Simple eye tip to protect against seizures plus an update

Eliminate seizures caused by strobe and flickering light...

Author

Martin Oguzie
March 01, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Hey everybody!
Welcome to this week’s newsletter. It’s been a busy few weeks as I’ve been spending more time in the clinic. However, I’ve taken some time to pause and think about some changes that I wish to make to the newsletter in the coming weeks. I want to make the newsletter a little more personal and inject more of my personality into it, starting with this episode. So the plan is to keep the eye tips brief, adding more thoughtful insight and character to the newsletter while keeping it a light read. I also intend to incorporate my mission of helping my community “keep your eyes precious”. This was the subtitle to my book which was first published in 2012 and it has remained my personal mission for the work that I do in eye care… more on this in future newsletters. As a subscriber you are hearing it first right here, so thank you. 

For today’s eye tip, this is a sneak peek into a topic that I will be releasing a short YouTube video on soon. If you are one of the approximately 3% of people who may experience photosensitive epilepsy or one of the people who develop it each year due to the impact of flickering lights and strobe lights, this tip can help you. Even if you are not, it’s worth being aware of for yourself or to help others. In fact, I have done this myself for many years when exposed to very rapid flickering lights or strobe light; many of us will agree that these lights don’t feel comfortable to be exposed to. 

sensory overload!

Monocular vision holds the answer.

One Eye Tip

The risk of seizures caused by strobe and flickering lights can simply be minimised by closing one eye. This has long been know and tested in visual neuroscience research. The flickering lights essentially cause information overload in the part of the brain that deals with vision called the occipital cortex. Closing one eye basically cuts the information in half, reducing the overload.

How can you use this information?

If you are watching a movie scene with strobe lights or if you are at a live show when strobe lighting starts, you can close one eye until the strobe effect passes or until you can leave the environment.

This is precisely what I’ve done for many years as a preventative measure even though I have no history of epilepsy or seizures.

Questions of the week

The short answer is that; I don’t think intermittent fasting is necessarily going to impact eye floaters for most people. However, I advocate thinking of intermittent fasting as a tool to allow your body the time to detoxify, recover and fight premature ageing mechanisms. This could help your eyes in numerous ways, including fighting early eye floater development. Great question.

Concluding Thoughts

What a simple tip, that could make a huge difference to you or someone else that you know. Keep it in your back pocket for when you might need it 🙂 . Expect more of this format in future issues as well as a name change for the newsletter to the “Keep Your Eyes Precious” newsletter. Along with that, expect more tips inline with my framework for keeping your eyes precious. It may not make full sense now, but I’ll be unpacking it over the coming months and year.

Until next issue,

Martin Oguzie | Optometrist | Creator of the KYEP Newsletter & Community

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