Geepers Peepers... where'd you get those eyes~

Hi Everyone, I'm still alive over here dispite not posting for the last few days. I've been incredibly busy running around. By the time I get home sometimes, I just don't have that urge to think and write things down anymore. Today was a much more relaxed day. After running errands, I got home at 5:00 pm terribly hungry, prepared food, cooked for 1 hour and my body decided to tell me that it wasn't that hungry in the first place. Bah. I ate a little anyways and took a nap.

Now on to today's topic: eyes. In Vancouver, nearly everyone I know wears glasses. Take a sample of 10 friends, perhaps 8 or 9 of them will be wearing glasses or contacts (or the general term I like using is "occular enhancers"). That was pretty much the norm. I on the other hand am a weird exception that I don't wear glasses I am also sometimes refered to as "eagle eyes" in some occasions. Before comming to Japan I had my eyes tested for some proceedure they needed. The result came out that I had about 20/19 vision.

Just as a note here. According to this webpage, 20/20 vision is supposed to be the "average" distance a person can read an 8 mm tall letter at a range of approx 10 meters. Either people's vision have changed with time or people in Vancouver have bad eyesight, could be either/or or possibly a combination of the two, who knows.

Anyways, for my Japanese listening class, we watched a documentary on glasses. It turns out that 49% of Japanese people wear either contacts or glasses from a sample of high school students (I thought that was low) where as the US high school students were at 25%.

As it turns out, some foreigners moving into Japan from places like the US that didn't wear glasses found that they had to start wearing glasses after a few years of Japanese study because Japanese characters (Kanji in particular) due to eye strain complicated characters. After a quick survey of people in my class, it was the feeling of people in France, Russia and Sweeden that the majority of their population did not wear glasses. Asian students from China indicated that a high percentage wore glasses. A possible factor of bad eye sight could be from complicated Asian character sets versus English letters.

The resarch followed up on eye usage when reading and found that people reading Kanji tend to focus their eyes on the characters closely during reading which is a possibility for eye strain. People reading English do not tend to focus on specific letters closely. Actually, it has been said that (recall if you've seen that funny e-mail that went around with nothing but spelling mistakes) people reading English can distinguish words by the general forms and glancing at the first and last letters of the word; people use this method sometimes to skim text. I tend to look at word shapes and pay less attention to individual characters. As a result, I am quite famous for my poor spelling.

After watching the documentary, I hypothesize that people that wear occular enhancers, in general, are more detail oriented people compared to people that do not. Of course, metrics are required to measure how "detailed" a person is (quantifying a quality is a little tricky and I hope you have an appreciation of my use of italics and boldface in the previous emphasis). But if I were to wave my hand at this argument, 'detailed-ness' could be measures in terms of how well a person can make plans with minimal deviations or how in depth they notice change in environments. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation.

Comming from a person that doesn't wear glasses, I can tell you that this much-- I am really, really bad at details (do I really need to give examples? Naaaahhh). Keep your eyes peeled on this hypothesis and see for your self :)