According to the New England Journal of Medicine, two women – ages 22 and 40 – experienced separate, yet consistent, temporary blindness symptoms for up to 15 minutes at a time, immediately following their use of their smartphone device while lying in bed.
To determine why this was happening, they went through several MRI and heart scans, along with a bevy of other medical tests. Everything came up inconclusive, and so the two visited an eye doctor who, in turn, asked them a very simple question — how were they positioned in bed when they were viewing their phone?
Well, it turns out that the two were scrolling their news feeds and checking status reports with one eye on the screen and the other covered by a pillow; this typically happens when one is lying on his / her side while using the device. The result is that the “phone” eye, if you will, adapts to the light of the gadget’s screen by being less dilated; the “pillow” eye, meanwhile, is more dilated as it has adjusted to the dark. When the device is switched off, the former eye takes a while to adjust to the dark and catch up to the pillow eye. While there is no true vision loss, the feeling is temporary blindness, such as that which is experienced when entering a dark room from the outside.
The technical term for this experience is “transient smartphone blindness” and the good news is that we can continue to use our devices in the dark, just so long as both eyes are used to read the screen.
It is worth noting that these two cases are considered novelty items, and in no way are they considered definitive; in fact, experts have gone on record in The Guardian as saying “transient smartphone blindness” is actually a rare phenomenon.
Also worth pointing out – even after the root of the cause was diagnosed, one of the women continued with her bad gadget habit. Some tweets can’t wait until the morning.
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