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Why might reading make people myopic?
- alexgmcm 8y ago"One would therefore expect that dark text on bright background would stimulate myopia development and bright text on dark background would inhibit myopia." Another reason to use dark themes.
- istjohn 8y agoI suspect this effect is far weaker--if even present--in adults.
- alexgmcm 8y agoYeah - my eyesight is already really bad, but hopefully there will be something like a Kindle Paperwhite with dark theme so my future children won't have to suffer the same.
- rawoke083600 8y agoand a big-screen version one ! I use BIG fonts then only a few words per line fits in.
- pvaldes 8y agoxpdf -rv
- anotheryou 8y agoIt seems very much fluctuating for me. I had days where it was really bad and days where it's non-existent.
- Santosh83 8y agoBut how to invert the colour of web pages? Dark themes darken the UI but the webpage is almost always still dark text on light background.
- anvandare 8y agoIf you're on linux: `xcalib -i -a` turns everything negative.
- kroltan 8y agoJust add the filter: invert(100%); style's on a page's HTML. There are userscripts that do that automatically for you.
- kbutler 8y agoThere are lots of addons available - here is a highly rated one: https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
- sdfin 8y agoThanks for sharing, that addon works marvelously. I tried similar ones before but they made various pages unreadable. This one gets most pages right.
- lordnacho 8y agoStylus Chrome extension has alternative styles for loads of websites. Eg I make GitLab dark with light text using a downloaded style sheet that someone made, and my HN as well.
- jraph 8y agoOn Firefox you can use Dark Background and Light Text. Also works on Firefox Mobile, good results with a led screen.
- walterbell 8y agoTriple-click home button on iOS, via accessibility settings.
- Tharkun 8y agoUgh. Dark themes. Can't get used to them. Fine for general terminal use, but impossible for me for larger amounts of text. Can't really articulate why, but it's uncomfortable for me.
- crazygringo 8y agoThere's lots of research showing that people read black-on-white body text significantly more accurately/faster (around 25-30%), so that's normal.
- anotheryou 8y agoprobably because people are used to that though, no?
- crazygringo 8y agoI'm not sure anyone's 100% sure, but from what I've read the leading hypothesis is that white light spreads in the retina and is more sensitive to lens distortions (and the pupil is larger when looking at a black screen, so even more distortion). So white letters essentially smudge more in the eye against each other and require more work to decipher, while black letters don't. (White light surrounding black letters could make them "shrink" with the same effect, but this doesn't seem to harm legibility.) Which is also why it's more relevant to body text, as opposed to display text which is larger and thus less susceptible to the problem.
- saalweachter 8y agoI actually keep my Kindle white-on-black.
- alexgmcm 8y agoHow can you change the setting? Everything I looked at says it's not possible.. unless you mean the Kindle Fire?
- nbeleski 8y agoI remember recently reading about the myopia increase in China and it was largely attributed to children staying much more inside, out of the sunlight, causing the eye to under-develop iirc. I wonder how much these are correlated.
- delecti 8y agoMyopia is actually caused by your eye being "too long", and means the lens focuses light in the middle of your eye, rather than on the retina. It seems that sunlight ceases the development of your eye, rather than encouraging it. Perhaps we evolved to "make use" of UV light to halt our eyes growth.
- madeuptempacct 8y agohttps://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/05/383765377/why-is-nearsightedness-skyrocketing-among-chinese-youth https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/05/3837653... There was a study that followed Chinese kids who stayed in China vs Chinese kids who moved to Australia. There was a marked difference. Not sure if its about sunlight or near/far focus though.
- Apocryphon 8y agoThey can test this if they tried getting students to try studying outside under natural lighting for a while. Though in China that may be impractical depending on the city.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoThey tested having students study in a sunlit classroom. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5536284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5536284/
- jacobolus 8y ago> Not sure if its about sunlight or near/far focus though. I have seen some suggestion that it is a combination of both. Either is plausible though.
- arendtio 8y agoThank god, terminals have dark backgrounds by default :D
- 4ad 8y agoWhat default is that?
- alexgmcm 8y agoAlso I wonder if this means TV and Video Games etc. aren't as bad for eyesight as they should have the same visual statistics as natural scenes (as they display natural scenes more or less) despite TV being demonised as bad for eyesight for generations. Whereas when you think about it staring at dark symbols on a bright background is really unnatural and therefore it is reasonable that it can affect visual development.
- theriddlr 8y agoCould be CRT vs. LCDs. Family all have bad eyesight but my younger sister who spends every waking hour gaming doesn't need glasses. I spent less time on the computer when I was her age but I had a CRT monitor.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoI am a 99% sure that "some people are just immune." I have friends my age who played games way more with perfect eyes. I also have a friend who drank soda at work all day and never had a single cavity.
- doombolt 8y agoWe should take their genes responsible for that, put it in our future embryos. Essentially turning "genetic lottery" into "genetic basic income".
- gwbas1c 8y agoWhen I was a teenager I preferred white text on a black background. (Think of the DOS terminal.) In my very early 20s, I suddenly found white text on a black background extremely irritating. Suddenly, my vision was filled with persisting horizontal lines. (Like what you get when you look quickly at a light bulb.) Maybe it's because DOS was really grey on black, but on the web, people typically do bright white on black?
