A New Lens | Dr. Steve Ingersoll

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of youf're the Cure. I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. We've got Dr. Steve Ingersoll with us today. If you've been a longtime Listener, you've heard Dr. Steve before the topic today we're going to talk about autism and other neurodevelopmental delay. These symptoms that kids start to display. And it can be attention problems, it can be reading problems, different, what we just call neurodevelopmental. Of course autism been in the News. You know, J.B. hanley was on the show recently. Just an amazing story that he told about his son who has severe version of autism and non verbal. And if you didn't hear that podcast, go back and listen and just. It'll bring a tear to your eye. When JB discovered that his son was cognitively all there, very intelligent and once he could actually communicate through a letterboard and spelling and, and Jamie Hanley, JB's son was able to just basically vomit out all this stuff that was trapped inside of them. It was incredible. But go, go listen to that. But today we're shifting gears a little bit, talking more about what's actually going wrong in the brain or in their ways to kind of reverse engineer that thing, get to the root and maybe help these kids in other ways. So Dr. Steve's been on this path for a long time of trying to discover what's at the root of this. And I'll bring him on to talk about that very thing. But I wanted to start with this. And this is a study from 2005. And you can look this up, guys, just type in Environmental Working Group 2005. I think 10Americans is what I typed in. They looked at 10 babies, newborn babies, umbilical cord blood. Again, this is 2005. Twenty years ago, 287 different chemicals were detected in the umbilical cord blood of these newborns. All 10 samples had various forms of chemicals. 180 of these are known carcinogens. 217 toxic to the brain and nervous system. 208 of these 287 chemicals cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal studies. That's a toxic womb, a toxic mother, a toxic womb and therefore a toxic baby on day of life. 1287 different toxins. That's not even talking about the nutrient depletion. That's been well documented that modern diets are devoid of micronutrients and mamas who are not well nourished, I. E. Moms eating a standard American diet. So you've got babies in incubating in a womb that's nutrient depleted, stressed out, highly toxic. Who knows now, 25 years later what this study would show? So there's this perfect storm, nutrient depletion, toxicity. There can be a genetic predisposition and then boom, a major insult. Like we've talked about in some of these previous podcasts with Dr. Suzanne Humphries, Dr. Paul Thomas, the pediatrician, go listen to that if you want to, about the autistic kids in his practice and what that immediate trigger was, that stressor on the brain. But like I said, Dr. Steve Ingersoll has been studying this topic for a long time. He's actually come up with some solutions. So I've asked him to come on. Secretary Kennedy a few weeks ago had the big press conference, announced that autism rates are now down to 31. One in 31. And in, in California, I think it's one in 12 boys. So the numbers continue to worsen with this epidemic. And he said by September, they will start to release the data of an ongoing study that they're conducting to get to the root cause. So it is a hot topic. It's on the front pages. It will continue to be a hot topic until we can get to the root of this thing and fix it and avoid it and prevent it. Dr. Steve Ingersoll, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming back to educate the audience and myself. You have some amazing knowledge. And I always think of, I think it was the last one when you talked about how a thought produces light, internal biophotons produced by thought, by imagination and thinking. It just incredible blew my mind. But welcome back to the show. Dr. Steve, thank you for joining us. [00:04:28] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Appreciate that and appreciate you. All the work you're doing because it's needed and Secretary Kennedy's efforts and your efforts and our efforts are in synergy. We know that we have a lot of work to do, but we've got to do something. I mean, 1 in 31 autism is a catastrophe for the whole family and for the whole culture at those kind of staggering numbers. So we really need to understand what is it is. And here's my kind of technical explanation, but I'm going to try to make it understandable. I'll start with a kind of an unintelligible description. It is a biphasic epigenetic syndrome or constellation of behaviors. When I say biphasic, I mean the first phase is the toxicities and nutritional deficits that you opened with. The child comes into the world a little Compromised due to toxicities. And I'm sure that that's what Secretary Kennedy's going to prove or lay out in September. But then why the. That's general. Everyone has that just about. And so why are these particular kids affected in the way that they are? And that's rather a sad comedy of timing. We all learn how to do things, how to meet environmental demand at the point of demand, based on our state of maturation. When the demand comes our way, that's when we first learn