DC, in March 2026. After a two-hour-long series of tests, Dr Appelbaum gives me his verdict. My long list of vision defects includes a “fragile” ability to focus, poor depth perception (I have trouble judging how far away an object is) and poor visual memory.
Prolonged screen use wasn’t helping and, as suspected, the childhood riding accident was playing a part. “You cannot have a head injury without it affecting your functional vision. It’s just a question of degree,” he says. “More than 50 per cent of the brain is involved in some way with processing visual information. You had an accident at an age when rapid cognitive and visual development was taking place. Your brain would have literally had to rewire itself.
“Stressful events activate the fight and flight response and over the years you have compounded the problem with screen-based work, which effectively locks your focus in close.”
He explains that excessively working at a screen is, for your eyes, similar to clenching your fist and keeping it clenched. “It’s not surprising that you feel off kilter: your brain is overwhelmed and exhausted trying to make sense of all the visual inputs.”
Dr Appelbaum took Emily through a series of exercises to train her vision and brain Credit: CHP
My heart sinks at the mention of screens. Modern life and work make them unavoidable, even for Dr Appelbaum. He says that he was so disturbed by watching his young children gravitate to screens during Covid that he developed ScreenFit – an at-home vision-training programme that aims to mitigate the effects of screen use. Noticeable improvements, in terms of blur, headaches, brain fog and eye strain are usually felt within a few weeks of consistent practice.
“Our visual systems evolved to move from scanning the horizon and exploring through nature. Now they are locked onto devices blasting melatonin-suppressing blue light at our faces at a fixed distance for hours on end,” he says.
Natural light is critical for eye health, particularly for healthy eye development in children, as is good posture, movement and nutrition. The global prevalence of myopia, thought to be virtually non-existent in hunter-gatherer societies, is expected to rise to 50 per cent by 2050. There’s a clear and established link between myopia and time spent indoors engaged in close work and on screens. In Seoul, South Korea, more than 80 per cent of teenagers are myopic by the time they leave school.
The cure
To start fixing my own vision deficits, I embark on a tailored programme of exercises. There is a greater emphasis on my weak areas, including divergence and convergence (turning the eyes inwards to focus on a near object and outwards to focus on a distant object) to improve depth perception and focus control.
Some of the exercises are basic. For focus control, one involved focusing alternately on letters on a small chart close to my face and then on a chart pinned to a wall. Practice is slow and mindful. Others make use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets and have me exploding asteroids by moving my eyes in certain ways, or slicing virtual fruit with a Samurai sword.
For one, I stand on a wobble board and pass a ball through a hoop while playing a verbal memory game to increase the challenge, the learning progressively sequenced by a clinician to help rewire the eye-brain connection. I am encouraged to be aware of how exercises feel and to visualise.
Slowly but surely, I can feel a connection between my thoughts and what my eyes are doing. It’s a bit like locating an unfamiliar muscle in a gym session with a personal trainer. By the end of the week, I can, with effort, turn two thumbs held in front of my face into three and keep them there as I move them closer to my face. People with good vision (my husband) find this easy. I don’t.
One exercise involved passing a hoop over a ball while standing on a wobble board and playing a memory gameCredit: CHP
My final evaluation arrives. In just five days, among other improvements, I have made dramatic gains in focusing ability, depth perception, reading speed and visual memory. What does this mean? I can fix my gaze on an object and see it clearly with greater ease. As measured, my right eye is now holding a target 97 per cent instead of 88 per cent of the time. Startlingly, my distance eyesight has gone from 20/30 to 20/20, which means that I can read the bottom line on an eye chart without glasses, and I have jumped two lines on the chart for presbyopia, which means that I can see numbers a little less than half the size I was seeing just five days earlier.
One of the most welcome changes, though, is hard to describe: a feeling of being more anchored in this world. I look at my phone in the cab to the airport and don’t feel sick. Once there, I am unfazed by all the people and lights and converging lines. I can read the announcement boards.
I head home, equipped with a VR headset and a folder full of homework. I have to do 10-15 minutes of exercises a day and will have a follow-up appointment via Zoom in two weeks. I am much more mindful about the brightness settings on my laptop and taking screen breaks.
Most people get excited about improvements to their eyesight, says Dr Appelbaum, but the bigger picture is that life is richer when you optimise the eye-brain connection. “Seeing 20/20 is one thing. I want people to be 20/happy,” he says.
Dr Appelbaum’s Top Three Tips for Visual Health
There’s a lot we can all do to optimise vision without specialist exercises, according to Dr Appelbaum. Here are his top tips.
The 20:20:20 rule for screen users. Take a vision break for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes, looking at something at least 20ft away. Ideally, go outside.
Eye push-ups. Cover one eye. Bring your thumb as close as you can to the other, open eye until it’s starting to get blurry. Make it clear. Hold for five seconds, then look into the distance for five seconds. Repeat. Then do the same procedure with the other eye. This helps to build flexibility and stamina in the focusing system.
Eat foods rich in nutrients that are known to benefit the eyes, particularly the retina and macula: lutein, Vitamin A, zeaxanthin, carotenoids and Omega-3 fatty acids; foods such as sweet potatoes, kale, eggs, salmon, mackerel, red peppers and walnuts.
Dr Appelbaum’s ScreenFit programme is available online. Telegraph readers can receive $200 off using this link or applying the code TELEGRAPH at checkout.