- VLM 8y agoWeb era began around the rise of LCD displays. CRTs are too non-linear for most people to tolerate black on white, so its a status symbol from around the turn of the century to do white on black. Not helping matters is the rise of glossy distraction screens, again before the turn of the century the status symbol was ultra low glare matte screens to avoid eyestrain and with the conversion to everything must be shiny its hard to look at a black background reflecting tons of distracting moving shadows so everything must have a white light blackground to cut thru the bright distracting reflections.
- crazygringo 8y ago> CRTs are too non-linear for most people to tolerate black on white What does non-linear mean? And what do you mean tolerate? Before LCD screens all Macs were black-on-white and people loved it. The first Macs were monochrome. I don't recall anyone ever having a problem with it. Also, I don't remember any matte CRTs -- they're all glossy because their surface is glass. Really confused as to what you're talking about.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wingspar 8y agoLot's of matte CRT's back in the day.. To name two: The 'flat screen' Zenith CRT monitors.. Had a TV version that was awesome... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-05-13-8702050478-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-05-13-870205... Sony Trinitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron Mac's were color pre-LCD too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh_Color_Display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh_Color_Display
- tobr 8y agoAm I understanding this right? The choroid layer behind the retina gets slightly thinner when we look at dark details on a bright background, and slightly thicker when we look at bright details on a dark background, and somehow this causes an opposite effect in the overall eye growth over time. So spending a lot of time looking at dark letters on a bright background would cause the eye to become too long and unable to focus on objects far away. Is there an explanation for why the choroid changes its thickness, and why this change would create an opposite effect in eye growth over a longer period?
- philipswood 8y agoSo, they eye works pretty much like a camera - but it's not a camera: it's a complex dynamic self-assembling, self-tuning adaptive structure. The fact that it's geometry is roughly static around a focal length that has sharp focus on the retina is a wonder of homeostasis with at least three known tuning loops: 1) the lens Moving on swiftly... 2) a slower feedback loop adjusting the choriod (hence focal length) in the order of hours. 3) an even slower loop adjusting the eye geometry over longer periods of time.
- philipswood 8y agoThe story so far: We hack our visual sense to be a data channel for symbolic information. This incidentally messes with the above homeostatic loops causing myopia. We then hack the eye's optics to correct the immediately problem without fixing the cause and oppose the corrective process by adding glasses or contacts. We end up at a myopic static point where the balance of forces match. Big lens wins.
- pen2l 8y agoThis is just so wonderfully fascinating, that's all I have to say!
- philipswood 8y agoIs fascinating - checkout https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627304004933 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662730.... If you want to duckduckgo: Emmetropization
- DrNuke 8y agoThere are a few gym protocols used to train / flex / exert the eyes’ muscles and revert myopia gradually. An expert tutor acting under your doc’s supervision is needed, though.
- elektor 8y agoWhat you're describing is the Bates Model, which has not been objectively shown to improve eyesight.
- DrNuke 8y agoNah, there are more recent studies based upon first principles and less stretching protocols than Bates. Still not accepted best practice, though, so individual mileage may vary, my myopic eyesight improved enough to give them a pass.
- Deinos 8y agoCould you share these sources please? Interested in seeing how newer models improve upon The Bates Method.
- DrNuke 8y agoSure, some fundamentals are here and absolutely no money is needed to understand the principles better: https://gettingstronger.org/2016/03/faq-for-vision-improvement-by-hormetism/ https://gettingstronger.org/2016/03/faq-for-vision-improveme... .
- k__ 8y agoI'd say "well that explains everything" after I spent most of my time before a monitor since I was ten. But I'm not myopic, but astigmatic.
- walterbell 8y agoHow is your neck posture? Reading sideways in bed can also affect visual cortex.
- k__ 8y agoNever did that. Felt rather tyring quick
- fhood 8y ago> However this is also necessary since we have about 125 Million pixel in the retina but only about 1 Million “cables” in the optic nerve. Just switch to a busable protocol. I don't see what the issue is here.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 01100011 8y agoSo does this mean that my preferred color scheme of light text on a dark background might be accelerating my presbyopia? I'm at the perfect age for it to start(43), but it sure seems to be progressing fast.
- matt-snider 8y agoAs a German speaker, this title seems very Denglish-ey to me. Is this phrasing valid in English? It seems like the object of 'to make' is necessary and missing, whereas in German it is perfectly normal and correct to phrase things this way (e.g. Tofu macht satt, or Schnaps macht betrunken, whereas in English you'd say: tofu makes you full/is filling, or shnaps makes/gets you drunk). Not trying to nitpick, just curious if this is actually correct grammar or not.
- jackpirate 8y agoAs a native English speaker, you're correct.
- stephenhuey 8y agoI’m also a native speaker, and I find this construction recognizable from some literature. Just searched for examples of whether a grammar teacher would allow transitive verbs without direct objects, and I found one of the answers here suggesting it’s ok in English because the object can be inferred from context: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/43482/a-transitive-verb-without-a-direct-object https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/43482/a-transitive-v...