The biohackers who want to fix their vision without resorting to glasses
An alarming global surge in short-sightedness caused by lifestyle not genetics is encouraging many to seek clarity in strange ways
It seemed like a bright and clear October morning along New Hampshire’s Merrimack River, but Mike Craumer couldn’t be sure. As usual, he was not wearing his contact lenses, so the world beyond his arm’s length was a blur. Craumer was hoping that would not be the case for too much longer.
For several weeks leading up to that autumn day in 2020, the 35-year-old software engineer had been attempting to reverse his short-sightedness. He was one of a growing number of people subscribing to the notion that it is possible to correct even very poor vision (Craumer’s had been measured by an optometrist at -6 in the left eye and -6.25 in the right) with “biohacking” techniques, including tensing and relaxing the eyes, focusing on distant objects or simply imagining seeing the world in full clarity.
Until now, he had been struggling. Standing on the river bank, he could just about make out the shape of his black Labrador roaming through the woods and the trees dissolving into autumn colours. The river itself, perhaps glistening in the sunlight, was just a blue haze. Craumer waded in. “There’s something about coming out of the water that just seems to generate clarity,” he told me later. As he ducked his head into the river, the water felt soothing on his eyes. But then, as he straightened back up, he noticed something remarkable. The scene around him was definitely becoming sharper.
Reality is getting foggier. If, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin believed, the way we see is connected to the way we live, that people started to see the world differently, had new experiences of vision as we began driving cars, taking photographs and filming videos, then the experience that most defines our current screen-encumbered moment is blur at a distance. A 2016 study estimated that by 2020 2.6bn people would suffer from myopia globally, 50 per cent more than in 2000. By 2050, the study found, that number is set to double to nearly 5bn. Scientists used to believe myopia was mostly genetic in origin, but research over the past few decades has conclusively pinned this epidemic of nearsightedness on our lifestyles.
Spending too much time indoors and in front of screens stretches out our eyeballs, turning them from spherical into something more egg-like, disrupting how light moves through the optical system and causing far-off objects to look hazy. The reasons for this are not fully understood. Some scientists think the high contrast of screens might play a role. But experts agree that sunlight triggers dopamine, which tells the eye to stop growing. Too much time indoors, and the eye doesn’t know when to stop.
Sometimes, blur is the least of a myope’s problems. As short-sighted people age, their misshapen eyes risk causing serious diseases, including retinal detachments that can lead to blindness. The possibility that half the world’s population may be nearsighted by 2050 is a “time bomb” that threatens blindness on a mass scale, ophthalmologist and Emory University professor Machelle Pardue told me. Spending more time outdoors can hold off myopia for a while in children. Relaxation techniques, too, can help relieve eye strain, which is caused by focusing for long periods. But once the eyeball has become elongated, most ophthalmologists agree it cannot be reversed without surgery.
This is a fate more and more people are refusing to accept. The boom in short-sightedness is encouraging many to seek clarity in strange ways, believing myopia and other eye problems can be fixed without corrective lenses or surgery. Inspired by biohacking podcasters and wellness influencers, including American neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and tech entrepreneur Dave Asprey (who runs a chain of “human upgrade centres” across the US), and spurred on by the prevailing suspicion of mainstream medicine under the Trump administration, legions of myopes and hyperopes, presbyopes and amblyopes (the near- and the far-sighted, the ageing-eyed and the lazy-eyed) are trying to seize back control from their tech addictions, from mainstream optometry and the £108bn global lens industry. What they want to achieve is something every eye doctor I spoke to assured me was physically impossible: to train themselves to see clearly again. It was like trying to will yourself taller. “You can’t meditate your way into being 6ft 2in,” said Donald Mutti, an optometrist at Ohio State University. “It just can’t happen.”
Close your eyes and picture the darkest of blacks. Now imagine a shade even darker than that. No, even darker. Or conceive of the most vivid bunch of red roses you can muster and drink in all of the detail — the guard petals peeling back, the dense inner spiral, the tips of the thorns. Do this often enough and, one day, a clearer world might be there waiting when you open your eyes.
