| tuvredzība jeb miopija 2 |
18. Nov 2010|20:58 |
http://www.effortlessvision.com/docs/Myopia_As_An_Adaptation.pdf
Myopia As An Adaptation
By Robert Lichtman
... In particular, fear and anxiety play a large role in the production of myopia by
introducing factors that affect the ability to form a clear image on the retina as well as regulate
the elongation of the eye. I will propose a theory as to how emotions become thoughts, thoughts
become motor impulses, motor impulses affect the eye and visual cortex, and how these
3 phenomena ultimately blur vision. It is important to note that since these processes are dynamic
and since there is no organic damage to the myopic eye, the condition is reversible.
...
Blur begins with a fear of not being able to cope. In hundreds of interviews with myopes
conducted by the author, those who became myopic before the age of 15 tend to report the onset
of myopia as occurring within a year or so of a stressful situation such as moving to a new
country, problems at home, learning to read, or adolescence. Late onset myopia most often
occurs during college, when perhaps the stress of being away form home mixes with the stress of
reading large amounts of unattractive material and being forced to write papers on deadline.
...
From here comes the correlation between education and myopia, though it is really a correlation between
being willing to submit to strain for the sake of social approbation and myopia.
...
Beyond all this, though, there is one intriguing if not sinister advantage to myopia: while
anxiety brought on by the fear of not living up to expectations may be an underlying cause of
myopia, myopia ironically becomes somewhat of a palliative for anxiety. In her doctoral
dissertation, Carolyn Ziegler showed myopes reported more anxiety than emmetropes, but only
up to about -3 diopters of myopia. Beyond that, the anxiety levels went down as vision got
worse. By around -6 diopters, the border of severe myopia, the anxiety levels of the myopes were
similar to those of emmetropes (Zeiger, 1976). Her work further suggests that treating myopia
would concomitantly treat anxiety, though severe myopes would likely report an increase in
anxiety as their vision improved into the -3 diopter zone.
...
In my interviews with myopes, the fear of letting go is not only a fear of
losing control, but also a fear of losing parental love. This is even true for adults, who apparently
had the thought as children, took protective measures (held on), and forgot the thought while
remembering to hold on.
...
Borkovic found this anxiety linked to imagery-based worry. His
experiments support the notion that a switch to verbal-based worry from imagery-based
mentation inhibits cardio-vascular activity. In other words, it appears to calm us down.
Appearances can be deceiving, though. The discomfort of the cardiovascular response to image
based worry limits how much worry a person can tolerate. Switching to verbal/thought based
worry allows a person to worry much more without feeling the effects of the worry. In other
words, switching from imagery-based worry to thought-based worry does nothing to reduce the
anxiety, but it is similar to taking a pill that blocks the perception of the anxiety. Just a pain killer
allows an athlete to hurt himself even more, thought based worry allows a person to worry and
be paralyzed by that worry so much more. At the same time, our school systems are biased
toward thought-based mentation so the behavior is rewarded, engaging the child in a vicious
cycle that may last his entire life.
The mechanism by which we switch from imagery-based mentation to worry based
mentation may involve a suppression of high frequency receptor fields. If so, excessive worry
would induce myopia at the same time it palliates anxiety. This resolves the problem of why
people would blur their vision and take on chronic strain: in order to reduce the effects of
anxiety. While anxiety’s purpose is to provide extra energy for a fight or flight response, in our
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modern world it actually makes our decisionmaking processes less effective. In their study of
how we process fear, Foa and Kozak found anxious persons exaggerated “subjective personal
risk” and made other, similar errors in judgment (1986). Again, the problem is the sympathetic
nervous system’s all or nothing response; every crisis is dealt with the same way we would want
it to deal with a tiger chasing us with no shades of gray (Levine, 1997). |
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