to meet the demand. And whatever tools we possess at that point really are what define our thinking. Attentional behavioral differences. And let me just say there's no purposeless behavior. As bizarre as the constellation of behaviors are in autism, they're not purposeless. They are with a purpose. And it's incumbent upon us as diagnosticians to understand that purpose. Because if we don't understand what they're trying to accomplish, then we don't know what to do. We don't know what we're doing until we understand what they're doing. Because autism is not so much something one has, it's something one does. Now, I'm not saying there's not any organic underpinning to this. There certainly is, but it's generalized. The particular behaviors have a purpose, and they were designed for a purpose. And I'll get to that. So early in the neonatal period, we can tell which kids are at risk. And those kids have relatively soft primitive reflexes, particularly ocular reflexes, that right after birth, the child comes into the world with reflexes like if you brush the cheek of a newborn, the child will begin suckling. Its head will roll towards the stimulus. Of course, he finds the breast. So these movement reflexes have a purpose, and that is bump into the world. And right after that, if the outcome of that bumping into the world is good, the child learns to seek the breast. So then the child begins to use its musculature of its torso to roll towards mom. And so that reward then draws the child into the purposeful movement. But the initial reflexive movements are standard equipment at birth. Well, the eyes have similar circumstance. Face following, for example, the child will face follow. And some kids, the ones that are, I think, compromised from toxicities and nutritional deficits, have a little bit less robust face follow. They have, you know, if you take a baby and rotate them like this, their eyes will roll up. Like, you see my eyes moving up and down in response to my head movement. This is called the vestibular ocular reflex, the common name for it sometimes is called doll's eye movement. It's a writing reflex to keep my vision stable as my head moves around, you see, my eyes turn sideways as opposite my head roll. And so it keeps vision stable as my inner ear senses the reposition of my head. Well, you'll notice in the neonate, so we can spot this stuff in early baby, that doll's eye, or the VOR vestibular ocular reflex is just not as robust as normal. We also see that when you look way to the side, the eyes start ticking in what we call nystagmus. It's called endpoint nystagmus. That's less robust. And if I take a spinning drum of light and dark expands and spin, that the eyes will again begin ticking into a nystagmus movement. That's called the optokinetic nystagmus. And that's less robust. So these kids have a little delay in the. In the robustness of these reflexes. And consequently, we see these slight delays in their brain development expressed in their function. So maybe they're a little bit late. They didn't latch onto the breast very well, or they had some digestion problems or didn't crawl really well. They're walking, perhaps, and talking a little bit late. But they get there, they're reasonably on task or on timetable, and the child begins to talk. And here's what happens. In a visual sense, the way vision works is we've got this. You've heard of rods and cones. The rods are the periphery of our vision, and the cones are our inspection of things. So our rods go out there and find things spatially, and then we zero in on the cones and inspect those things that we have found. Well, vision is not what you think it is. I mean, we look out there and we say, oh, everything's clear. It really isn't. If I took a quarter and held it at about arm's length and looked through that quarter, that's where my clear vision is. Everything around that is about 2200, the big E on the chart. So really, my vision is all blurred except for this little spot. And I move the spot around based on what this blurry vision tells me, where things of interest are, and I zero in. [00:11:45] Speaker A: So really works peripheral vision for those who aren't watching video, what Dr. Steve described this peripheral vision versus central vision. Small, central, almost pinpoint vision, but go ahead, Steve. [00:11:57] Speaker B: Yep. And so I find things with my peripheral vision, and then I lock in and inspect those things. Then I release and go back and find the Next thing, and I do this in a back and forth accordion kind of style and many, many iterations per moment. I'm doing this fast back and forth, back and forth. And at the same time I'm lining my eyes up. Physical coordination of binocular alignment. And so right around 18 months, most kids get skilled enough at their eye movements so that they were, they're able to shift their attention to the central field as the primary spot to pay attention. So most of their attention starts flowing into that central little quarter sized center vision. And then they inspect the characteristics of the things that they've locked onto. And that's what gives rise to language. That's why kids take off in language at the same time, they're coming out of the terrible twos. And of course, that's a transition from my hand to my eyes as the primary seat of attention. The