Many vision biohackers take the view, first proposed by William Bates, a renegade ophthalmologist who worked in New York at the turn of the 20th century, that eye problems like myopia are due not to the immutable shapes of eyeballs but instead stem from a sort of chronic strain, inner blockage, spiritual sickness, even failure of imagination. Glasses and contact lenses, they believe, are overprescribed. The idea that eyesight naturally declines over time is incompatible with biohackers’ trust in near-perpetual bodily optimisation. Meditation and eye yoga can supposedly hack vision back to sharpness, manifesting more of the world into lucidity. “If you twisted an ankle,” I was told by one natural-vision coach, who claimed she’d improved her -8 myopic eyes to the point where she no longer needs glasses at all, “would you just think, ‘This is it?’”
Many holistic-health proponents believe sharpening your vision could also help mend your mind, perhaps even help put the world to rights. Rangan Chatterjee, until recently a practising GP and the resident doctor on the morning TV show BBC Breakfast, links poor vision to high stress levels, lack of empathy, phone addiction, even to angry or tunnel-visioned ways of interacting online. “Maybe,” said Chatterjee recently on Feel Better, Live More, his health podcast that he claims is Europe’s most successful, “if more and more of us could improve our visual processing . . . it could help make the world a kinder . . . place.”
Chatterjee’s guest on that episode was the controversial Maryland optometrist Bryce Appelbaum, who treats problems most of his colleagues say cannot be improved and believes “vision is the new microbiome”. After spending several days in Appelbaum’s vision-improvement clinic, Chatterjee credited the rebel optometrist with helping reduce his own myopia.
Back in New Hampshire, Craumer was having his own revelation. As he swam in the river, he noticed the trees along the bank coming into focus. He waded out of the water, sat down on a log and looked around. The rocks, he saw, were becoming clear. He could see vivid patterns emerging from the granite. On the ground were individual grains of sand! He took in the sharpened landscape and wondered if he’d already been cured.
But then, worried he was late for work, Craumer checked the time on his phone. As he looked back up, the world was once again a haze. The breakthrough had lasted about 15 seconds, but Craumer knew it meant he was on the right track. Now, it was simply a matter of making that glossy world he’d glimpsed permanent. He walked back to his house to begin the working day, inserting his contact lenses so he could see his computer screen.
Craumer’s story was one of many I’d been hearing. People were claiming to be fixing their eyesight naturally and I wanted to know what was going on. So last summer, I signed up for the International Conference of Holistic Vision, which would be the largest gathering in the community’s history, held in October in Valencia, Spain. After years in the shadows, an organiser told me, the community’s ideas were finally catching on.
Short-sighted for most of my adult life, I wondered, perhaps against my better judgment, if biohacking techniques could make a difference. And while it all seemed rather suspect, even a little unseemly, the myopia surge was making me worried — about inexorable sensory decline, about a degradation of vision hastened by the attention-industrial complex. I was also curious, at a time when our vision is collectively worsening, about the motivations of this coterie trying to bring things into greater focus through sheer force of will.
Last October, I arrived at the conference with 300 or so other attendees, all of us filling a vast, bright room inside a building on the shore. A racing yacht, its hull wrapped in plastic, was moored up against the floor-to-ceiling windows and blocked our view of the sea.
Over the next five days, there would be a packed schedule of vision-yoga workshops, group eye-therapy sessions and talks about shifting mindsets. The miraculously ex-blind were here, I’d heard, with driving licences in their pockets. I watched people’s eyes widen as they recognised fellow biohackers from previous gatherings. Many were wearing the official conference T-shirt, its SEE AND BE SEEN slogan arranged in the shape of an eye chart on their backs. Failing to count a single pair of glasses, I slipped my own frames into my shirt pocket and took my seat for the first workshop of the day.
Carme Llimargas, a Spanish vision coach dressed in a white linen dress, with bare feet and a silver bob, was there to lead a morning workshop called Heal your Vision, Heal your Life. Llimargas was teaching us how to remove our spiritual blockages to clear vision. She told everybody to stand up with their eyes closed and sway from side to side, on a floor covered in pink, yellow and blue balloons.
Part of the problem, Llimargas said, was that living in states of anxiety was causing our vision to fog up. “We need to programme ourselves to see clearly,” she said. “Nothing is impossible.” I noticed one attendee repeat a mantra under her breath: “I know I can see, I know I can see.” Outside, in the concrete yard beside the yacht, a woman was turning her head slowly back and forth in the sun, her eyes closed — a relaxation ritual called “sunning”. We were told to link arms, form a circle, close our eyes and breathe deeply. After several minutes, Llimargas asked us to open our eyes. “Maybe we can see more clearly now,” she said. Most people nodded.
