14. How to Arrange Proper Reading Light Conditions

Learning to read without glasses requires the substi­tution of good reading habits for bad ones i.e. proper reading light arrangement. Practically everyone, as he grows older, finds it difficult to read unless he has kept the eye muscles flexible. If he has depended upon glasses, it seems troublesome at first to learn new techniques of reading.

There is a great reward in persisting in your practice of the new techniques as it will enable you in the long run to read without strain, headache, fatigue, or that blurring and watering of the eyes which is so annoying.

Abuse of the eyes is nowhere as prevalent as it is in reading i.e. poor reading light conditions, and this abuse frequently starts in child­hood, and becomes fixed long before the child has grown up. People are apt to be unconscious of their reading habits, though they are not unconscious of the uncomfortable results, even when they fail to recog­nize the inexorable law of cause and effect.

You do not exercise a tired heart, or encourage a tubercular patient to play tennis, or put a hearty meal into an upset stomach. But you feel that the eyes can always be used, regardless of the circumstances. As we have already pointed out, the eyes respond imme­diately to any physical ailment, yet the person who takes to his bed because he has a cold or a fever or an illness of some kind, plans to while away the time by reading. While he is resting his body to cure his ail­ment, he is continuing to tax his eyes, although they too are ill.

If you have a cold, your eyes are tired and inflamed. Whatever your illness, the eyes reflect it. Give them the same consideration you give the rest of your body.

This recommendation applies with equal force to your regular reading. Even when you are in good health, it is foolish to read when the eyes are tired. The first rule, then, for reading without glasses is to rest tired eyes before reading. If they are completely relaxed, you will see better and read longer without strain or tiring.

Watch your posture. The way you sit and stand and hold your head has a great deal to do with the way you see. When you curl up in a chair with your spine out of alignment, the neck muscles pulled and strained, your chin on your chest, peering down at the book on your lap, you are inducing a severe strain on your eyes and distorting the focus.

Sit erect. Poor posture impedes circulation of blood in the spine and head, and circulation of air through the nostrils, thus making your breathing shallow—for proper breathing is an important factor in vision.

For normal eyes the book should be held twelve to fourteen inches distant, with the printed page tilted outward and slightly below the level of the eyes so the head is up, not bent forward.

Many people find an inclined reading table of ma­terial aid in adjusting books or magazines to the cor­rect height and angle and enabling the body to relax completely.

The far-sighted person or the one suffering from presbyopia has a tendency to hold his book at a con­siderable distance from the eyes. If that is your trouble, make it a matter of habit to hold your book a little closer to you than is actually comfortable. If you make a constant practice of this—not trying it now and then, but in doing all reading—you can retain your reading sight indefinitely.

LIGHTING

Consider your reading light setting in your reading room. While proper, scientific light­ing is available today for everyone, an overwhelming number of people regard their lighting fixtures from the viewpoint of their decorative value rather than of their value to the eyes. There is no reason why a light can­not be both decorative and useful, but it is not com­mon sense to select it primarily for its decorative value.

The lighting companies frequently offer free services in analyzing your proper lighting needs and there are many free pamphlets which provide the same service. Good light is essential to eye health, and bad light af­fects the eyes as surely as bad air affects the lungs.

In planning lamps to meet your reading needs there are three essentials to keep in mind:

1. There must be enough light.
   
   
2. There must be no glare.
   
   
3. There must be good general illumination in the room. That is, the room should be about as bright as the page you are reading. So don't use a reading lamp and turn on no other lights.

Research has just begun to make clear to us the vital effect of lighting on vision and on the general health. Matthew Luckiesh, in Light, Vision and Seeing, pointed out the far-reaching effects of proper lighting in offices and factories:

"Among the tangible and intangible benefits," he writes, "arising from high see-levels and good seeing conditions in general are:

"1. Increased rate of performance of useful work done which results in decreased costs.

"2. Increased accuracy which results in better work and less waste of materials, thereby decreasing costs.

"3. Increased ease of seeing which results in the conservation of human resources, such as eye­sight, energy and time, through the reduction in eyestrain, nervous tension, eye-fatigue, gen­eral fatigue, annoyance and mental fatigue. "4. Increased safety through quick, certain and easy seeing which reduces the enormous material and human losses due to preventable accidents. "5. Increased morale resulting directly or indirectly from the foregoing and from other psychological factors such as cheerful surroundings which are an inevitable result of good seeing conditions." Reading under a pool of light in an otherwise dark­ened room seems to be a widespread practice with attendant strain. Not only should the room itself be adequately lighted but, for eye ease and for maximum light, it is a great help if the walls themselves are light in color. Dark colors absorb light while light colors reflect it. The darker your walls, draperies, and the upholstery of your furniture the more light you are losing.

