Doctors have reported that using cellphones in the dark caused temporary blindness in two women.
In a New England Journal of Medicine article titled “transient smartphone blindness”, it was reported that two women, ages 22 and 40, had complained of having recurring vision loss for to 15 minutes. They ran several medical tests which were inconclusive. It was an eye specialist who discovered the cause of their blindness.
According to Dr. Gordon Plant of Moorfield’s Eye Hospital in London.
“I simply asked them, ’What exactly were you doing when this happened?’” He explained that both women typically looked at their smartphones with only one eye while resting on their side in bed in the dark — their other eye was covered by the pillow.
“So you have one eye adapted to the light because it’s looking at the phone and the other eye is adapted to the dark,” he said.
Thank goodness the problem isn’t caused by just checking your smartphone in bed, because I dislike that almost every night. The issue is having one eye on the screen and the other covered by a pillow. Where the phone eye adapts to the light by being less dilated, the pillow eye is more dilated and adapts to the dark. After the phone is switched off, the phone eye takes a while to adjust to the dark and catch up to the pillow eye, causing the feeling of temporary blindness. There wasn’t any true vision loss, but it was an effect similar to how we feel “blind” right when we go into a dark room after being outside.
The phenomenon is called “transient smartphone blindness” and is totally avoidable if we use both eyes to check our phones in dark. Ironically, I also typed this with my smartphone in dark. Although some experts have said two cases weren’t enough to prove that one-eyed smartphone use in the dark caused the problem. Dr. Rahul Khurana, a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, called it a fascinating hypothesis and said he and his wife recreated the scenario but found it difficult checking their smartphone with just one eye.
Even if we eventually don't go blind through this, it's best not to look at bright screens in the dark. Good thing some smartphones come with nightmode. You sleep best in total darkness.
Na wa ooo
ReplyDeleteWow, eye opener
ReplyDeleteWow, eye opener
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