"One would therefore expect that dark text on bright background would stimulate myopia development and bright text on dark background would inhibit myopia."
Yeah - 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.
Ugh. 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.
I 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.
Myopia 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.
I read that it isn't a sunlight issue, but an overall brightness issue. If that is true, reading on a bright screen might be better than reading a book.
Also 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.
Could 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.
I 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.
When 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?
Web 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.
> 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.
> Web 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.
How does this account for things like Atari TOS, MacOS, OS/2 or any early version of Windows that all mainly use black on white for text? The "web era" depending on how you define it could of course have coincided with the LCD era (though in my experience happened more than half a decade earlier, which is generations in computer technology time) but the web didn't somehow invent black text on white backgrounds.
I've always preferred a sepia type color scheme. The HN default colors are pretty close to perfect for me. Solarized Dark color scheme is about as dark as I like to get. Going full black background on white text has always been hard for me to read.
I still prefer dark background with white text to this day, even when the web came around I tried to keep all my software/OS with dark background/white text. To this day I'll try to use "night mode" if available.
It's so much less strain on the eyes, especially during the night or after waking up. Going from darkness to a blazing white screen literally hurts in the eyes.
Am 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?
There 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.
Nah, 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.
Not quite true. The ciliary muscles and suspensory ligaments in your eye are largely responsible for ensuring the accommodation-convergence reflex (the process by which your eye focuses on objects at different distances) works properly. It's not a priori non-sensical to assume that actions (exercises, drugs, etc.) that affect the ciliary muscles could change the accommodative properties of the eye sufficiently to decrease the effects of myopia - in fact, that's a part of what happens when you get atropine drops during an eye exam.
Note that this is not an endorsement of Bates' or any other method supposed to implement this in practice. I'm just noting that putting "muscles" and "myopia" in the same sentence isn't non-sensical.
In most cases, myopia is caused by physical properties of the eye (wrong length, etc.). Relaxing the ciliary muscle actually increases the focal distance, so I don't see how muscle-oriented exercises would help.
> in fact, that's a part of what happens when you get atropine drops during an eye exam
Even a fully paralyzed ciliary muscle cannot overcome a wrong geometry of your eye. Whether atropine has any real effect on myopia is controversly discussed.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.5 ms ] threadAnother reason to use dark themes.
I wonder how much these are correlated.
Perhaps we evolved to "make use" of UV light to halt our eyes growth.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How does this account for things like Atari TOS, MacOS, OS/2 or any early version of Windows that all mainly use black on white for text? The "web era" depending on how you define it could of course have coincided with the LCD era (though in my experience happened more than half a decade earlier, which is generations in computer technology time) but the web didn't somehow invent black text on white backgrounds.
It's so much less strain on the eyes, especially during the night or after waking up. Going from darkness to a blazing white screen literally hurts in the eyes.
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?
This combination of words doesn't make any sense.
Note that this is not an endorsement of Bates' or any other method supposed to implement this in practice. I'm just noting that putting "muscles" and "myopia" in the same sentence isn't non-sensical.
> in fact, that's a part of what happens when you get atropine drops during an eye exam
Even a fully paralyzed ciliary muscle cannot overcome a wrong geometry of your eye. Whether atropine has any real effect on myopia is controversly discussed.
But I'm not myopic, but astigmatic.