1. The Problem: Human Eye

The most encouraging fact about human eye is that the less effort you make to see the better you can see. It is difficult for people with imperfect sight to believe that perfect sight requires no effort; indeed, any effort to improve the sight makes it worse. Curiously enough, we have long known that before we can swim or dance, play tennis or golf, or master a musical instrument, our muscles must be relaxed. Acquiring that relaxation of the muscles has often been the hardest part of learn­ing any of these things, but without it all the other lessons are useless.

We have been singularly slow in discovering that this fact applies with equal force to the use of the eyes. Without exaggeration, we might call human eye the most neglected part of the body. If the principle of the correct use of the eyes were applied from early child­hood, no method of re-education such as the one described in this book would be necessary. But the blunt truth is that we are not taught how to use our eyes. Actually, countless cases of eyestrain are a direct result of current methods by which reading is taught in our public schools.

Most serious of all, however, is the misunderstanding that is so widespread in regard to what vision is. Text­books are crammed with material on the physical eye, and yet the physical eye can be perfect while the vision is defective; in fact, in some cases, there may be no vision at all. Nothing has been done or is being done to prevent eye defects, all of which are produced by a mental strain. Investigation has been concentrated on external influences alone. This is an alarming situa­tion in an age in which tremendous strides are being made in surgery, in public health, and in preventive medicine as it applies to almost every physical con­dition save the eyes.

Such an attitude cannot be condoned when one gives a little thought to the appalling statistics. A total of 50,000,000 persons, forty per cent of our entire popu­lation, has defective vision. Some authorities go so far as to say that two-thirds of the people have poor eye­sight. Eye defects increase rapidly with age. Although only about seven per cent of our children are affected before entering school, about twenty-four per cent, or one out of every four, have measurable human eye defects at graduation from high school. One out of three is affected by the time he is graduated from college. The ratio has increased to fifty per cent by middle age and to eighty per cent at the age of sixty years.

The American Journal of Ophthalmology reportedin 1942 on the results of an examination of 126 pupils in the fifth grade of a public school where the average age was ten years. Forty-three per cent of that group of small children suffered from some form of eye defect.

In the Second World War it was necessary to reduce visual requirements from normal sight (20/20) to 20/100. That means an ability to read at twenty feet a line of letters which the normal eye can read at one hundred feet. If normal vision had been required, almost a third of the men of draft age would have been rejected. Instead, the prevalence of faulty eyes led one cynical examiner to remark, when a young draftee explained that he had defective vision, "We don't measure 'em in this war. We just count 'em."

It is time to get excited over this shocking preva­lence of eye defects. For decades, organizations and investigators have struggled to find the cause of eye defects in external environment and they have failed. If we accept the theory that eye defects are the result only of external influences to which the eyes are ex­posed, we find it impossible to account for the fact that, under similar conditions of life, the eyes of different persons and different eyes of the same person react differently.

It remained for Dr. William H. Bates, a New York ophthalmologist, to solve the problem after nearly forty years of research and painstaking investigation. Records of liis prodigious series of experiments are to be found at the New York Academy of Medicine. His greatest memorial, however, is the large number of persons whose vision has been corrected by his method.

HOW   WE   SEE

How does this thing called vision function? How do we see? The eye, as is constantly pointed out, operates in many respects like a camera. At this moment you are looking across the room. Perhaps there is a paint­ing on the opposite wall. Perhaps you see an easy chair with a lamp beside it. Whatever it is, for our purposes it constitutes a picture.

Suppose you want to record that picture with a camera. First, you adjust the focal length so that the image is sharp and clear without blurring or distortion on the film. If the object is at a distance, you shorten the focal length. If it is close, you lengthen it. Then you snap the picture. That is, you let light in upon the exposed plate and the picture is taken. You can­not see it, however, until the film has been developed.

How does this compare with the functioning of the eye? The eyeball of a normal eye involuntarily adjusts itself so that the image is focused on the retina (film of the camera). Once again there must be sufficient light to make your picture clear. Once again, if the object is at a distance, the focal length (the distance from the cornea to the retina) is shortened; and vice versa if the object is close. This process of adjustment to far or near sight is called accommodation. Later on, we will devote more attention to it because of its im­portance and the conflicting  opinions which exist in regard to its functioning.

