Ming’s Wisdom

The number 1, divided by your contact lens (or glasses) prescription number, is your eyes’ focal length. This focal length is the distance in meters when things start becoming blurry. This simple statement blew my mind.

Just moments ago, sitting on the toilet, I realized its implications (it’s truly amazing how many of our greatest ideas come either when we’re in the shower, sleeping, or on the toilet). It all started last night, while taking a late-night jog through the streets of North San Jose. I’ve experimented with not wearing corrective lenses while jogging in hopes of making my eyes adapt to naturally focusing into the distance and improving my near-sightedness. Joanne (the optometrist in training) was running with us and revealed this fact to me.

For example, my left eye has myopia with a prescription of -4.00. My right eye is at -3.75. To make it easier to calculate, let’s take my left eye as an example. The number 1, divided by 4.00, equals 1/4th meter. That means when objects are more than 1/4th meter away from my eyes, they are not as clear as they should be.

I have a suspicion that the muscles that focus the eye are at an equilibrium state when focusing on objects at their focal length. E.g. when I relax my left eye, it is focused on 1/4th meter away. Now the only way to bring a healthy 20/20 (1 divided by 0 prescription gives a focal length of infinity) eye’s balanced state to the distance of 1/4th meter probably took a lot of exercise of the eye’s squeezing muscles (ciliary). That much exercise meant that the eye must have focused on objects averaging around 1/4th meter away (probably multiplied by some constant factor). In short, your focal length is determined by the average distance of the objects that you look at. (1)

This could have profound implications on how we treat our eyes in our daily routine. If your focal length is determined by the average distance of the object that you look at, then you would be able to change your focal length by simply looking at objects that average a different distance from you. By its definition, changing your focal length changes your prescription. That means, if your prescription is -4.00, but you would like it to change to -2.00, you would simply need to change your focal length from 1/4th meter to 1/2 meter. Instead of looking at objects averaging 1/4th meter away, look at objects averaging 1/2 meter away. Stop reading with your eyes next to your book, no matter how intense Harry Potter’s next adventure may be. Try not to slouch into the computer monitor. Get outside every so often to avoid staring at walls at a close distance. It may be hard to do, especially for students and certain professions, but could have amazing effects.

Notes:

(1). I don’t yet have concrete experimental proof of this. Right now it’s a suspicion, and was logically deduced from what I currently know about eyes. As I learn more about them I will definitely search with all my ability for experimental proof of this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 16:59 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.