Are Your Eyeballs Your Destiny?

I had an interesting discussion the other day with my eye doc.

(Allow me to interrupt myself with a report on my Lasik.  [Because some of you are bound to ask.]  My eyesight is very, very good, particularly distance vision.  I’m seeing the nearby mountains better than I’ve ever seen them, even with contacts or glasses.  I’m still a bit sensitive to bright light and glare, and my eyes get tired and sore more easily than formerly.  But on the whole the Lasik is a big thumbs-up.)

Anyway, what my doc said was, “The reason you’re a writer is because of your vision.”

Well yes, I thought, I have enormous artistic vision.  But then I realized he meant my eyeballs.

“When you first went to school you were nearsighted,” he went on, “and you were comfortable reading and doing other close-up activities.”  (My first grade teacher would have called it “seat work.”)  “But since your distance vision wasn’t as good, you were less comfortable at activities requiring farsightedness, and as you grew older you arranged your life so as to stay in your comfort zone.”

(First, a couple of comments.  I wasn’t that nearsighted in first grade, and didn’t need glasses till third grade.  Though the doc was right that I was probably more nearsighted than not.

(Also, my eyeballs might have made me a reader, but I suspect it’s artistic vision, such as it is, that made me a writer.)

The doc contrasted me with kids who go to school farsighted, which is something like 20% of the total.  They don’t get diagnosed, because there’s nothing obviously wrong with their vision— they can see the baseball coming at them or whatever.  But they’re uncomfortable reading and doing seat work, and they don’t get good at it.

The farsightedness usually goes away by the time they’re ten or so, but by then they have a mental block against reading, and think they’re not good at it, and don’t do it.

The doc has a friend who owns a sheet metal factory.  (“Nobody decides at the age of ten to become a sheet metal worker,” he remarked.)  None of the workers at the factory wear glasses.  None of them are readers.

So do we think this is true?  Will a farsighted five-year-old inevitably grow up to be a sheet metal worker?  Are your eyeballs your destiny?

It occurs to me that if the data actually supports this, I might work up a Malcolm Gladwell-style essay on the subject.

I’d ask my friends, but everyone I know is a reader whether they’re nearsighted or not.  So I thought I’d ask the world in general, but then you’re all readers too, aren’t you?

Maybe I’d better just search the literature.