Previous:: A cure for nearsightedness?, Eyesight Feedback

I had some time to kill and it was a beautiful day so I decided to sit outside and do some reading. The sun was bright and overhead and reflected quite strongly off the page. This wasn’t painful and my eyes adjusted to the brightness quite quickly so I read for over an hour. When I got up, everything was clearer…

It was very noticable, like last time and very nice. It’s not immediately obvious how to fit the results into my theory, though.

This is the first time this has happened. It happened once before when I was at the library, using the computers. The screens were pretty bright and very close. When I got outside, my eyesight was much better. I didn’t understand how this could have happened from sitting close to the screen (I assumed that to exercise the eyes you needed to fit farther away) so I wrote it off as an oddity.

Now it’s much harder to dismiss. I suspect that even though sitting very close to something bright would tend to stretch the eyelids in the wrong direction (admitting less light in, not more), the same stretching makes it easier to do the opposite. This would create one of those four-box charts: close/bright, close/dark, far/bright, far/dark. The first and the last seem to be the ones that strech the eye muscles, the middle to seem to make things worse.

I’ll keep experimenting and let you know, but sitting outside and reading sounds a lot more fun to me than spending time staring at street signs. ;-)

posted September 13, 2002 03:03 PM (Personal) #

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Aaron Swartz (me@aaronsw.com)