hyperactive child really is a child that hasn't yet learned to replace his hand with his eyes as the primary explorative tool. So when vision becomes dominant in an attentive sense, and this child is skilled enough to find and inspect that peripheral, find vision and that clear inspect vision, when they can do both those things and line their eyes up at the same time, they then become primarily visually dominant and they start exploring the physical surround by grabbing things visually instead of tactfully. So, so the, their vision replaces their hand. [00:14:01] Speaker A: They were going from touching everything, grabbing everything, putting everything in their mouth, just tactile, tactile input through the touch, through the hands, and now it's, it's flipped to input data through the eye. [00:14:12] Speaker B: Right. And when those kids, when all of us get to that point, now we're setting the stage for our intellectual development. Because when you think about thinking, you realize that no matter what question I ask you, I'll ask you a question. Dr. Ben, you own a bicycle? I sure do, yes. And you just saw that bicycle? I bet I did, yes. [00:14:36] Speaker A: On front, actually, because it's my daughter's old bicycle, because mine's broken. We just went on a bike ride last night. Now I'm riding a girl's bike with a basket on the front. [00:14:44] Speaker B: All right, all right. So now we could have a half an hour conversation about this bicycle and all the stuff associated, all the action associated with this bicycle. And you would easily recount using language, speech, you would tell me all about this experience, but the experience itself, the thinking about the experience itself is a great big visual scenario that you've got in your head. So thinking and language are not the same thing. Thinking is a visual event. Language is a description of visual event. That's really why we're having so much trouble with our school systems. You see, our educational programs are centered on language, which is not thinking. It is the description of thinking. We need them both. You know, I need to be able to think. But language is much easier if it is used as a description of visual thought. If I'm not very good at visual thought, I don't have anything to say. And that's really the story of struggling students. They're not good at the visual underpinning or predicate of language. That's why they struggle with language. And our educational approach is targeted toward language. It needs to be targeted towards imagery, that is the ability to construct visual scenarios in one's mind. And when you do that, language gets easy. Which really brings us to what's going on in autism. Because one of the critical factors in autism, probably the most dramatic factor in autism, is the retreat from language. And language is the. A language arises secondary to central visual inspection of things. So the first step of language is the visual grab of objects and the visual inspection of objects. So what I do. Take my little granddaughter, for example, Elora. When she was about 18 months or about two, her dad and I were both Dada. But then a little while after she differentiated dada from papa, she saw that papa me was, you know, far more dashing than her father, and therefore he was stuck with the dada, and Papa became the honorific. So, yeah, so she differentiated the language because she saw the difference. At the time that I was a dada, all men were dadas. Right. But her language started to differentiate as she made distinctions between. Through that central visual inspection. So that's why language explodes at the same time that the child comes out of the terrible twos, because central visual attention becomes the primary seat of attention. But here's what happens in autism, regressive autism, because that's really what we see at 18 months or somewhere in that two to three years of age, right around two, we see a sudden regression from language. So the child is developing some language, maybe a little slow, but getting there. And all of a sudden they get sick from something like a vaccine like the MMR, which is what, 18 months. Typical. Right. And we get this load or some other injury. Now, I know there's all kinds of controversy. We can have that argument. But some insult has created a situation whereby the child's recently acquired binocular alignment is knocked off target. And here's where those that are just listening, auditorily are going to have a little bit of trouble because I want to demonstrate this to you. Dr. Ben, if you could please hold your fingers up one close and one far right along the midline. And I want you to turn your eyes in and look at the near finger. That'll create a situation where you over converged your eyes compared to the far finger. While you're looking at your near finger, you're going to see the far finger double. Yeah, true. