jen

I have many of the same symptoms as you do when exposed to fluorescent light or most backlit led screens. Extreme loss of working memory (can look at a name on a plaque and not remember it seconds later), confusion, disorientation and dizziness, headaches and head pressure, nausea, malaise. Symptoms start after about 5 minutes of exposure to fluorescent lights in places like grocery stores, it’s slower when being exposed to bad computer or tv screens.

I was totally normal with zero symptoms until I took a psychedelic drug called salvia when I was 23 years old and had a horrific reaction. I haven’t been the same since, no clue what the hell that stuff did to my brain.

That was way back in 2008 and it feels like the medical community has made zero progress with this condition since then. It’s dismaying to say the least.

Fortunately I’m able to work from home these days and I’ve found a few devices that I can use heavily without awful symptoms including a television and a phone, so I lead a mostly normal life. I avoid going to places with bad lights and order most of the stuff I need online.

I’ve often wondered if is some sort of epileptic seizure we’re having. Have you tried any medicines or supplements? Any eye training routines besides patching?

Also, do you happen to suffer from depersonalization or derealization? What about tunnel vision? When you watch television do you “go into the show” or is it just a 2d image on a device far away from you?

Any responses appreciated, hoping we make some progress on curing ourselves in the 2020s…

      I don't think having a weaker eye is bad. I actually think it's part of the normal functional body. Just like you have a weaker hand and a weaker foot.

      If you don't see screens, you don't need to "train" your weaker eye. I feel like those recent screens are forcing us to have our eyes more symmetrical and both functioning equally which is not necessarily what it meant to be.

      There are many assymetries in our bodies beginning with our brains. Actually, I think forcing the weaker eye to "work" more could even be detrimental.

      • mike replied to this.

        Web I have no BVD (confirmed by an expert), but patching helps somewhat delay, but not prevent my symptoms if the flicker is coming from a screen. I haven’t tried other eye training because I already have perfectly binocular vision. I’ve done lots of experiments that support the idea that flicker is the trigger for me and one eye viewing it is sufficient to trigger my symptoms. Flicker from ambient LED lights is too immediately dangerous for me even covering one eye as best as I can - I just have to avoid it to not quickly become very debilitated.

        I haven’t found any medications that help yet. The headache neurologists have recommended trying magnesium and riboflavin supplements, which don’t help me at all and have irritating side effects for me. Recently they suggested CoQ10 supplements, which I’m not sure of yet. They don’t prevent symptoms from starting for me, but I’m not sure yet whether symptoms haven’t been super long-lasting in the past few weeks has anything to do with the supplements or is just because I’ve avoided major triggers…. CoQ10 is supposed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

        I don’t have any of what I think you’re describing in terms of depersonalization or derealization. I don’t have tunnel vision that I can notice myself. However, in a neuroophthalmologist’s visual field test, i had peripheral blindness in my right eye (the side where I feel symptoms) while flicker symptoms were starting due to the flicker of the ambient LED office lights, but not when we repeated the test at a later visit and kept the flickering LED lights off.

        I hope some of this helps - I’m sorry I don’t have better answers.

        • Web replied to this.

            jen

            Weird, I just looked at the frontispiece of that book for about a minute. I didn’t feel any symptoms at first, just a small amount of discomfort since it’s a confusing pattern. I showed it to my girlfriend and asked if she felt something similar looking at it, and she said it didn’t bother her but probably would if she had to look at it for a long time

            After moving on and looking at some of the other patterns I suddenly experienced an intense bout of deja vu. I then started to feel extreme brain fog. I tried to communicate this to my girlfriend and my speech was slow almost like my brain couldn’t communicate. What the hell?

            Is all this just epilepsy?

            To be fair I don’t feel the pain or extreme headache and confusion that comes with my usual exposure to fluorescent lights. And I have other health issues that produce similar types of brain fog (sulfur intolerance). But the deja vu is definitely weird. I wonder if epilepsy medication would help me…

            • jen replied to this.

