Research suggests that if you think you can see well, your eyesight will improve. In one of several fascinating experiments, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer showed a group of normal-sighted subjects a reversed eye chart, with the letters at the bottom increasingly larger. The subjects read the smallest letters better than they did on a regular eye chart. Why? According to Science News, "These results reflect people's expectation, based on experience with standard eye charts, that letters are easy to see at the top and become increasingly difficult to distinguish on lower lines, the researchers suggest." From Science News (Wikimedia Commons image):
Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.
Langer's new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from the eyes to the brain but on experience-based assumptions about what can be seen in particular situations. Those expectations lead people to devote limited attention to familiar scenes and, as a result, to ignore unusual objects and events.
"Vision gets better with the right mind-set"