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Yes. [00:19:25] Speaker B: As now slowly move that far finger off to the side a little bit. Just right out. That's probably far enough. Now you're looking at your near finger and you're out 20 or 30 degrees from the midline with that far finger. And it probably looks single now. Yep. Because. And here's what's happening in my central visual field. I've got a real tight, what's called panem's area. It's a receptive field size. Be like looking through a screen door. The screen on the door, a bunch of tiny little squares. And if the light from one square fell and a different object fell next to it, but they're in different squares or I see them as separate. However, as we go away from the central visual field, the size of the receptive field size gets bigger. So now we're looking through chicken wire, let's say with a bigger space for each cell. And both the misaligned targets fall in the same cell. I summate them. That's what happened here. So you were looking out what we call the parafoveal. The fovea is the very center of your vision. And the periphobia, which is kind of the area surrounding has a bigger panems area, bigger receptive field size. And so you discover. So here's what happens with the child. Child gets sick. He has already kind of soft binocular skills from that precursor of toxicity that we talked about in the beginning. And so their ability to hold alignment is a little bit less robust than normal. And they slip into a little bit of misalignment which creates double vision in the central field. They discover that if they look just off to the side a little bit that the double vision goes away. However, the very central field is what we rely upon for our language. That's why the child retreats from language. It's also why the child starts flapping in the periphery. They'll flap their fingers off to their peripheral vision or they'll go to venetian blinds and flip them on and off or a light switch, or they'll splay their Fingers in front of them and create visual motion. All of that stimulates the perifobial region of your vision, your periphery, and helps them block out the center. They're blocking out the center because the center vision gives them double vision. Because their eye alignments are off a little bit, because they're less robust in their locked in alignment from the previous delay from toxicities and nutritional problems. And so a certain segment of the kids that are, that are coming to the game of brain development a little bit soft, end up less robust in holding proper alignment, they slip into double vision. They take a behavioral step, look to the side to get rid of the double vision that becomes routinized. And that's the trigger point. Now here's the important information about that. If at the very, and this is real important for all physicians and all parents to understand because we can block this from happening if at the first moment of suspected regression into autism. And of course that's really what we find in the case history. Mom says the child was sick after the vaccine or after some injury and he was listless and then he started losing his language and all of a sudden it was a cascade of disaster, a retreat from. And at the first sign of that, put a patch on the child, patch one eye and about every three hours change the patch to the other eye and do that for a couple of days. Then when the child is feeling better, remove the patch and the regression into that central visual field neglect will be gone. We can interrupt this, we can prevent this problem from happening. That's my main reason for wanting to get on and I thank you so much for allowing me to say this. We need to, and I hope Secretary Kennedy gets this information because we need to, we've got this, this culture endangering incidence rate 1 in 30. Oh my goodness, we've got to do something about this. And I'm telling you, if you, if you interrupt the need or the impetus for this central visual neglect, the whole constellation is interrupted and doesn't happen. So that's the preventative message, the therapeutic message. After kids have already routinized this non central looking. And of course, you know, you've seen plenty of autistic kids, you know that they don't look at you, they look to the side of you a little bit. Exactly what I'm describing here. The therapeutic solution is to reawaken central visual attention. And there's a number of techniques to do that. And that's what we do at the Iconics Learning Clinic. And you know, people need to Understand this, there is a treatment method for this. And the first step of that treatment is it's tough sledding. I don't want to give the impression that this is an easy fix. It's not, it's tough. But we know what they. We know at least what we need to do. And that is to reintroduce central visual attention and central visual grasping of objects. So that central vision, the child is looking out his visual system out onto the environment and he needs to learn to centrally lock on to those objects. That is what stimulates language. So the answer isn't in speaking the land. The answer is in the mental imagery that precedes speaking. And the disconnect is between that imagery and speech. And when the demand is shrunk down to letters, then they, they get it. They are able to do that by system. However, there's a better way. I mean, not to say that that's not a good thing. I mean, it's a great thing, It's a revelation. But you see, these kids have full blown imagery going on in their mind. They just don't know how to bring that imagery to central focus to connect it to language. You see, language. Language are particles. Central vision is the particulate analysis of the great big visual scene. So in my