If you know me, you know that I am quite stubborn. When I was younger, my parents constantly told me not to read in the dark, not to sit too close to the TV, not play video games, etc. They blamed my extremely bad eyesight on the fact that I did not listen to them. And for the longest time, I did not believe it could be my fault. It did not make sense to me and so I thought it was just some myth, like being cold makes you sick.
College has shed some light onto these myths and I’m going to report what I’ve learned. Some of these so-called myths are true and other not. The thing I find most surprising, though, is how much advice gets passed down while the reasoning behind it is forgotten. Most would argue that the advice is the only important part. However, if you ever have a kid like me, the latter is probably more useful.
Reading in the dark
This one seems a bit obvious at first. You’re straining your eyes because it is dark and so there is a lack of contrast. With a smaller range of intensities, the difference between the darkest spots and lightest spots is not as great. In order to read the characters off a page, you work harder to distinguish between something that is dark (the page) and something that is more dark (the ink). But does that really make sense?
What does it mean for your eye to work harder? In order to answer that, we have to look a bit into how your eye works.
Your retina is just a sensor that is stimulated by rays of light. In a dark room, less light is entering your pupil, leaving a dim image on your retina. You’re retina cannot work harder — There is no mechanism to make the photoreceptors cells more sensitive. This is not entirely true because your eye has 2 types of photoreceptors cells, cones and rods. Cones respond to different colors in higher intensity light whereas rods are primarily for low intensity light, e.g. night vision.
Our eyes are extremely complicated systems that have evolved to adapt to a changing environment. When the lights go off or dim, our brain uses input from the rods instead of the cones. The retina receiving less light triggers the pupil to dilate to allow as much light in as possible. You may have noticed this in elementary school experiments where you stand in a dark room and suddenly shine a flashlight in your eye. You see your pupil shrink drastically. For those familiar with photography, the pupil is akin to aperture.
The problem with low intensity light is not so much contrast, but focus. When your pupil is dilated, it is harder to focus on things. If you’ve ever gone to the optometrist and had this done, you may recall that aside from being blinded from the sunlight, everything was blurry. Photographers immediately get what is happening here. As your pupil widens, the depth of field narrows. Or, put in another way, as the pupil expands, the circle of confusion expands.
By changing the shape of the lens, you can in fact change the focal distance of your eye. Effectively, this is what contact lenses do; however, they change the shape of your cornea. Muscles in the eye can bend the lens and this is precisely what “straining” your eyes is. The muscles in the eye are trying to hone in on the correct focal distance to produce a sharp image. Since the pupil is wider, the range of depths in focus is smaller, making this search process much more difficult.
In contrast, when reading in a well illuminated room, the pupil is smaller, thereby expanding the depth of field. It is much easier for your eye to focus on the page in front of you, making it less stressful on your eyes. At least that’s my understanding of it!
Clarification: Reading in the dark does not necessarily damage your eyesight. This just explains why after reading in the dark, your eyes feel tired. I used to think it was just your brain being tired of having to decipher a low contrast image (though it still might be the case).
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