                Web

                My first experience with a bad monitor was 2 years ago. It was a cheap viewsonic ips monitor. I remember after 20 minutes of watching, I quit the chair and just fell on the floor. Still completely conscious and with a strong need to eat something sugary, I ate like 4 bananas lol. It's like it threatened some form of hypoglycemia or a seizure, it was a bit scary.

                Since then, I experienced strong eye strains with two gaming monitors said to be pwm free that led to bloodshot veins in my eyes that I still have to this day. My eyes used to be white. Now they have all these dirty red veins pointing to the center and I noticed many people nowadays have those also.

                I experienced what I believe to be pwm with a seat ibiza screen/dashboard and couln't use the car anymore. A bwm also seemed to trigger symptoms but I'm not certain.

                I had quite a few laptops that I couldn't use. Symptoms were either strain either a sense of reduced cognitive ability/slower brain and sleepiness or in the contrary over excitement and jittery.

                With recent tvs that are pwm free, I have a hard time focusing and feel slight changes in personality or way of thinking.

                I've noticed in general phones of all kind tend to produce less symptoms than other devices.

                My theory is that everyone suffers from modern leds but some more than others.

                I don't have problems with old devices that were fine to me. They still are. So it's the modern display technologies that fuck me up. Nowadays they add so many processing layers that you're not looking at an image anymore. You have the screen with all the layers. Then the gpu that adds tons of processing. And now even the os does ton of shit. I've had android updates that completely shattered usable phones. It makes everything so complex and that's why in 7 years, people still try to figure out what exactly is wrong in this site.

                I try to stick as much as possible with old device and software.

                  Web Hopefully research will start on LED sensitivity soon. I'd also be very interested to know how this might be related to epilepsy. I just had a normal EEG and I think others here have too. I refused the flashing light portion of the testing, though, because it was going to be 3 minutes of flashing, that I knew could potentially trigger bad symptoms that might jeopardize my job. I didn’t think it was worth the risk since they weren’t testing LED-like flicker. They said the fastest was only going up to 24 Hz, I think, and the machine couldn’t do faster. They would only monitor for seizure and not visually evoked potentials that were studied for fluorescent flicker sensitivity in the 70s.

                  Web the delay in your getting noticeable symptoms after first looking at the patterns in the book is interesting. I also have a delay during which pressure seems to start to build in my head before my debilitating and sometimes weird neurological symptoms start. I hope you’ve recovered!

                  • Web replied to this.

                        Liberator005 I don't think having a weaker eye is bad. I actually think it's part of the normal functional body. Just like you have a weaker hand and a weaker foot.

                        If you don't see screens, you don't need to "train" your weaker eye. I feel like those recent screens are forcing us to have our eyes more symmetrical and both functioning equally which is not necessarily what it meant to be.

                        Who says anything about training your weaker eye? This is about relearn/reprogramming brain and eye muscles, so we can use screens without getting tension headache and red burning eyes. Why not try it if it works for many people?

                          reaganry I don’t know what to say about the article. It feels far fetched.

                          What we know is that eye-one-training has worked for me. From no screens newer than 2011 to all screens. I have no side-effects or problems, what I know about.

                          And it works for more people.

                            reaganry I think we all (like all people) have to a adapt/learn, and almost all people do this so quickly behind dithering LED-screens so they don’t notice.

                            Somehow we LEDStrain-people don’t adapt (or it takes long time and/or training/glasses).

                            Their is quite a few people on LEDStrain that have adapt to the new screens, some has left the forum. So we can’t see this problem as a “fixed condition”. It’s something some (and I hope all) can adopt to.

                            I have my guessing why it works, the easy explanation is relearning/reprogramming. How this works in detail I don't know, and I think we need a “top-of-the-line brain specialist” to explain how it's possible.

