Friday, May 29, 2009

Eyes and Vision

I suspect that these things are quite useful:

-Eye Movement Exercises
-Eye-Focusing Exercises
-Exercises for the Pupil of the Eye

The exercises are really basic stuff, nothing spectacular or counter-intuitive. I was already doing some of them on my own before I found these, every once in a while.


I never carried glasses(or lenses) in my life and probably never will. I'm also inclined to believe that glasses are in fact generally unnecessary, as controversial as it may sound. I even think that they prevent a real healing and improvement. Eyes are adaptive things: If people with healthy eyes start to carry glasses, their vision begins to get worse, while adapting to the new glasses.

Similarly if people with sight problems decide to carry glasses which make them see better, then the eyes become content with their flawed performance, thus make it impossible to adapt back to a natural, better state. It's like if people's legs are tired or feel weak they go to a doctor and ask for some leg braces to assist their movement, and live with the leg braces for the rest of their life believing they need them. When they could've just worked on their legs, strengthened their legs to adapt to the lives they want to live somehow... and run if that's what they desire. (Edit: Oh hey! I noticed that the guy here used the same analogy a week ago in a comment: VIDEO - Natural Eyesight Improvement )

Most people start wearing glasses at a very young age without even considering any alternatives, since it's "common knowledge" that glasses/lenses are the only way to fix the eyes. Just within the past 12 months I'm pretty sure that I was pretty myopic at times, for example after a few days spent almost exclusively in front of the PC. I can clearly remember how surprisingly blurry my sight was when I went out to grab something to eat during that time. Over time it got better on its own and that was when I first grew suspicious of the conventional wisdom about sight. If I had the same experience when I was a child a doctor would've certainly prescribed glasses to me. That's basically how most people start wearing glasses as far as I can tell, and as far as I can see it's just an unscientific tradition.

There are many books written on the subject of natural vision, the oldest ones go as far back as 1920. Check it out. It makes a lot of sense in my opinion. Too unbelievable? Maybe not if you try it.

I suppose Perfect-eyes.com describes how the majority of people who carry glasses/lenses would react to this natural vision information pretty accurately, even if just for marketing purposes:
...Why hadn't anyone told me?

Then I revisited my old friend... Mr Skepticism.

"If it was really possible to fix your own eyes with simple daily exercises, no-one would be wearing specs or lenses anymore. Surely, everyone would have perfect vision!"

I didn’t want to believe I’d spent so many years of my life being 'technically blind without glasses', when the 'cure' was so simple.

"It must be a load of old rubbish!"

Thank you, Mr Skepticism...
Oh and by the way, the reason I looked up these exercises is because sometimes I'm having trouble focusing on long distances (20+ meters), probably related to the amount of time I spent in front of the computer. I guess I become a little myopic because of that every now and then. I see sharper if I squint my eyes/eyebrows. Let's see if I'll be able to fix that completely. My focus will be on Eye-Focusing Exercises for now. I also wanted for a long time to be able to dilate my pupils at will. I think I'll seriously invent some to do that in the near future, but that's irrelevant to sight. Just interesting.

UPDATE:

The eye relaxation stuff seems to be what I was missing. I was trying harder and harder to see sharper, when what I was really supposed to do was in fact the opposite, apparently . (I do most of my basic sight experiments with a tree across my window, the distance is ca. 40 meters to the trunk I guess.) Today, after listening to what the guy in that video above says, I played around with eye relaxation and it really did make a substantial difference. It appears that the tension in the eye muscles require attention like all the other muscles. Interesting... I thought it would be mainly about muscle strengthening when I created this blog entry. Apparently this misconception is not uncommon:
The Most Misunderstood Aspects of the Bates Method

