March 26--I looked up from my phone recently (big mistake) and was reminded that things located more than 12 inches from my face still exist.
There were buildings and people and flowers and some kind of bright, fiery object in the sky. There might have even been some birds, but I got a text and had to look away before I could be sure.
It was all quite surprising. I had assumed that a near-constant focus on phone screens, computer screens and television screens had rendered my longer-range vision obsolete and that nature and other far-off objects had simply been ignored out of existence.
But no, there was still stuff out there beyond the length of my arm and I was able to see it, an attribute that seems to be slipping away from many young people around the world.
There's a fascinating article currently on the website of the journal Nature under the headline: "The myopia boom." Myopia is a fancy word for nearsightedness and, according to the article, about half of young adults here and in Europe now have blurry distance vision, "double the prevalence of half a century ago."
Per the article: "By some estimates, one-third of the world's population -- 2.5 billion people -- could be affected by shortsightedness by the end of this decade."
People have long thought that close-up work -- reading, writing, staring at screens, etc. -- was responsible for myopia, thus the stereotype of the nearsighted, bookish nerd. But research presented in the article points to an entirely different culprit: too much time indoors.
Myopia occurs when a person's eyeball becomes slightly elongated and the light coming into the eye focuses in front of the retina rather than directly on it, causing distant objects to appear out of focus.
Some researchers now say the natural light you get while outdoors helps to stall the deformation of developing eyes. According to the Nature article: "The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development."
Several studies have found a direct correlation between time spent outside and myopia. One study in Taiwan looked at a school "where teachers were asked to send children outside for all 80 minutes of their daily break time instead of giving them the choice to stay inside. After one year, doctors had diagnosed myopia in 8 percent of the children, compared with 18 percent at a nearby school."
The problem may not be that our kids are spending too much time staring at electronic devices; it may simply be that they're staying indoors while doing so.
In theory, that's a problem that's easily fixed. Take the child's tablet or smartphone, throw it in the garbage, explain to your child what "outdoors" means, draw the child a map leading to the back door of your house and then tell her or him to follow it and not come back until dinner.
Unfortunately, that theory overlooks one critically important point: The outdoors is extremely boring. It often just sits there and does nothing, the trees don't respond when you tap on them and the only things that are touch-sensitive are caterpillars and slow-moving bugs.
While technology has advanced at a staggering pace -- putting increasingly awesome games, images and information in the palms of our hands -- nature has hardly changed a bit, lazily relying on an outdated model that assumes some grass, a field or a few rolling hills are enough to keep us interested.
Nature should be ashamed of itself for failing to keep up. Simply put, the things we stare at outdoors can't compete with the things we stare at indoors.
For the sake of our children's constantly elongating, horribly deformed eyeballs, we need to upgrade the once-great outdoors. We need to draw kids out into the light.
We need Nature 2.0.
For starters, the whole experience needs to be more interactive. Children should be able to drag and drop whatever flora or fauna they wish to see into their outdoor user-engagement areas. Wildlife should be more interesting, perhaps with squirrels replaced by Rainbow One-Horned Rodent-bots and birds jazzed up with some underwing rockets.
I'm just brainstorming here, but the kids will certainly need to control their environments with some kind of stylus (maybe a stick?) and then be prompted when a task (poking something with a stick/stylus?) is successfully completed.
Each player (child) will earn an "outdoor activity badge" after completing a task and can swipe-right on the side of the backyard to see a Dopamine Fun Gauge that helps track optical health. Pretty soon every kid will be begging to go in the backyard and play Outdoors: Retina Revolution.
Of course this nonindoor reality-based educational life/health vision-enhancement app will require parental supervision. So Nature 2.0 must be designed to sync with our mobile devices.
That way we can watch our kids without having to do anything that makes us uncomfortable. Like focusing our eyes on the world beyond our phones.
rhuppke@tribpub.com
