Tod.FM - Part 3

March 30, 2010 – 9:55 pm

This article is part of an ongoing series about my vision improvement experiments. To get the full value of what I am learning, be sure to check out the introductory article which also has links to all of my updates.

So what am I actually doing to reverse my nearsightedness? It’s really simple, so far, and it almost sounds dumb.

Remember that scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when they’re driving the Ferrari home after a day of joyriding? They realize that they have to somehow erase the miles they put on the car. Ferris says they’ll just drive the car home backwards!

It doesn’t work that way with cars, as they discover, but it might work with vision.

The system I’m trying out advises myopes to wear plus lenses in addition to doing various eye exercises. The idea is that if negative lenses make your vision more nearsighted, then plus lenses should make them better. I laughed aloud when I first read it because it sounded too good to be true!

But it fits with the theory. As far as I know, there’s no harm in making the world even blurrier than it already is, so I tried it. I wore some very weak +1.25 lenses (the cheap kind from a drug store) and read a few chapters of a book. I positioned the book at such a distance from my eyes that I could make out the text crisply and clearly without glasses, but if I moved the book a bit further, the text would begin to blur. Then I put on the plus lenses. You have to read text that is blurry but slightly readable, but not so blurry that you can’t read it at all. You can’t focus on an unintelligible blob, but if you can make it out slightly, you can train your eyes to focus just a little bit farther. And then farther and farther, reversing the process that made you a slave to your glasses. That’s the idea, anyway.

The first thing I wondered is why I would need to wear plus lenses to blur some text, when I could easily move a book or a computer screen away from me to the point that I can’t easily read anything. As I soon found out, it can be uncomfortable to read a book held out at arm’s length. Now I understand why hyperopes carry around plus lenses. I always thought, if you can read a newspaper at a distance but not close up, why not just read it at a distance? The problem is that the text might be clear, but it’s small. In my case, I can just barely make out 12 point text held at arm’s length. Even if I could see it clearly, it would be uncomfortable to read at that distance. And then if I could correct my vision to the degree that I could clearly see text at arm’s length, how would I extend the improvements to further distances? By trying to read the newspaper from across the room? Hence, the plus lenses.

I actually noticed some changes to my vision. Being of sound mind, I didn’t get too excited. They were small improvements to begin with, and I also made sure that I wasn’t subconsciously moving my head in closer, squinting, or using the lensing effect of tearing in the eyes to sharpen my vision. Once I made some adjustments to my set up to keep all of these factors under control, I was satisfied that my observations of improvement were reliable.

If I stare at a page of blurred text with weak plus lenses, eventually I am able to resolve it and see the text as clearly as if I was not wearing the lenses. This claim is pretty wild in itself, since any self-reported vision changes are pretty subjective. I even hesitated to make it so early on, wanting to verify it a few dozen or more times before I made it public. I am sure of what I am seeing, however.

I’ve been a graphic designer for many years and I have a very good visual memory. When I experiment with focusing on text, I will place a book at the farthest point I can clearly see the text and remember exactly what it looks like. Then I will move the book further, so that the text is blurred, but not so much that it’s completely unreadable. I get a visual memory of how blurred the letters are. As I converge and diverge my eyes, eventually the text comes into focus. Sometimes it almost snaps into focus, like a camera rapidly adjusting to a different distance. I understand the limits of subjective reporting of visual experiences, but I am confident that this is actually happening without any subterfuge on my part.

So is this significant or not? Maybe all eyes can make minor, temporary upgrades in vision. I couldn’t even tell you how much my vision changes during this easily repeatable experience, but I’m sure that it’s a fraction of a diopter. So I wonder if there is some range of better focusing that even a myopic eye can accomplish — but anything outside that small range is permanently inaccessible.

Going with the theory that my eyes gradually adjusted to negative stimulus over many years, the way to reverse it (I hope) is to subject my eyes to positive stimulus. As I have read, this would involve holding some text out to the blur point and sharpening up my focus that fraction of a diopter that I can control (which still astonishes me). Then if I read this way for a few hours every day, I will become more and more able to focus at a slightly farther distance, and then I’ll move on to yet farther distances. The plus lenses will help me to increase my focusing power while keeping the blur point within arm’s reach, to make it easier to read.

This slight sharpening of my vision that I have under my control may not be so surprising at all. Maybe an eye expert could tell me that I’m wrong to be astonished by it. Still, since I can sharpen up my vision slightly, if I keep practicing it, maybe I can gradually make it better and better. My vision gradually got worse and worse, probably through the same process of accommodation.

I haven’t gotten into the theories explaining what muscles might make this work, if it works at all. Everyone has a different model, and it will take more study of both the established and the fringe ideas to understand what might be happening physiologically.

