My 20-minute adventure in reading without corrective lenses
This past week, I was given the opportunity to wear a pair of eye-tracking goggles (and an EEG cap and a heart monitor) while attending a conference session, as a live demo of the way in which attention and engagement, which are the precursors to memory, are monitored in the moment. I've written about that experience and about the afternoon conference session that followed, given by the neuroscientist who ran the demo and who would be subsequently analyzing the data.
It was pretty cool.
As an aside, though, I wear corrective lenses. Not contacts: glasses. And you can't wear glasses with the eye-tracking goggles. So, no clear vision for me.
This made for quite an experience in that morning session. I'm ordinarily a pretty fast reader, which means that my eyes sweep across wide swathes of text in the saccades by which all of us move through text.
"Saccades?" you may ask. Yes, saccades. We all of us read only a few letters at a time, in the small circumference of sharp-focus vision that our eyes are capable of. After we've read one group of letters, our eyes dart ahead in a jump known as a saccade and we then take in the next group in the moment that our gaze rests on what's before us. That moment of rest is known as a fixation. As we read, our eyes dart forward and back, making sense of what we're reading as we're processing visually what it is we're seeing. We use the same sorts of strategies that predictive text does in making quick judgments and inferences about common words and common arrangements. Good readers jump ahead more rapidly, across wider gulfs of letters. Poor readers go more slowly, picking their way across the letters in smaller saccades.
This is all happening incredibly fast, on the order of microseconds, and so we as proficient readers are not aware of the process. Our intuitive sense, our lived experience, is that our eyes are traveling smoothly across the lines of text. That is not the case. Our eyes are capable of what's known as smooth pursuit only when our gaze is following a moving object. That's how we're built.
At any rate, back to this particular experience, the live demo.
I am not ordinarily aware of the process of reading. I just take it all in, in a process that feels smooth and natural. Unable to see the letters clearly in this demo (with the eye-tracking goggles on in place of my glasses), I was unable to make sense of words as quickly and so unable to make sense of groups of words quickly. The requisite slides up on the requisite screen were not crisp. The information was not readily, fluidly, and effortlessly available. Instead, reading was . . . effortful.
This experience reminded me of how significant is the technology of glasses that so many of us rely upon. And it reminded me of what a gift it is to be able to read at all.