visual scene of my peripheral vision, all the parts exist inside the scene. And my central vision analyzes the parts of things that are in the scene. Words in that manner, are particles of thought. Imagery is the big picture of the meaning of the thought. And words are particles of thought. And since they've retreated from the system, the central visual system that analyze the particles, likewise, they retreat from the words that are the particles of thought. That's the correlation there. Yeah, it's treatable along those lines. Yeah. [00:27:13] Speaker A: What if you could, I mean, how much of this is because of the natural timeline of the maturation of these reflexes and that switch from touch to vision? You know, I'm not saying this is the answer, but what if things were just so well cared for and preserved? Meaning the vaccine schedule was pushed out to three years old or something like that? [00:27:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's a comedy of timing. I say a comedy, it's a tragedy of timing. We are loading up those kids at just the wrong time. The critical area, the absolutely critical time, is at the transition from physicality to the representation of physicality, which is what vision is. Vision is movement and touch. Estimated vision is our virtual physicality, if you will. And we have to connect the two. They have to be congruent. My eye Movement skills must be in maturity enough to make vision and touch congruent. If the two are matching, I can substitute vision for touch. If they mismatch. I've got to do something about this. Some kids swing an eye out and become strabismic. They turn an eye way over to the side and ignore one eye. That works. That's why we see strabismus, that is misaligned eyes. The coming around at that same time. That's when they. That's when that happens. Because there's. There's. They're not skilled enough. They're mobile, they're going through. Vision is like vision is to humans as cat whiskers are to cats. Vision is out in front of us telling us what we're going to bump into. Just like cat's whiskers. Right. Only ours, of course, extend out further and forms the basis of our. Of our intellect, which is really the only human tool. It is the human tool. I mean, when you look at the physical attributes of human beings, we should be extinct. We can't run very well. We don't have claws. We can't fly. We can barely swim. We should all be dead. Right? The animals should have overtaken us. Except that we have the one great tool. When God blew the breath of life into Adam's nostril, he sent a little pixie dust of the ability to construct imagery in our minds. And that is the vehicle by which we transcend time and space. And so I asked you about your bicycle. You visually traveled back in time and to a different place as if you were standing there actually looking at the scene. Indeed you were. You defied Newton's formulations entirely and transported your consciousness to yesterday when you were riding the bike and you saw every detail as if you were standing right there. That is the unique skill of human beings. We transcend time and space and is the tool of dominion. Of course, God had that all planned out, and we're now just discovering that, you know, and every time we discover something new, we realize, oh, that was already in the Bible. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. 100%. [00:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So we think we're discovering all these things and then we circle back and go, oh, I see. [00:31:02] Speaker A: Our vision is a little more clear. [00:31:04] Speaker B: That's right. [00:31:05] Speaker A: More deeply, with a little more understanding. [00:31:08] Speaker B: And without vision, the people would perish. Didn't I read that somewhere? [00:31:17] Speaker A: Go ahead. [00:31:18] Speaker B: Well, I'm just saying that these anomalies. I guess I'd say the operating system of human consciousness is imagery. The ability to take that. That extraordinary capacity of creation, of Lighted scenarios in our mind, which in another podcast we talked about the photic energy that's produced with that and how that contributes to the energy that runs our mitochondrial glycolysis and subcortical regulation, all the physiologic business that goes with that, but that fantastic miracle of skill that human beings have, give us dominion over all the creatures. But we also have to live in the Newtonian reality of physicality. Therefore, we need language. So we have to connect this fabulous thinking capacity. And if we were telepathic, I wouldn't need language. I just take the pictures of my head and send them to yours, and we wouldn't speak at all. But we don't have that capacity because we have this duality about us. We are both body and spirit, and our consciousness, our conscious mind, is their spirit really. Or maybe, maybe there are three. A triune situation. But I can think in vision, and then I get, you know, and the thing is, I see the future consequences, then I can make a decision. And not only can I make a decision, I must make a decision. Yes, I see good from evil. Oh, so culpability comes with this construction of blighted scenario. And then I choose, and I have free will to choose. That's a lot of responsibility on a bad guy like me. I have to choose. Moment by