Looking at Unfamiliar Objects
This is perhaps the most trying of all seeing-situations and also one of frequent occurrence. We are called upon to look intensively at unfamiliar objects every time we go shopping, visit a museum, search for books in the shelves of a library, hunt through drawers and cupboards for some lost article, tidy up a box-room or attic, pack and unpack baggage, or repair a machine. The problem is how to avoid or reduce the strain and fatigue that ordinarily follows such looking.
First of all, make sure, if this is in your power, that what you are looking at is brightly illuminated. Draw back curtains, turn on lights, use a flash-lamp. However, if the looking has to be done in some public place, you will have to put up with the lighting, which others consider sufficient, but which will almost certainly be inadequate.
Second, resist the temptation to stare, and do not try to see clearly more than a small part of the total visual field. Look analytically at what is before you, and keep the eyes and attention continuously shifting.
Third, do not hold your breath, and blink your eyes frequently.
Fourth, rest as often as you can, either closing the eyes, “letting go” and remembering some familiar object, or, preferably, palming. If possible sun the eyes from time to time, or bathe them in the light of an electric lamp.
If these simple rules are followed, it should be possible to come through the ordeal without serious fatigue, discomfort or strain.
Movies
For many people with defective vision, a visit to the pictures may be the cause of much fatigue and discomfort. There is no need for this. Looked at in the right way, movies do not strain the eyes and, indeed, may be made to pay handsome dividends in improved vision. Here are the rules which must be followed, if an evening at the picture theatre is to be a pleasure, not a torture.
First: Refrain from staring. Do not try to see the whole of the screen equally well. Do not try to “hold” any detail. On the contrary, keep the eyes and attention continuously on the move.
Second: Do not forget to breathe and blink regularly.
Third: Take the opportunity offered by boring sequences to rest, by closing the eyes for a few seconds and “letting go.” Even during the more exciting parts of the picture, you can find time occasionally to glance away for an instant into the darkness surrounding the illuminated screen. Use any intermission for palming.
One way in which the movies may be used for improving vision has already been described in the chapter on myopia. Movies are also helpful in other ways, above all by making it possible for us to become familiar with objects and situations, which are frequently met with in real life.
In an essay on the relationship between life and art, Roger Fry has written a passage which casts a very interesting light on the way in which the movies can be used to improve defective vision. “We can get a curious side glimpse,” he writes in Vision and Design, “of the nature of the imaginative life from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant action, is cut off. If, in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think of getting out of the way, or heroically interposing ourselves.
The result is that, in the first place, we see the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real life could not struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the problems of our appropriate reaction. I remember seeing in a cinematograph the arrival of a train at a foreign station, and the people descending from the carriages; there was no platform, and to my intense surprise, I saw several people turn right round, after reaching the ground, as though to orientate themselves; an almost ridiculous performance, which I had never noticed in all the many hundred occasions on which such a scene had passed before my eyes in real life. The fact being that, at a station, one is never really a spectator of events, but an actor engaged in the drama of luggage or prospective seats; and one actually sees only so much as may help to the appropriate action.”
These lines express a very important truth: there is a fundamental psychological difference between a spectator and an actor, between looking on at a work of art and looking on (which can rarely be done without intervening) at an episode of real life. Spectators see more, and more clearly, than do actors. Owing to this fact, it is possible to make use of the movies to improve our vision for objects and events in real life. Because you are not a participant in the drama, you will be able to see, more clearly than you could in real life, the way in which people on the screen perform such ordinary acts as opening a door, getting into a cab, helping themselves to food and so forth. Make yourself conscious of seeing more on the screen than you are normally able to do in real life, and, after the show, deliberately call back the memory-images of what you saw there. This will make such ordinary actions seem more familiar than before; and this increased familiarity will cause similar actions to be more visible to you, when they occur at some future date in real life.
Close-ups provide a means whereby persons with defective vision may overcome one of their most embarrassing handicaps—the inability to recognize faces, or to catch the fine shades of meaning, which people normally convey through facial expression. In real life, faces sixteen feet high and eight feet wide are unknown; but on the screen they are one of the most ordinary of phenomena. Exploit this fact in such a way as to improve your vision for real faces of ordinary dimensions. Look carefully at the gigantic face. Carefully, but always analytically. Never fix a greedy stare upon a close-up, even if it should belong to your favourite star. Examine it in all its details, noting the structure of the bones, the way the hair grows, and how the head moves on the neck and the eyes within their orbits. And when the colossal face registers grief, desire, anger, doubt and the rest, follow the workings of lips and eyes, of the muscles of cheek and brow, with the closest attention. The more carefully and analytically you observe these things, the better and clearer will be your memories of the commoner facial expressions, and the easier will it be, at some later date, to see similar expressions on the faces of real people.
CHAPTER XVIII, Lighting Conditions
People with normal vision, who consistently do their sensing and perceiving in a condition of dynamic relaxation, can afford in large measure to disregard the external conditions of seeing. Not so the men and women whose sight is defective. For them, favourable external conditions are of the greatest importance, and the failure to secure such favourable conditions may do much to increase their disability, or, if they have undertaken a course of visual re-education, to retard their progress towards normality.
The most important of all the external conditions of good seeing is adequate illumination. Where lighting is poor, it is very hard for people with defective vision to get better, very easy for them to get worse.
The question now arises, what is adequate illumination?
The best illumination we have is full sunshine on a clear summer’s day. If you read in such sunshine, the intensity of the light falling upon the page of your book will be in the neighbourhood of ten thousand foot-candles—that is to say, the light of direct summer sunshine is equal to the light thrown by ten thousand wax candles placed at the distance of one foot from the book. Move from full sunlight to the shade of a tree or house. The light on your page will still have an intensity of about one thousand foot-candles. On overcast days, the light reflected from white clouds has an intensity of several thousand foot-candles; and the weather must be very gloomy for general outdoor intensities to fall as low as a thousand foot-candles.
Indoors, the light near an unobstructed window may have an intensity of anything from one hundred to five hundred foot-candles, depending upon the brightness of the day. Ten or fifteen feet away from the window the illumination may fall to as little as two foot-candles or even less, if the room is papered and furnished in dark colours.
The intensity of illumination diminishes as the square of the distance. A sixty-watt lamp will provide about eighty foot-candles at one foot, about twenty at two feet, about nine at three feet, and, at ten feet, only four-fifths of one foot-candle. Owing to this rapid falling off in intensity with increase of distance, most parts of the average artificially lighted room are very poorly illuminated. It is common to find people reading and doing other forms of close work under an illumination of one or two foot-candles. In public buildings, such as schools and libraries, you will be lucky
