Eye Care Blog

Defective vision, as I have said, is the result of an abnormal condition of the mind. Glasses may sometimes neutralize the effect of this condition upon the eyes, and by making a person more comfortable may improve his mental faculties to some extent; but we do not alter fundamentally the condition of the mind, and by confirming it in a bad habit we may make it worse.

It can easily be shown that among the faculties of the mind which are impaired when the vision is impaired is the memory; and as a large part of the educational process consists of storing the mind with facts, and as all the other mental processes depend upon one’s knowledge of facts, it is easy to see how little is accomplished by merely putting glasses on a person who has “trouble with his eyes.” The extraordinary memory of primitive people has been attributed to the fact that because of the absence of any convenient means of making written records they had to depend upon their memories, which were strengthened accordingly. But in view of the known facts about the relation of memory to eyesight it is more reasonable to suppose that the retentive memory of primitive man was due to the same cause as his keen vision, namely, a mind at rest.

The primitive memory, as well as the keenness of primitive vision, has been found among civilized people, and if the necessary tests had been made it would doubtless have been found that they always occur together, as they did in a case which recently came under my observation. The subject was a young girl with such marvelous eyesight that she could see the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye, a fact which was proved by her drawing a diagram of these satellites which exactly corresponded to the diagrams made by persons who had used a telescope.

Her memory was just as remarkable, She could recite the whole content of a book after reading it, as Lord Macaulay is said to have done, and she learned more Latin in a few days without a teacher than her sister, who had six diopters of myopia, had been able to do in several years. She remembered what she had eaten at a restaurant five years earlier, and she called the name of the waiter, the number of the building, and the street on which it stood. She also remembered what she wore on this occasion and what everyone else in the party wore. The same was true of every other event which had awakened her interest in any way, and it was a favorite amusement in her family to ask her what the menu had been and what people had worn on particular occasions.

When the sight of two persons is different, it has been found that their memories differ in exactly the same degree. Two sisters, one of whom had ordinarily good vision, indicated by the formula 20/2 0, while the other had 20/i0, found that the time it took them to learn eight verses of a poem varied in almost exactly the same ratio as their sight.

The one whose vision was 20/10 learned eight verses of the poem in fifteen minutes, and the one whose vision was only 20/20 required thirty-one minutes to do the same thing.

After palming, the sister with ordinary vision learned eight more verses in twenty-one minutes, while the one with 2o/ 10 was able to reduce her time by only two minutes, a variation clearly within the limits of error. In other words, the mind of the latter was already in a normal or nearly normal condition and she could not improve it appreciably by palming, but the former, whose mind was under a strain, was able to gain relaxation by palming and hence improve her memory.

Even when the difference in sight is between the two eyes of the same person, it can be demonstrated, that there is a corresponding difference in the memory, according to whether both eyes are open or the better eye closed.

The memory cannot be forced any more than the vision can be forced. We remember without effort, just as we see without effort, and the harder we try to remember or see, the less we are able to do so.

The things we remember are the things that interest us, and the reason we have difficulty in learning certain subjects is that we are bored by them. When we are bored out eyesight becomes impaired, boredom being a condition of mental strain in which it is impossible for the eye to function normally.

The youngster with the keen eyes, could recite whole books if she happened to be interested in them. But she disliked mathematics and anatomy extremely, and not only could not learn them but became myopic when they were presented to her mind. She could read letters a quarter of an inch high at twenty feet in a poor light, but when asked to read numbers one to two inches high in a good light at ten feet she miscalled half of them. When asked to name the sum of two and three, she said four before finally deciding on five, and all the time she was occupied with this disagreeable subject the retinoscope showed that she was myopic. When I asked her to look into my eye with the ophthalmoscope she could see nothing, although a much lower degree of visual acuity is required to note the details of the interior of the eye than to see the moons of Jupiter.

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