This human also makes similar points: BATES METHOD FOR EYESIGHT. And I also found a paper from 1912 talking about this: EYE TRAINING FOR THE CURE OF FUNCTIONAL MYOPIA
...Mrs. X. was wearing glasses, concave 1.00 D. nearly, with astigmatism, prescribed by a competent ophthalmologist who had used a cycloplegic to relax the accommodation. Her vision with the glasses was nearly normal. Without glasses her visin was about one third. She had myopia apparently with the retinoscope, but spasm of the accommodation or functional myopia by the direct method with the ophthalmoscope. She was told that a cure without concave or other glasses was possible.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

“About five minutes,” was my reply. She was asked to read the Snellen card at ten feet and to note her ability to see. Then she was directed to read it by making an effort and shown how to make an effort by partly closing the eyelids, by staring, etc., in short, to imitate the efforts of the children she saw treated. She was convinced that the effort materially lowered the vision. It was explained to her that her poor vision was caused by a continuous effort which was unconscious. The suggestion was then made that she read the letters on the distant card without trying so hard. The vision improved immediately and became normal in a short time. Her sight was now better without glasses than it had been before with glasses. She was quite excited over the prompt relief...
Some more interesting stuff here: Better Eyesight Magazines - 1919-1930

Oh and a fun fact: I just found out that if your myopia is cured, then they call it Pseudomyopia, since "real myopia" can't be cured naturally as everybody knows.

Now the only problem I have left is that I still can't shift my focus as fast as I'd like to from that tree to my finger right in front of my eyes. Maybe that delay is "normal" for such extreme shifts of focal distance but I'd prefer to be able to do it faster. I'm not sure if that's because my muscles are too tense or too weak. I think the latter is more probable for someone who spends most of his time in front of a computer screen. I use that focus-shifting function of my eyes pretty infrequently and I simply lack training. The eye-focusing exercises should help me improve. I didn't invest any time in those today.

NOTICE:

Of course the experts would tell you if all this was true though. This is clearly pseudoscience. [Edit: When I wrote that, Wikipedia was describing the Bates method directly as pseudoscience. Now for some reason it's changed to alternative/fringe category.] So don't be an idiot and don't take what I wrote above seriously. It's an insult to all the experts! It's impossible that all those people can lack the critical thinking skills and the objectivity to notice this and the honesty to let others know! Obviously I'm just deceiving you because I'm a psychopath. And Dr. Bates is just another psychopathic, idiotic, liar and a conspiracy theorist for finishing his book like his:
...The fact is that, except in rare cases, man is not a reasoning being. He is dominated by authority, and when the facts are not in accord with the view imposed by authority, so much the worse for the facts. They may, and indeed must, win in the long run; but in the meantime the world gropes needlessly in darkness and endures much suffering that might have been avoided.
Pff... Sickening propaganda from a fraud! bising Just like Margaret Corbett!

And Aldous Huxley is another fool! I mean look at this crap he wrote, from Wiki:
Huxley reviews the unique status of vision, according to the prevailing medical view
If orthodox opinion is right – if the organs of vision are incapable of curing themselves ... then the eyes must be totally different in kind from other parts of the body. Given favourable conditions, all other organs tend to free themselves from their defects. Not so the eyes. ... it is a waste of time even to try to discover a treatment which will assist nature in its normal task of healing. ...
He quotes Matthew Luckiesh, Director of General Electric’s Lighting Research Laboratory who wrote:
"Suppose that crippled eyes could be transformed into crippled legs. What a heart-rending parade we would witness on a busy street! Nearly every other person would go limping by. Many would be on crutches and some on wheel chairs."
Huxley goes on to stress that when legs are imperfect, the medical profession make every effort to get the patient walking again, and without crutches if at all possible. "Why should it not be possible to do something analogous for defective eyes?"
The orthodox theory is, on the face of it, so implausible, so intrinsically unlikely to be true, that one can only be astonished that it should be so generally and so unquestioningly accepted. ... At the present time it is rejected only by those who have personal reasons for knowing it to be untrue ... It is therefore no longer possible for me to accept the currently orthodox theory, with its hopelessly pessimistic practical consequences.

The stupid, it burns! tension

P.S. I just ordered Huxley's The Doors of Perception after watching this video.
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