Where the vision is defective, natural sunlight, which is the equivalent of 10,000 foot-candles—that is, 10,000 candles placed one foot from your book—is agreat boon because the intense light makes the print appear blacker and therefore more sharply defined on the white page. Indeed, the ideal light is that which you get out of doors on a sunny day.

Sitting near a window where you can get natural daylight is the next best light for reading. This gives the equivalent of 100 to 500 foot-candles, depending on the clearness of the day. From ten to fifteen feet away from the window, the light is equivalent to two foot-candles or less. The illumination diminishes as the square of the distance. A sixty-watt lamp produces eighty foot-candles at one foot, but only nine foot-candles at three feet.

These few figures will give you some idea of the poor illumination in our artificially lighted rooms.

Many people complain of eyestrain when they first begin to work or read with fluorescent lighting. Indeed, it is claimed that twenty per cent of the people seek­ing relief for their eyes do so because of fluorescent lighting. One reason for this is that under this type of light everything appears in the flat, without shadows. It has been discovered, however, that after using it for a month, people become accustomed to it and prefer it to other light and it is said to be the nearest approach yet found to actual daylight.

As glare causes eyestrain, always sit so that the light comes over your left shoulder and falls directly on the printed page. Never read facing a light.

When reading by artificial light, a tall table lamp with a 150-watt bulb is recommended. Place the lamp on the table to the left of your chair. In order to avoid reflected glare on the printed page, try this simple test: Place a small pocket mirror in the center of the page. If the light bulb is reflected in the mirror, move the lamp until there is no place on the printed page where your eyes can see the light in the mirror.

People who have a pet chair in which they like to read overlook the fact that there may be no adequate light near the page. People start to read by bright daylight, become engrossed, and do not notice that as twilight falls, the light grows dimmer and dimmer, until they are straining to make out the words on the printed page.

The problems of lighting and posture are important for the healthy eye as well as for the eye that suffers from some defect. In the case of the latter, their neglect is little short of criminal abuse.

HOW TO READ

One way in which the pressure of our machine age and our growing admiration for speed for its own sake affect our eyes is in the contemporary attitude toward reading. We are taught not how to read better but how to read faster. People take an inordinate amount of pride in the fact that they can read a book in an hour, or go through two or three books in the course of an evening. It is part of contemporary nerve tension and the feverish rush of our days that we pride ourselves on doing things fast rather than doing them well.

Rapid reading means skimming, which in turn means the loss of central fixation. The person who boasts that he can read a book in an hour—and people who do things fast almost always boast of it—overlooks the fact that he is subjecting his eyes to a severe strain, often resulting in headache and impairment of vision, to say nothing of the fact that the speed of his hasty reading gives him no time in which to absorb the real savor of the book or the inner value of the author's thought.

Stop to think that when the normal eye looks at a printed letter, four separate and minute shifts of vision are required in order to see the letter in its entirety. If you look at a line of fourteen letters the eye makes some seventy shifts in the fraction of a second. Now when you try to take in a whole block of words at a time, you are endeavoring to cover a larger area than the center of the retina can cope with and you lose the normal shifting which begins to slow down as a result of strain. When you read at great speed, glanc­ing swiftly down the page, there is no central fixation, the eye does not shift, and strain is the result.

It is always difficult to develop the lost central fixa­tion in the rapid reader, and one reason is the reluc­tance with which the reader approaches the idea of acquiring new reading habits. Doing things fast is so fine an achievement in itself!

I tried to make this point to a woman who prided herself on her ability to read rapidly. She had worn glasses for forty years, first because of myopia, then bifocals as she lost both the near and far vision.

After regaining her sight for near and far, her great­est difficulty was to get rid of the images. I explained that this condition was the result of losing central fixa­tion because of her continued grasping of groups of words, which stimulated the nerve receptors outside the macula area and caused blurring and images.

I handed her an index card in which I had made a pinhole. "Look through that," I suggested.

She glanced up at me in surprise. The type was clear, black, distinct, and free of images. "That's won­derful!" she declared.

"That's central fixation," I retorted.

READING   PROCEDURES

1. Read through a slot.

An excellent way to regain central fixation, by keep­ing the eyes focused on a small area, and to curb the rapid skimming of pages which always causes strain, is to cut a long, narrow slot in a rectangular piece of black cardboard or paper, making the slot slightly longer than the average line of print, and just wide enough so that the line of type and the white space below it is visible. Train the eyes to follow this white space with an easy, flowing movement.

Now, holding the piece of cardboard over the printed page, slide it along the... [Chapter Incomplete]

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