The Berne Podcast with Dr. Sam Berne

The Berne Podcast with Dr. Sam Berne


Can Pinhole Glasses Improve Your Eyesight and Vision?

October 22, 2024

Keywords


pinhole glasses, vision improvement, myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, eye strain, depth of field, eye health, visual habits, retraining vision


Summary


In this episode of the Berne Podcast, Sam Berne discusses the concept of pinhole glasses, exploring their functionality, benefits, and limitations. Pinhole glasses are designed to improve vision by reducing light scatter and enhancing depth of field. While they can provide temporary relief from eye strain and improve clarity for certain vision conditions, they are not a permanent solution and require retraining of visual habits for long-term effectiveness.

takeaways

• Pinhole glasses reduce scatter of light and improve clarity.

• They can help with conditions like myopia and astigmatism.

• Wearing them can reduce eye strain, especially at the computer.

• They enhance depth of field, allowing clearer vision at different distances.

• Pinhole glasses can help retrain the eyes to focus without magnification.

• They are a temporary solution and not a cure for vision problems.

• Using them requires practice and adjustment to new visual habits.

• Bright light is essential for effective use of pinhole glasses.

• They may not be effective in dim lighting conditions.

• Long-term vision improvement requires deeper retraining beyond just using pinhole glasses.

Titles

• Can Pinhole Glasses Improve Your Eyesight?

• Pinhole Glasses: A New Approach to Eye Health

Sound Bites

• “Are they good for you? Do they work?”

• “Pinhole glasses actually reduce the scatter of light.”

• “They enhance something called depth of field.”

Chapters

00:00Introduction to Pinhole Glasses

00:45How Pinhole Glasses Work

02:12Benefits of Pinhole Glasses

03:35Limitations and Considerations


Hey everyone, welcome to the Berne Podcast. In today’s show, I’m gonna talk about pinhole glasses. Are they good for you? Do they work? What in the heck do they actually do? Stay tuned.


So these are pinhole glasses. It’s a type of eyewear that has tiny holes in the glasses. There’s no prescription. Do they work? How do they work? That’s what I want to discuss today. Pinhole glasses are a type of eyewear that contain a lot of little holes. Unlike traditional glasses, pinhole glasses actually reduce the scatter of light.


and they block the indirect light into the eyes. Pinhole glasses are marketed as a vision improvement technique to help conditions like myopia, hyperopia astigmatism and presbyopia. A description I use for pinhole glasses is limited light entry into the eyes. The holes in the glasses focus the light rays onto the retina.


Light enters the eye from the multiple directions. This leads to blurry eyesight. So in the pinhole glasses, the only light that gets through is parallel and is focused directly onto the retina. The pinhole glasses enhance something called depth of field. This means that it allows you to see objects at different distances very clearly since the pinhole glasses block peripheral vision. It limits the amount of aberrations that we might see normally.


which again creates some blurry distorted eyesight conditions like double vision presbyopia or astigmatism might be helped by using the pinhole glasses. If you put the pinhole glasses on you’ll probably be able to read the distance eye chart more clearly. You see the eye chart more clearly using the pinhole glasses. You start to prove to the brain and the mind that you can actually have clear eyesight.


Sam Berne (02:12.172)

without your regular lenses. Pinhole glasses may reduce eye strain, especially if you use them at the computer. One of the things I have found with pinhole glasses is they work really well for people who are dependent on magnifying glasses. So whether you’ve got hyperopia in the distance and or presbyopia up close when you put on the pinhole glasses, you will be able to see the world very clearly.


without the magnification effects of the regular lenses. One of the side effects of magnification lenses is it makes your eye muscles unresponsive to focusing. This is where the pinhole glasses can reprogram your eyes and your brain to learn how to focus again. It’s miraculous when you put the pinhole glasses on because the print is very clear and this is very unusual.


without the pinhole glasses and without the magnifiers. Usually the print is too blurry to be able to see. So by wearing the pinhole glasses about 10 minutes a day, you start reading through the holes. It begins to change the habit that the farsighted magnifying glasses have done to your eyes. This is one benefit of using the pinhole glasses as a substitute for your magnification lenses.


For myopia, it’s a little different situation because minus lenses that you wear are matching the over focusing that you’re doing. And although the pinhole glasses may make the world a little clearer, it’s not really helping you change the soft focusing that you need to learn to be able to reduce your dependency on the minus lenses. Now for a stigmatism, it’s


a individual by individual case in some people wearing the pinhole glasses. If you have astigmatism can begin to change the astigmatism in the eye. Also, if you wear pinhole glasses in dim light, it could be difficult to read. It’s much better for you to have bright light. If you’re going to try to read using the pinhole glasses see pinhole glasses as a temporary


Sam Berne (04:31.212)

vision improvement technique that creates a change in your mental and visual habit patterns. So in the short term, it’s great to have them because you have to make some changes in order to use them unless you can internalize the changes that the pinhole glasses are asking you to make then it’s just a temporary solution a band-aid and it’s not really treating the causative factors changing your vision permanently.


requires a reprogramming or retraining on a very deep internal level. This requires a lot of practice and daily activities. And although the pinhole glasses can help in the short term by itself. I don’t think it’s the answer. That’s our show for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in until next time. Take care.