After a concluding namaste, it was time for lunch. Over my tortilla, I complained to another biohacker that I’d noticed no improvement in my visual acuity. The biohacker, an American vision coach in his thirties who said his eyesight had already slightly improved since the morning, explained the key to clarity was faith. Observing reality, the natural-vision people believed, was a largely mental act, an exercise in conjuring clarity out of your head.
In some ways it was an instinctive idea. To believe we live in a shared world that can be measured and understood, you first must grasp how it becomes visible, which is not intuitively clear. Plato believed that we saw the world thanks to rays shooting out of our eyes. Other ancient philosophers thought objects sent out tiny replicas of themselves which wafted through the air and landed in the eyes.
Confusion lasted until the 11th century, when the Iraqi mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haytham, known as the father of modern optics, first explained how light bounces off objects before reaching the eyes, to be interpreted by the brain. In revealing that our perception of the world could be explained by geometrical rules, he demonstrated that the natural world could be precisely calculated, a major step towards mathematical theories of reality. With optics, wrote the historian Theresa Levitt, “the world became eminently legible”.
Not for the myopes, though, who had to wait until the 14th century for their first concave eyeglass. How the glasses worked was a mystery, until Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, explained in 1604 that light reaches its focal point too soon inside myopic (and therefore elongated) eyes, landing in front of the retina rather than directly upon it. Concave lenses focused the light a little further back. Back then, myopia was rare. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that German doctors noticed a rapid increase in the problem, which studies have since linked to the introduction of compulsory education.
Some casualties of myopia, such as Claude Monet, embraced the condition. When the painter of hazy scenes tried on a pair of spectacles, he was reportedly dismayed by the world’s hard edges (towards the end of his life Monet developed cataracts, and had to wear corrective glasses). Paul Cézanne, “an artist exasperated by a defective vision . . . who discovered the basis of a new art”, in the words of one 19th-century critic, refused to wear glasses. Other myopes believed glasses actively damaged eyesight, acting as a crutch while worsening the underlying causes of visual problems. Like the vision coach from Istanbul at the conference, who recounted to me the story of being sued by the Turkish government for practising medicine without a licence (she won the case). Or the Israeli therapist who went from severe myopia to driving at night without glasses and investigated the “inner emotional roots” of her patients’ vision problems by “conversing with the eyes”.
Or like Craumer, who I spotted on the second day standing next to the conference merch table wearing a pair of pinhole glasses on his forehead (glasses with a black plastic grating through which small beams of light enter to help reduce blur). The burly American’s beard was scraggly, his eyes the colour of light-wash denim. Inches away from his nose, he was holding a book called A New World of Seeing. Intrigued, I followed him out into the yard for lunch.
Five years ago, Craumer told me while spreading peanut butter across a slice of bread, he looked up at the stars and decided the heavens couldn’t have been this hazy to his ancestors. “Something seemed off,” he said. “Something didn’t seem natural.” As he said this, I noticed he had a dead-eyed look. He was, chillingly, gazing not at me but straight through me. “I feel like you’re looking past me,” I said. “As if I’m not here.” Craumer admitted that whenever he’s outdoors, he likes to make the most of it by focusing his eyes steadfastly on the distance, even when an object — such as another person — is in the way.
Craumer discovered the YouTube videos of Nathan Oxenfeld, a vision-biohacking influencer from Vermont, who introduced him to the teachings of vision biohacking’s founding father, Bates, who claimed to have cured his own poor eyesight. While researching his 1920 book, Perfect Sight Without Glasses, Bates brought a retinoscope to the Central Park Zoo, where he measured the optics of the eyes of an elephant, a monkey and a Cape buffalo. He supposed that each animal became myopic when anxious. Problems like myopia, Bates came to believe, were caused by an epidemic of mental strain that corrective lenses were worsening. He theorised that tension in the muscles surrounding the eye causes them to press down upon the eyeball and flatten it, like squeezing a balloon. (Ophthalmologists say such a phenomenon is anatomically impossible.)
Bates also believed a good memory was essential to seeing clearly. One of his patients, he wrote, had cured her short-sightedness by vividly recalling a buttercup she once saw — an achievement that helped cement Bates’s faith in memory’s curative power, even as he himself experienced bouts of prolonged memory loss that led to his occasional disappearance. In 1902, months after vanishing from New York without warning, his wife found him working in London’s Charing Cross Hospital as an assistant, having been admitted in a fugue state. He spent a couple of nights recuperating in the Savoy hotel before vanishing again and turning up, years later, as a small-town eye doctor in North Dakota.