moment, I have to choose. And I don't always choose right. And so I need help. Fortunately, God anticipated that too, sent that along. Hallelujah. But this business of creating lighted scenarios, absolutely central to our identity and our destiny. But in order to live in the physical world, we have to describe that which is in our minds with language. And if there's a disconnect between that. See, the central vision gives me the words, the particles, my peripheral vision gives me the picture which is the imagery. And I need them both. And if I, if I, for some reason, the reason that I just described to you, the lack of binocularity and the resultant double vision and the, and the neglect of the very center of my vision, I, I will neglect the language also. That is entirely connected to central vision. That's the etiology of autism, of regressive autism. And the stage is set with compromised developmental physiology, of toxicity and nutritional deficit and other factors, I'm sure too. But that's the etiology. And it can be interrupted at the first sign of regression with a patch. And it only takes 2, 3, 4 days until the child is feeling better, and then no patch required. And that will stop the cascade into the regressive retreat from language and Then the tougher situation is once the kids are already routinized in this parafoveal fixation. When I say parafoveal fixation, what I mean is directing attention out the side of their vision instead of dead center and that becomes routinized, it becomes their habit. Therapeutically, we just need to shift them back into the central field and fortunately we have some tools to do that. And that's what must be done to restore language. [00:35:33] Speaker C: Are you ready to take control of your health together? You're not alone. Dr. Ben, as well as a mission driven team here at Veritas, created this online wellness membership because so many are suffering. We want to help more people by sharing the truth that we believe will change lives. Veritas Wellness Membership is more than just a wellness program. 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Visit veritaswellnessmember.com to get started. [00:37:11] Speaker B: How. [00:37:13] Speaker A: Does does this manifest in other ways such as dyslexia, add, adhd? I mean, is this a spectrum of, you know, the severe autistic? Even on autism spectrum, there's obviously the. [00:37:27] Speaker B: Spectrum, but their classification there, the like, for example, Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's syndrome is thought to be kind of autism. Like if you will. It's actually the opposite. Autistic kids are, let me put it this way, both the Asperger's kid and the autistic kid are lost in the forest. The autistic kid sees a sea of trees and does not have the capacity to focus down on a single tree. The Asperger's kid is so ingrained looking and inspecting the bark of a single tree that he doesn't realize he's in a forest. So it's the opposite. You see, the Asperger's guy is heavy, heavy into detail and misses the sort of bigger picture of social awareness and the cues that come from bigger analysis. Elon Musk, for example, he's, he's admitted or said that he's got this Asperger's syndrome. Well, if you watch him, you'll see he's socially awkward. You know, there's a. He's in an interview, let's say, and is brilliant guy, brilliant digital mind. He's in the bark of every little tree, right? Of every little thing. That's why he's so successful in the digital age. You see, he's on the detail. He is on all detail, but the context of that detail is sort of lost on him. So let's say he's in an interview and the interviewer says, well, what do you think is going to be the outcome of AI? And he'll pause. So you see this kind of lengthy pause as he's speaking his way through his mind. He's analyzing part by part by part. And then comes the answer, well, we'll probably all be dead by next Tuesday, you know, or something. You know, something that would be an earth shattering pronouncement. And he says it in a completely flat affect. And then he watches the people around and they all are shocked and making these big facial features. And then he mimics them, you see. Then he, then he displays the same kind of. So that's what's going on. He's socially not very aware, but he's smart enough to realize that he can learn to use the same social responses as the people around him. So you see this little delay and then he chimes in, he's thinking his way through this. That's not what the balanced global particle person like you and me, we catch them both. And he is analyzing by rule an extreme example of that. This is some years ago, maybe, maybe 15, 20 years ago, I was at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona and Temple Grandin, the noted autistic lady who's articulate enough to tell everybody what it's like to be autistic. So her, she's, she's a speaker and she's filled with a room, room full of guys like me, developmental optometrists who know what the, who know what I just told you. Okay, so she's up there and she's running her hair, fingers through her hair, essentially flapping in the periphery is what she's doing. She doesn't know that. She's just got this gesture going and her voice is unmodulated, she's screeching and down, you know, she's doing the classic kind of