When Eyes Become Teeth

There’s good news about myopia from Taiwan, where some 90 percent of high schoolers are near-sighted. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so Taiwanese researchers did something radical: They allowed themselves to doubt the received wisdom that our phones are to blame.

Looking at small stuff right in front of your face—nearwork or close work—has been “the leading scapegoat for myopia for centuries,” Amit Katwala wrote not long ago in WIRED. In 1611 the astronomer and scientist Johannes Kepler wrote, “Those who do much close work in their youth become myopic.” In the 19th century, anxiety about farmer children emerging from new schools unable to assess distant row crops led to The Hygiene of the Eye in Schools, which advocated for headrests that physically prevented the eyes from coming too close to the text during reading.

But all along, it seems, researchers had overlooked the other thing that’s often going on when kids are doing nearwork. That is, when kids are knitting, studying, sewing, assembling models, reading books, watching TV, playing Wordle, or scrolling through social media, they’re almost always indoors.