For Bates, telling lies or imagining things that didn’t exist, such as “a blue sun” could also obscure one’s vision. The real sun, meanwhile, had in his view been a victim of ophthalmological slander. With fully relaxed eyes, Bates assured his patients, they would be able to stare at it for hours without harm or discomfort. Techniques for achieving such relaxation included palming, swaying, closing one’s eyes in the sun and shifting one’s gaze from side to side.
With the help of Bates’s techniques, and after achieving that fleeting moment of clarity in a New Hampshire river in 2020, Craumer worked relentlessly to improve his vision. Four years later, his world had become a little clearer, he told me. He took an eye test. His myopia prescription, his optometrist found, had dropped by 1.5 dioptres in the right eye, and 1.75 in the left. (Dioptres are the unit used to calculate the strength of an optical lens.) Craumer showed me a picture of the two prescriptions, but when I told eye doctors his story, they all doubted myopic eyes could ever improve so dramatically.
It was becoming a familiar tale. In Valencia, dozens of people, from wellness bros and eye yogis to renegade ophthalmologists, from fringe-medicine faithful and spiritual seekers to the nearly blind and the newly healed, all swore they’d improved their vision naturally. Most did so while making direct eye contact with me and without blinking (which I took as a sign of their honesty). Some, like Craumer, even had the documents to prove it. It sounded fantastical. But then I had an odd flash of clarity of my own that forced me to consider whether I might now be one of them.
During one workshop, a vision coach from Tennessee called Gloria Ginn asked us to sit and “palm” for several minutes. Before we started, I looked over at the emergency exit sign above the door. It was blurry. After covering my closed eyes with my palms for a few minutes, I opened them, blinked, and yawned. The sign shifted into focus for a couple of seconds. I could make out the letters SALIDA DE EMERGENCIA. It was the furthest I could ever remember seeing without my glasses.
Conventional ophthalmology had a few different takes on my lucid flash. Most eye doctors I asked about it suggested that, because I was then in a state of relaxation, the tension in my ciliary muscles, which control the focusing of the lenses, could have been temporarily relieved. Such tension, they told me, can give rise to blurry distance vision, a condition known as “pseudomyopia”. Biohacking techniques could never cure true myopia, which is caused by the structure of the eye, but it was possible that some biohacking techniques could relieve pseudomyopia.
Perhaps some of the biohackers — so convinced of their ability to manifest the world into clarity in defiance of facts like the anatomical structure of the eye — had never had myopia at all. Others, a couple of ophthalmologists told me, might have adapted to the blur and now believe they see more clearly than they do. Still, the biohackers’ obsession with taking the visible world by the reins was something I could understand. A couple of the people I met seemed to enjoy telling me how inspiring it was to see all around you the rewards of your achievement — like being deeply moved by a view that comes at the end of a long and arduous hike, but that would leave you cold if seen through a car window.
After the revelation of the emergency-exit sign, I took the lift to the building’s roof terrace. I wanted to see how far I could now see into the distance without my glasses. It was a warm and breezy evening and the sky was pink. Behind me were dusty shadows of distant mountains. I looked out across the sea, towards the horizon, but the view was so blurry that I put my glasses back on. Now I saw a small rowboat pass in front of a bright blue freighter loaded with containers. Between them was a person nimbly riding a hydrofoil. Birds were swooping overhead and people were strolling along the promenade past café terraces. It was a beautiful scene. Would it have been more beautiful if I could believe seeing it was my own doing?
I took the lift back down to the ground floor. One of the conference organisers was reciting poetry about the ocean. Around a dozen people were lying on the floor, palming on their yoga mats. I spread my jacket on the ground and lay down alongside them, but I couldn’t relax. Screams from the other side of the window were distracting me. I cracked open an eye, turned my head to the side, and peered through a gap in my fingers. Outside, I saw hundreds of biohackers running around with black felt strips hanging down the middle of their faces to divide their fields of vision in two. They were playing catch with tennis balls which they kept dropping and chasing across the yard, crashing into each other, whooping with delight.
I believed some of them had seen genuine improvements in their vision. Others couldn’t see much at all. Still, they evidently felt the world was out there, somewhere in the murk, ready to be polished into focus. And that seemed like plenty.