新概念雙語：研究顯示黑暗中側(cè)躺看手機可暫時性致盲

在我們被各種電子產(chǎn)品和顯示屏包圍的今天，眼睛也在發(fā)生著改變：近視、遠視和散光，甚至手機導(dǎo)致的暫時性失眠，無一不體現(xiàn)出這一點。我們到底應(yīng)該如何呵護這扇越來越狹窄的“心靈之窗”?

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen, even calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth.

我們眼睛的狀態(tài)每日愈下-屬于童年時期的高適應(yīng)性已經(jīng)一去不回。從我們誕生在這個地球上開始，晶狀體就變得越來越厚濁、僵硬，甚至鈣化。眼睛不再是心靈的窗戶，它們越來越像牙齒。

To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. The first sign of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting at phones. Next comes the reflexive extending of the arm, the impulse to resize letters into the preschool range. And at last the buying of drugstore readers.

如果想檢測自己的眼球是否在“硬化”，不用怎么費勁，看手機就行-也許你早就將目光轉(zhuǎn)向了那邊。凝視屏幕、閱讀、目不轉(zhuǎn)睛，不要去管真實空間的第三維度和自然光線。眼睛向牙齒發(fā)展的第一個征兆是，我們會瞇起眼來看手機;接著便是不斷地調(diào)整屏幕的距離;再就是調(diào)大字號;最終是去配眼鏡。

Modern medicine offers little apart from magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia (from the Greek presbus, meaning “old man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you on your feet just fine, which is to say, you can once again relish your phone without squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for farsightedness evidently succeeds to the degree that it restores a woman or man to the comfortable consumption of texts, email, ecommerce, and social media on a glazed rectangle of aluminum alloys held at a standard reading distance of 16 inches. With reading glasses we live again.

有了眼鏡這一現(xiàn)代醫(yī)學的產(chǎn)物，你就可以重新沉浸到手機的世界中，既不用瞇縫起眼睛，也不用伸長胳膊。近視眼和遠視眼的治療方案顯然很成功，以標準的 16 英寸(約 40 厘米)為閱讀距離，被這一問題困擾的人士可以舒適地閱讀鋁合金發(fā)光屏幕上的短信、郵件，處理電子商務(wù)，或者使用社交媒體。眼鏡讓我們獲得了重生。

Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the primary object of our eyesight seems corrosive. We measure our vision against the phone, all the while suspecting the phone itself is compromising our ability to see it.

可是，這難道不是一個惡性循環(huán)嗎?視力本來就不好，但主要的注視對象似乎又會嚴重侵害視力。我們以手機為標準來衡量視力，又同時懷疑正是手機在折損我們看清它所呈現(xiàn)出的內(nèi)容的能力。

Even if we don’t say out loud that failing vision has something to do with our vastly narrowed visual field, our bodies seem to know what’s up. How convenient, for example, that you can turn up a phone’s contrast and brightness with a few taps. If perception can’t be improved, objects can be made more perceivable, right? But then the brightness seems, like morphine, to produce a need for more brightness, and you find yourself topping out, hitting the button in vain for more light only to realize that’s it. You’ve blinded yourself to the light that was already there.

即使嘴上不愿承認日漸衰弱的視力與視野的普遍變窄有關(guān)，但我們的身體仍很誠實。例如，只要稍微動動手指，就可以輕松地調(diào)節(jié)手機屏幕的對比度和亮度。雖然無法改善自身的視覺能力，但這可以讓所視之物變得更容易看清不是嗎?然而，屏幕亮度恰如嗎啡，會使人調(diào)節(jié)上癮，直到調(diào)到最頂部還徒勞地按加號-你用這些光線閃瞎了自己。

What might modern vision be today without the phone as its reason for being? If you were a nomadic goatherd in the Mongolian grasslands, you might not even consider presbyopia a pathology.

如果手機沒有成為日常必需品，現(xiàn)代人的視覺會變成什么樣?如果你是一名生活在蒙古草原上的牧民，也許都不會認為老花眼是種病。

There are at least two recorded cases of something called smartphone blindness. The New England Journal of Medicine notes that both patients had been reading their phones in bed, on their sides, faces half-hidden, in the dark. “We hypothesized that the symptoms were due to differential bleaching of photo-?pigment, with the viewing eye becoming light-adapted.” Differential bleaching of the eyes! Fortunately, smartphone blindness of this kind is transient.

目前，已經(jīng)至少出現(xiàn)了兩例記錄在案的智能手機眼盲癥。《新英格蘭醫(yī)學雜志》(The New England Journal of Medicine)注意到，兩例患者都喜歡在黑暗中側(cè)身斜眼看手機。“我們推測，隨著眼睛越來越適應(yīng)屏幕亮度，兩眼視覺細胞中的光敏色素會不同程度地褪去，從而導(dǎo)致了這些癥狀。”唯一值得慶幸的是，智能手機眼盲癥是暫時的。

Lately, when I pull away from the screen to stare into the middle distance for a spell, I take off my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will even approach a tree. I don’t want mediation or glass. The trees are still strangers; I hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing myself on leaf shapes and shades of green. All I know so far is that trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious interface. Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a minute or two, I-what’s that expression, “the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost, at times, like that.

最近，當我把眼睛移開屏幕，然后向中遠距離處看一段時間后，我會摘下眼鏡。我試著找一棵樹。如果我在室內(nèi)，那就打開窗戶;如果在室外，我甚至會走近一棵樹。我只想用裸眼去觀察它們。樹木對我來說還很陌生;我?guī)缀醪恢浪鼈兊拿Q，但還是努力觀察葉片的形狀和綠色的深淺。就我目前的感知而言，樹木完全不同于屏幕。它們擁有驚人的分枝結(jié)構(gòu)，有很多蟲子。看了一兩分鐘后-最近我時常會有這種感覺-“我如夢初醒，光明涌入了眼簾”。