Question
Hi, I have mild shortsightednes, but ive got this weird ability to make my eyes go blurrier on demand and then clear, i tend to do this more when im daydreaming, its especially noticable when ive got my glasses on
is this normal and what are my eyes doing when this happens?i made my eyes go like taht once when i was in the opticians on their autorefrecator machine and it gave me a really high reading and after the subjective bit, the doctor lowered the prescription . is doing that blurry thing with my eyes a signal taht i could be more short sighted than i already am?
Answer
Hi D,
Each of our eyes have inside an adjustable lens controlled by a circular ring shaped muscle. The muscle squeezes on the soft lens and causes it to bulge thereby changing focusing power. This is why we can autofocus from far to near even though your glasses only focus you for far. As we get old we the lens hardens and we can't focus up close; welcome to adulthood and bifocals. So enjoy your youth and powerful autofocus mechanism. You are blurry sometimes because you are over or under focusing. No worries. And if you over focus while looking through the autorefractor you will appear more nearsighted than you really are. The drops we use to dilate pupils also paralyzes the focusing muscle so you cannot autofocus: you see the near blur (as if you're old) if wearing your distance glasses (and you won't fool the autorefractor.
Hope that helps,
Mitch Axelrod, OD.