                            //Mike from Sweden

                                mike I wasn't discouraging anyone from trying, heck I might give it a good attempt at some point. But I don't think we should lose focus towards either aspect and I certainly have more ideas on empirically detecting, measuring and potentially mitigating bad stimulus from devices, and that's also important research.

                                    JTL @diop you are two of the smartest guys on this forum, please read, and think about this:

                                    I think we all work against the same goal. But in different ways (which is good I think).

                                    I remember back in 2014 @ the Apple forum when it was some users (me included) that had big problems with a IOS 7.1 update. I was happy not to be alone, that other people had the same problem. Everyone was trying to fix it. Nobody really did. Now is 2022, soon 2023 and we are still trying to find and fix something with hardware and software. Dithering, PWM, anti-aliasing … We may all have the same underlying problem, but I don’t know if we could find five people on this forum that can use exactly the same setup. You get the picture.

                                    It would be nice if we just could contact the manufactures like Apple and they just fix it. Even if they could fix this today it would take 10-20-30-40 years before all screens are changed in every place. I didn’t have the time to wait, and i don’t think so many else have that time either.

                                    Thanks to @martin by coincidence I discovered one-eye-covering/patching. I had so big problems with screens so if my old computer or phone had died I couldn’t find a replacement that I could use for my work and spare time. The result had been that I couldn’t work, so for me it was do or die.

                                    Down the line, more people like me will come to an endpoint. Where there is no more setups that will work. Then you are at do or die, and people will need solutions like one-eye-training.

                                    So, once again. Why can’t we get more people to start patching right now. Then we can collect the data with result from patching, adjust the technic and so on. Maybe we can find a way so the patching will give better results? Why have it worked so good for me that was “first in line”, was it something special i did, was it the sinus-medicine, was it that I had so much problems that made it more easy, or something else?

                                    And one more thing. I don’t need LEDStrain anymore, I am only here to help others!

                                    //Mike from Sweden

                                        3 months later

                                        jen sorry for the late response, I’ve been very sick the past several months. Strangely it all started exactly when I looked at that pattern, although there were other health issues at play. I have severely debilitating reactions to airborne fumes in garlic and onion, and got bombarded by that several times around November and December causing me to basically black and feel completely poisoned 24/7. Not fun. But I was also having a ton of weird panic attacks and deja vu, was unable to look at any screens without extremely intense cognitive symptoms.

                                        I definitely think part of my condition could be some sort of central sensitization or even ptsd. I suffer from severe tinnitus and hyperacusis as well as all this other stuff. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

                                        I’ve also noticed that brute-forcing exposure to devices can help sometimes.

                                        Fortunately I seem to be recovering pretty well after adjusting my diet and avoiding those damn fumes like the plague. My goal now is to find some sort of workable laptop situation so that I can use Microsoft Word and resume my career…

                                        I’m scheduled to get an EEG later this year so hopefully that will shed some light on whatever is happening, although after your experience I’m not very optimistic.

                                            mike Do you do eye patching now, or no need anymore? Even for new screens?

                                            Also how was your eye patch training? How many hours a day, and in both eyes?

                                            • mike replied to this.

                                                Web i started getting sick from garlic and onion last fall.

                                                  13 days later

                                                  tfouto It works really good now, I haven’t patched for 6 months! Some nights I can feel that my eyes are tired, that’s after 10-12 hours behind screens in a day. That’s kind of normal. I have got Philips Hue lights and the new Apple Watch.

                                                  When I patched, it was like half an hour to some hours in a day. My non-dominant eye.

                                                      21 days later
                                                      10 months later

                                                      mike the hero we need. but dont deserve. i too am at an endpoint all screens and leds hurt me, eye pain yada yada-. and through reading your posts. i tried eye patching and it is working. albeit slowly. but better then anything so far. so i am pretty happy. just wanted to give you a thankyou. eating healthier does help a little for me. being more alkaline. but the eye patching i think. is allowing the more damaged eye to heal. or cure myopia. dunno. but its working so am very happy. thankyou mike.

                                                          dev