Just like a camera’s autofocus our own eyes can bring things into clear focus, no matter how close or far the object is from our eyes.

This amazing ability comes from our own internal “auto-focus,” and is also known as accommodation.  It is so amazing and so fast in fact, that most of the time we hardly even notice it working.  Things just look clear, all the time.  The structure inside the eye that actually takes care of the dirty work is called the lens.

Note: The lens inside the eye is the internal “auto-focus.”  Everyone needs extra focusing power to prevent things from looking blurry up close.  In far-sighted people (hyperopes), they use their internal autofocus ALL the time, even for looking at things off in the distance.  So for looking at things up close, including reading, there is much more stress on the visual system.

Accommodative insufficiency is a condition where things look blurry up close, for one eye or both.  We expect a certain amount of clear vision up to a certain close distance from your eyes.  This distance depends on your age; the older you are, the further away things need to be from your face to remain clear.  Accommodative (or focusing) infacility is the inability to quickly refocus from far to near and back.  Focusing fatigue is simply that things start to appear blurry after a short period of visual stress.  Visual stress can be as simple as looking at a computer screen or reading for 10 minutes.

We are all focusing superstars in infancy, so good in fact that we could enter the focusing olympics.  This makes sense because the world for an infant is within arms reach, where extra focusing power is needed.

By age 60 most of us will have lost all of our useful internal auto-focus, and frequently even by the mid-40’s lenses are used to help compensate and focus for us.


Related Services:

  • Visual Efficiency Exam
  • Dilated Health Exam
  • Vision Therapy
  • Perceptual Skills Assessment
  • Computer Vision Syndrome
  • Reading Dynamics Program