If a large portion of your working life involves sitting in front of a computer screen, this is for you.
As those in the above category are aware, this can put a major strain on your eyesight, sometimes causing painful headaches and pressure around the eyes.
Thankfully, science seems to have found a way to help the millions of people working in desk jobs and suffering from this common affliction, (which is pretty horrible at times as anyone who’s had a laptop screen-induced migraine will know).
According to The New York Times, a form of brain retraining that involves looking at images of ‘Gabor patches’ can help improve visual acuity.
Gabor patches, which you can see here, are what can only be described as blurred line on a grey background.
In the piece, Austin Frakt, a health economist and associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine, explains how the Gabor patches exercise works (but you need to look at them yourself too to properly understand, see above link).
“A great deal of the training involves trying to see Gabor patches placed between closely spaced, distracting flankers. In training, the flanker spacing is varied, the target contrast is turned way down, and the images are flashed on a screen for fractions of a second — to the point that one can barely see the target”.
Austin explains that doing this training regularly can help to improve vision which of course is ideal for those of us working on laptops all day, every day.
Having researched the topic in depth, Austin discovered a smartphone app involving this type of brain training and backed up by scientific research, named Glasses Off.
Glasses Off isn’t just for people who currently wear glasses but also reduces “headaches, eyestrain and fatigue after reading” or indeed, staring at a screen.
Although Austin mentions that the training is tough and expensive over time, it does work with him seeing results in as little as eight weeks.
“After a couple of months, the app reports I can read fonts nearly one third the size I could when I started and much more rapidly. According to feedback from GlassesOff, my vision after training is equivalent to a man about 10 years younger than my age”.
