One of the most consistent observations I have made over the many years of working with patients and broken down performace athletes is the role that their visual system played in maintaining their ‘less’ desirable patterns of behaviour. We do not experience the world as separate sensations of sight, sound, touch, and smell.
Instead, we experience our world as a continuous flow of integrated information that is processed through the brain’s association cortex.
Within this hierarchy, the visual system tends to dominate, followed by auditory processing and then somatosensory information — the signals coming from the body itself.
Every piece of sensory information (except olfactory – smell) we receive from the outside world travels through the emotional regions of the brain before reaching the cortex, where it is subjectively evaluated, interpreted and responded to with input from the limbic system – the emotional regions of the brain.
In simple terms:
First we sense… then we respond.
And our responses are shaped by our subjective interpretation of what we sense.
The Modern Visual Overload
In the increasingly bigger, stronger, fast and visually saturated world we live in today, the visual system has become overly dominant, often at the expense of the valuable information coming from our other senses, inclusive of the emotional regions of the brain…
The untarnished ‘natural’ visual system itself is extraordinarily complex.
Different regions specialise in detecting shapes, colours and movement.
The fusiform gyrus, for example, plays an important role in recognising faces and interacting with regions that interpret emotional expression. Other regions help us understand where our body exists in space and how far away objects are.
Yet the amount of visual information we process through modern technology — phones, screens, and high-pixel environments — may now exceed what our biology originally evolved to manage comfortably.
Psychologists were already raising this concern as early as the year 2000. It is even many times more relevant in 2026 today.
Foveal vision — the focused vision used when staring at a phone or computer screen — is extremely demanding. Neurons that would normally contribute to peripheral awareness need to be recruited to help process this intense central visual information.
Over time, this can influence how we perceive and navigate our environment physically and socially.
You only need to walk through a busy shopping centre to notice the change.
Years ago, two people approaching each other would naturally adjust their paths. Today, if I don’t step aside the person coming towards me, we would collide — a subtle sign that peripheral awareness is not what it once was.
Vision plays a powerful role in the maintenance of the psychophysical state and navigational skills that we are currently organised around.
Consider the difference between an elite tennis player and someone experiencing depression.
An elite tennis player’s visual system performs an extraordinary task, simultaneously monitoring the vast spatial environment of the court while tracking a small, fast-moving ball travelling at incredible speeds. In doing so, their visual system integrates peripheral awareness, body position, timing, and emotional regulation seamlessly, allowing the player to respond fluidly and efficiently.
However, if a person is experiencing depression and maintains the posture and metabolic state associated with that condition, the visual system self-organises around that state as well and will go on to play a major role in the maintenance of the persons depressive state.
That is; the world is then perceived through the lens of that internal organisation, and the brain becomes increasingly skilled at maintaining the behavioural and psychological patterns that match it.
Depression is a serious condition, and I do not make light of it here. I simply use it as an example of how our sensory systems — particularly vision — can reinforce ‘any’ state we are currently organised around.
In other words:
The way we experience the world through our visual system can very much contribute to and help stabilise the state we are in.
A Simple Experiment
Here is a simple way to explore this idea for yourself.
Stand upright and lift one leg slightly away from the midline of your body with your eyes open.
Notice how stable or unstable you feel.
Now repeat the same movement standing on the opposite leg.
Many people notice a difference.
If you detect a disparity, it reflects the differences in how the two hemispheres of your brain are organising information about balance and orientation.
Now repeat the same experiment with your eyes closed.
Often the difference between eyes open and eyes closed can be surprisingly large, which highlights ‘the FACT’ that the visual system is misrepresenting orientation in space time to the cortex and the associations cortex is agreeing with it, increasing hyper vigilance and anxiety.
Ideally, the nervous system should not rely excessively on visual input for basic balance, orientation, social correctness and acuate integrations.
So lets return to our standing on one leg eyes closes rule.
Nature Always Finds the Lowest Energy State
The Beauty and Elegance Here Is – That Nature follows simple rules.
Imagine a pendulum swinging. According to the laws of energy conservation, it will gradually lose energy until it reaches its lowest energy state — complete rest – because this an indisputable composite of the 1st law of energy conservation, which starts that in all systems energy must be conserved.
The human system works in a similar way.
When we remove excessive visual interference and allow the body to self-organise itself around the vertical constant of gravity, the nervous system naturally seeks the most efficient and stable configuration – because that’s the law.
Your system may pass through several temporary conformational states before settling into its most economical pattern, which is when it is doing the ‘right’ thing’
What you need to allow – only rescuing yourself from falling over when you need to – is to approach this challenge in a child like manner and mentally step aside and let your system do what it is intrinsically knows to do best and that is stabilize you physically and emotionally to the number one rule in nature – as mentioned- GRAVITY.
After all, it is energetically expensive for the body to wobble and compensate unnecessarily.
Nature always prefers efficiency.
Why Eyes Closed Are Used in NeuroPhysics Therapy (NPT)
During the NeuroPhysics Therapy process, we ask patients to close their eyes while performing all of their purposely prescribed movements, so that they become much more aware of information coming from their bodies and how they emotionally experience this information.
Hence via support and coaching from the NPT practitioner, the patient learns how to monitor and detect errors in how their system is presently responding to environmental stimulation compared to the actual ambience of the environmental setting they are in — which is all interconnected to the conditions that they seek assistance to overcome.
And by making online correction’s to these errors – metaphorically changes the algorithm that was giving rise to their condition.
This allows their nervous system to calibrate psychophysically without being dominated by visual input.
Once this calibration begins to stabilise, the eyes are opened very slowly so that the visual system can be then calibrated with the newly organised psychophysical system
There is no mystery here.
No blind faith required.
The data — and the outcomes people experience — speak for themselves.
Nature uses simple rules to generate extraordinary complexity.
AND our own systems are no different.
So keep up the very simple practice of your standing on one leg at a time – eyes closed exercise and many errors in your subjective experience of the world will be resolved on the spot.