Light enters the eye through the small hole in the iris called the pupil, and comes to a focus on the retina where, by a chemical reaction, it is changed from radiant energy into nerve impulses. Sensitive nerve re­ceptors of the retina, which are a part of the optic nerve, carry these impulses to the visual centers in the brain where, with the assistance of memory, imagina­tion, experience and judgment, a picture is developed. That is, the mind interprets the image.

It is, therefore, the brain that sees. The greater the degree of mental control, that is, the better your memory and imagination, the better you see.

When the camera is in the hands of a person who does not understand its functioning, the pictures are unsatisfactory, and so with the eye. If the eye fails to accommodate, as a result of some malfunctioning, it is improperly focused. If it strains to see, the individual begins to suffer from some form of eye trouble. He goes to an ophthalmologist and, after examination, de­parts with a pair of glasses. The glasses fix on the indi­vidual the trouble which they are supposed to correct, while the underlying cause remains unchanged. Mean­while, the sight will worsen when the glasses are removed. For instance, a person with 20/70 vision will find, a few weeks after being fitted with glasses, that his vision has degenerated to 20/200 when he removes them.

While many human eye troubles are preventable and many more can be vastly alleviated, the only solution that is offered for this appalling condition is to fit the eyes with glasses. There are glasses for young and old, dark glasses and colored glasses, reading glasses and ornate affairs; glasses for the near-sighted and for the far-sighted; glasses for eyestrain and to relieve headache. Glasses for every purpose, indeed, except to get at the cause of the eyestrain.

The widespread theory is that nothing can be done for defective eyes but to put on glasses. And yet some­thing can be done. Something is being done every day, in thousands of cases, to prove that when the eye is properly educated and properly used it can do its job, and the more it is used correctly, the stronger it becomes.

Makers of glasses devise jeweled frames and tinted lenses and even invisible lenses. Lighting experts study scientific lighting and its relation to eyesight. All these attempts at improvement are aimed at lessening the strain of near work upon the eyes, leaving the strain for distant objects—which exists even in far-sighted eyes—unaffected. And the mental strain, which under­lies the optical one, is totally ignored.

Strain is not the result of eye trouble. It is the cause. When the strain is relieved the eye sees normally. The principle on which this book is based—that of Dr. Bates—may be summed up as follows: When the mind is at rest there is no nerve tension; when there is no nerve tension there is no muscular tension and the eye is at rest; when the eye is at rest it has normal vision.

Dr. Bates' extensive research on the eyes led him to the inescapable conclusion that all eye defects are a direct result of nerve tensions which, as will be ex­plained in greater detail later on, cause muscular ten­sions that alter the shape of the eyeball and create conditions that range from mild myopia to severe cataract.

The causes of the nerve tension are infinite, but for the most part they are mental and emotional ten­sions brought about by our highly geared civilization. For instance, school children frequently develop eye-strain as a result of tensions created by a discordant home life, or teachers of whom they are afraid, or studies which are too difficult for them. The most un­fortunate circumstance in this case is that the eyestrain, frequently temporary in nature, becomes fixed if the child is fitted with glasses, while the underlying cause remains unchanged.

A headache has, in our current slang, become synonymous with worry or a difficult problem. Intense worry or mental disturbance almost invariably affect the eyes in some degree. We react emotionally to im­pressions that come to us through our senses. A sudden shock or fright has an immediate effect upon the heart, the circulation, the lungs, and general muscular ten­sion. Prolonged or intense worry and unhappiness have a less tangible but far-reaching effect on the general health. The worried or unhappy person is conscious of fatigue, he suffers from insomnia, sick headaches, indigestion and eyestrain.

It becomes apparent, then, that the mind and the vision are closely related. To what an extraordinary degree the mind affects the body we are only begin­ning to discover, and yet it is many years since experimenters in this field demonstrated that they could raise blisters on the skins of their subjects by hypnotic suggestion.

As far back as 1914, Thaddeus Hoyt Ames, in the Archives of Ophthalmology, recorded several cases which indicated the powerful effect of emotions upon the eyesight. One was the case of a young woman who, although her optic nerves were unimpaired and her eyes undamaged in any way, suddenly became blind. On investigation it appeared that her life was so monotonous and unendurable as the drudge for an unappreciative family, that her blindness had been an unconscious attempt to escape from the situation. When this point was made clear to her, she regained her sight as abruptly as she had "lost" it.

Countless examples of the powerful effect of the mind on the vision appeared in "blind" cases return­ing from the Second World War. These men had actu­ally lost their vision, and yet examination revealed that their physical eyes were perfect. They had sustained no injury that could have... [Chapter Incomplete]

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