autistic behaviors as she. Her central message in the lecture was, hey, if you neurotypical people would just tell us what the rules are, we could act better, you know, we'd do better. That was her message. So a break comes and of course, inevitably people come up to the speaker and ask a question. So this lady, one of my colleagues, is up there asking her a question, and Temple Grandin is standing too close, giving the answer. So she's like really close to this lady's face as she's answering, and she's looking off to the side and kind of her head's popping around a little bit as she's talking. And the lady starts retreating. And I'm watching this scenario, ladies retreating. Temple Grandin moves in, keeps that too close a distance, and chases the lady practically across the stage. And pretty soon the lady's making sort of defensive gestures. You're lifting and Temple Grandin just keep coming in. So after the break, I raised my hand and said, Dr. Grandin, could you tell us what you think, how you determine the correct social distance when in conversation? Without missing a beat, she said, I use the distance it takes to open up supermarket doors when you walk up to them. She had determined that the correct distance when in conversation was that distance that she experienced with these supermarket doors. And so regardless of the signals, the social signals that this questioner was giving her, she disregarded that entirely and did an intellectual top down analysis as to how close she should be and just kept that distance. So she was running her life by rule. It's like the Rain man saying, okay, It's Wednesday at 6 o' clock, we got to have Mac and cheese. And you know, Vanna White and I know where all the queens are. It's all systems, you know, instead of this integration between the peripheral and central field. So I know that's a lot of information here in this kind of short period of time, but. So the attention deficit question, the dyslexia, those are all disturbances between the integration of central and peripheral visual field. And they're all treatable. They are maladaptive behaviors. They are not conditions. Dyslexia is not a condition. One does not have dyslexia. One does. Dyslexia. One does not have attention deficit disorder. One does. Attention deficit disorder. So attention deficit hyperactive adhd. It's not a diagnosis. I mean, the diagnosis is made by checking off the behaviors we make the diagnosis by saying, oh, look, he's got, you know, 15 of these behaviors. Aha. We'll call it ADHD. But then when we say, well, what's ADHD? Well, it's people that do that stuff. So it's circular, you see. And unfortunately, the label itself stops the inquiry as to the real question. And the real question is, why does that guy act that way? Attention deficit taken to the extreme degree is like my cat on a laser dot. I can control my cat's behavior entirely with a laser dot. The cat does not know how not to jump on the laser dot. Even in exhaustion, the cat will pounce on the laser dot. You, of course, will not play laser dot with me. Because there's something else driving your behavior, and it is the imagery that you create in your mind of the future that's what guides your behavior, not dots. Kids that have poorly developed internal imagery chase dots, metaphorically speaking. And that's really what attention deficit is. The environmental happenstance captures their attention. You and I, it's not that we've filtered out those happenstances that occur around us. It's just not the main thing driving our behavior and our attention. The imagery in our minds is what keeps our attention because we have it well developed and we can relate it to others through language, first in form of gesture, then speech, finally textually. So the very purpose of language is the transmittal of imagery. And the very purpose of education should be the skill of creating imagery. And then language follows that quite easily. But if you try to teach language before imagery, good luck. That's what's happening. We've got a whole bunch of misdirected educational effort that way. And that's why we're bringing this new visually based model, like at Freshfire Christian Academy in Lubbock there, to the operations of, you know, we believe in decentralizing education. I mean, clearly we've got an educational problem in the public sector, not only for the reasons that I'm describing here, but all the other things that don't even need to be discussed. But we need to redesign how we do education. Knowing what we know now about neurology and neurologic development, brain development and our system. Well, think about it. Every single thing in our society, aviation, communication, transportation, everything we do is unrecognizable from a century ago, except education. We're doing the same stuff. It's not correct what we're doing. Our educational system is mis structured. And we can talk about whether it's misguided philosophically, that's Another argument. But it's structured wrong. It won't work and doesn't work and hasn't worked because it's not structured correctly. It doesn't match what brain development requires. So anyway, we've retooled that and actually we find it's better to be done in smaller groups, home groups. I believe every church in the land should have its own school. And that's our mission. We