I forget where I heard this, but have you heard anything about the shape of the eye evolving due to the proximity of cell phone/ iPad screens? I guess the light is hitting the human eye differently, (due to predominance of everything having a screen) and the prediction is that this will alter the shape..?

you know nothing of beauty or wonder. i weep for the burden of suffering you in this world.

Yeah. Nothing more egregious than an 'everlasting concert tee' joke.

You know what's truly beautiful? The ability to laugh and not shit all over something or someone; simply because they differ from you.

Have a great day.

blow me.

I agree. One thing that may have changed (not at the genetic level) since the advent of books and screens is an increase in near sightedness in the population. This is all purely speculative, but when you spend more time fixating very near things your lens spends a lot more time bent (the lens bends and unbends to bring things at diff distances into focus) and it may have a hard time unbending. My dad always said he thought my near sightedness was due to the fact that my parents got me a first gen Macintosh when I was little and I spent too much time in front of it playing kidpix... And not enough time staring off at the horizon looking for predators or big game (as our ancestors sitting at the edge of their caves may have).

We as humans are extremely adaptive to our environment. Only recently have we been so immersed in technology. Most of which has screens. So I think the logic is that this will have an affect on our bodies, (possibly changing the shape of the eyes) in some way.

There are anthropologists that hypothesize the human body will evolve to not have pinky toes. Why? They're becoming obsolete. THey serve no function.

Technology being ubiquitious is all new. We don't really know what effect it will have. Maybe humans in the future will adapt. Maybe we'll all wear glasses or get laser surgery.

Endlessly staring into tiny screens is not exactly what the human eye was built for is all I'm saying.

thanks piff. your t-shirt faded because every time you wash it (and good on you for doing so, laundry is my greatest nemesis), you wash away some of the dye. that means the physical structure has changed and the shirt will absorb and reflect light differently. given that your brain interprets reflected light in context and relativistically and given that not everything in your environment has faded, the shirt is now uniquely different from how it used to be. if you could cast a 'fade filter' over the whole environment and then look at your t-shirt, it's likely its possible it would no longer look faded (as long as it still has *some* brown in it)... you would essentially recalibrate.

speaking of an environmental "fade filter" and piff's depression. there is some anecdotal evidence that people who are severely clinically depressed actually do see the world as less saturated. people use metaphors, like "the world is gray," but it may be more than just a metaphor. I've seen video of deep brain stimulation in a depressed patient and every time the doctor stimulates the woman is like "WHOA! your cap [the surgeon's cap], its SO yellow!" and then again, as he advances his electrode and stimulates, "WHOA, your gloves! they're SO blue! I hadn't noticed before..." These doctors are not stimulating in color regions, they are targeting regions associated with alleviating depressive symptoms... Some people also report the world being brighter when they come out of depression....

there are lots of ways you might be able to account for this, like maybe depression just involves reduced global attention and/or sensation in general. it would be interesting to know if this is specific to color, or just all features of sensation (or at least vision). but I wouldn't be surprised if color was uniquely impaired in depression. We know from experience that color ties strongly into emotion... I'd love to do a study of color sensitivity in depressed patients (with a control test for some other visual feature), but working with that population is complicated for a bunch of reasons. maybe someday. its on my bucket list. piff, you can be the first subject.

Interesting.

I know depression affects memory. Not sure why. Is it merely a symptom? Or is it a function with purpose? Is it protecting the mind from bad memories?

If a depressed brain interprets color differently; what is the purpose? To compensate for feeling like shit all the time? The brains like, "you're stressed enough as it is. Fuck it. You don't need the color red right now..."

of course, I was in no way calling you out. i agree 100%, and I'm a stickler too. but piff asked a question about how looking at screens might change the shape of our eyes. just because he framed it in an assumption about evolution, doesn't mean we have to ignore the general intuition.. which is that we didn't evolve to look at screens, but now here we are looking at them all the time, are there implications for the shape of our eyes? (evolutionary or otherwise?)

I don't have a formal education. Am I using the term evolution incorrectly? Wouldn't the shape of the eye changing be an evolutionary adaptation? Or is it something else?

Tell me the correct way to describe this because I don't know but I am interested.