I’m definitely on the fringe, though, but I’m exploring it with absolute fidelity to reason. Some ideas that are universally accepted as true today were once considered to be fringe hypotheses. There are some ideas that are considered wacky but I’d defend with everything I’ve got. For example, there is so much good evidence and clear thinking behind neolithic foods being responsible for modern diseases, one way or another, that I’d almost bet my life on it. Except that modern nutritional scientists probably wouldn’t give the idea a fair hearing. You might say it’s because they’re so myopic.

Unglassed – Day 21

March 29, 2010 – 2:58 pm

In my research on vision, I’ve encountered many competing hypotheses and much truth and falsehood. The modern school of thought holds that one’s vision problems are inherited and can not be corrected with exercises. A nearsighted eye is physically elongated, while a farsighted eye is shorter than it should be. Glasses don’t cause or contribute to the problem, in the modern view, but correct it. Whatever refractive error exists in your eyes you’re stuck with, wishes and pleadings aside. I have to admit that their appeal to rationality and science always struck a chord with me.

The natural vision people all say various things about vision; among them, that glasses can make vision problems worse, that relaxing the eyes can restore vision, that exercising the eyes in the right way can restore clear vision, and that vision can change for the better just as it can change for the worse. Some of them — not all — also swear that one’s psychological or emotional state affects vision. Or, that being myopic in vision means being myopic emotionally. It’s so easy to refute that kind of thinking that I won’t even bother.

There are many different programs, exercises, and theories that fall under the umbrella of natural vision correction. Some of them are even contradictory. With all of the confusion on this side, I can understand the demand for facts and science by the modern ophthalmologists.

Now that I’ve studied both sides and done some experiments on my own, I can clearly state the essence of the natural vision approach. This allows me to dispense with the weaker or just plain wrong aspects of the movement and tease out the key ideas that may have value.

What it’s really about is this: The idea that the eye, like other parts of the body, is an adaptive organ. Normally it functions as evolution “intended,” but if subject to unusual forces, it will adapt to accommodate different circumstances. Not unlike how all organisms, sentient or not, can physically adapt to their environments, sometimes over the span of generations, and sometimes over a lifetime.

Modern humans exist in a world that is dramatically different than the one experienced by their ancestors millions of years ago. We now spend a lot of time focusing our eyes on tools or objects within a few feet of us, and much, much less time scanning the horizon for prey or predators. So our eyes tend to adapt to this closeup world. People who spend a lifetime focusing close by gradually lose the ability to focus far away. It’s a simple idea that fits with some easy observations you can make about our modern world, the most significant of which is that the rate of myopia has increased dramatically in recent decades. This increase correlates with dramatic changes in our environment: books, TV, computers, and a life spent mostly indoors. While it’s only an unproven correlation, genetics alone can’t explain the recent explosion in myopia.

The natural vision camp also says that eyeglasses are more like a crutch than a cure. If you gave a crutch to a man with a broken foot, you couldn’t say that the crutch cured his deficiency in walking. The crutch enables him to walk better, but the cause of the problem has nothing to do with the crutch and must be healed through a different process. Similarly, it’s been argued that eyeglasses are just a crutch that enable myopic eyes to see clearly, but do nothing to correct the cause of the myopia. In fact, the glasses tend to make the myopia worse, through the same process of adaptation that created it in the first place.

This approach treats the myopic eye as a deficient organ that should be restored to its original state, while the modern approach treats the myopic eye as a normal casualty of life on this planet, which can only be adjusted (and then adjusted again and again over the years) back to normal with a special appliance called eyeglasses.

The downward slide starts when you focus more on an inner, often intellectual world, and less on the big world of trees and sky and Nature in which our ancestors evolved. Then you’re prescribed glasses to fix your vision. As you focus even closer in — though it seems like you can see better than ever — you gradually become dependent on the glasses. Take them off and the world is an incoherent blur. Put them back on and you can see all near and far, while your focus is really on the near even when you’re looking far. (Please note that I’m not in any way suggesting that dispensing with books and romping through nature is superior to living as a rational person, only that life is different now than in the distant past and thus has different consequences for our bodies.)

That’s the essence of it. Some of the modern ophthalmologists might even agree with the evolutionary aspect, but probably not with the idea that if eyes can adapt to a negative stimulus, then they can adapt to a positive stimulus. If the environment can make your vision worse, than it can make it better. If you create the right environment.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems to be true at least in some form. I am committed to test it. With only 9 days until the end of my original trial of living without glasses (except driving and hockey), I am now sure that I could put up with it for the months that would be necessary to produce whatever improvements are really possible. In fact, I’m afraid to wear glasses now. I don’t want to hurt my vision any more than I already have. As always, I’m completely open to a vigorous debate — the science is far from settled, but I can’t wait around for modern doctors to give these ideas an honest trial (just as I eat an evolutionarily inspired diet, rather than wait around for scientists to prove that saturated fat and cholesterol are good and sugar and grains are evil).

Measuring my progress accurately and just doing things that are beneficial in the first place is a real challenge. It has actually taken me several weeks to wade through all the different ideas and come up with a program. More on that tomorrow.

Unglassed – Day 22

Unglassed – Day 21

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