want to help that way and that we can and have and are working at that. This autistic discussion, boy, it is so necessary. And I hope that through your organization and ours at Iconics, we can have an impact, because this needs to be addressed. It's. It's huge. And I know that you, you know, with Veritas Medical, you guys have. You're right in exactly the right philosophy and approach. And I'm so happy to hear that you've gotten some attention from Secretary Kennedy and more power to you and God bless you. That's the exactly what we need. And then these spread across the land. And I. I think it is it. It's a joyful time. It's incredible what's going on. [00:48:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:49:00] Speaker B: We were, you know, kind of moping around, hoping for the better, and now all of a sudden, the sun's shine and we've got a chance of doing the right thing, which is, of course, our life's mission. That's what we want. [00:49:14] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you, Dr. Steve. I mean, you've been brought so much incredible knowledge and just your passion for this, and we didn't really talk about how you got into this, but with your own child. I remember from previous interviews and some of his developmental and learning challenges. But you've obviously got to put it in you and gifted you and given you this hunger and desire to help these kids and therefore help our nation and the world. So thank you for all that. If someone wanted to learn a little more, in particular about what you just touched on at the end here, you mentioned Fresh Fire Academy, Christian Academy here in Lubbock. And if. If local folks don't know about that, you can check that out on their website. I'm probably. I'm going to have the pastor and the head of that school here on a podcast shortly. But they're implementing the curriculum and the teaching model that Dr. Steve's talking about, and there are other places doing that too, around the country. But talk a little bit about if someone's interested in that. Where do they learn more? How do they explore that? Maybe start a home group or a School at their church or whatever. [00:50:24] Speaker B: Yep. They can go to Iconics, which is I C O N I x. Iconics Learning Clinic.com will take you to a website. Another website is IconicsInstitute.com which is kind of the training arm of our work. Right there in Lubbock. Resilient beginning is Cassidy Luna. Dr. Cassidy Luna working with you at Veritas. She's clinically helping kids that have learning problems. And of course, Fresh Fire Christian Academy in Lubbock. My chiropractic daughter and I are coming down and another staff member from Iconics. We're coming down on June 13, I think, to do some training at the, at the academy. So, but. And we've got a couple of projects going on other spots in Texas. We've got a couple of schools that are forming in Boston area and especially school in Houston for autistic kids. And we've got another one that is forming in Dallas area, west of Dallas. So we're starting to get some momentum in those spots in northern Wisconsin and Atlanta area. So we, we've got some projects going. Probably a little too many projects going, but we're passionate about it. We've got a pretty solid team of people under us that understand what we're doing, and we're working hard to try to get our mission accomplished. But anyway, it's Iconics Learning Clinic. I C O n I X IconicsLearningClinic.com IconicsInstitute.com Fresh Friar Christian Academy in Lubbock. Resilient beginnings. Cassidy Luna. Dr. Cassidy Luna. She. She is great right now. Well, we both agree on that. She's a wonderful lady. [00:52:44] Speaker A: She's a great asset to this community and to Veritas for sure. [00:52:48] Speaker B: She is. [00:52:50] Speaker A: Thank you for training her and supporting her and thank you for being with us today. It's always so fun to hear from you and to learn from me. [00:52:59] Speaker B: So thank you to come back anytime that you have a slot. I know you're very busy and you got a lot of people that you want to bring on and doing a great job with Veritas Medical. You're. Your podcasts are great. I like to watch them. So thank you. [00:53:19] Speaker A: All right, thank you, Dr. Steven and for everybody out there. As Dr. Steve just said, the podcast, they're everywhere, on all the podcast platforms. Our Veritas wellnessmember.com website. We'll archive it there. YouTube everywhere. We'd like you to share this with your friends, your family, your neighbors, your co workers to continue to spread this truth. It's going to be the people, people like Dr. Steve, who have pieces of this puzzle all coming together to turn this chronic disease health disaster around. And it is a perfect opportunity now, with the kind of leadership we have in the country, that we can take some alternative steps than some of the old, old ways of thinking and doing so. It's a great time to be alive. Great time to bring some solutions so y' all spread this far and wide. And, Dr. Steve, we'd love to have you back. Somebody, thanks again for joining us. [00:54:12] Speaker B: Thank you. Appreciate it. You bet. [00:54:14] Speaker A: All right, everybody. I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. You're the Cure. We'll see you next week. Bye. [00:54:18] Speaker B: Bye.