Speed Reading Success - The Need for Proper Book Lighting
Your bodily position relative to the light presents two aspects: the way the light strikes the type and the way the light strikes your eyes.
- There are three wrong ways of illumining the type: with too intense a light and with too faint a light.
- With very uneven light, so that parts of the page are bright and parts dark.
most of us who work in large city offices are in constant danger of overbright lights. Recent studies reveal that ordinary work and reading can be done as efficiently in lights much fainter than those generally used in offices and factories. The bright lights have a psychological value, however, in that they seem to stimulate many workers. It is no figure of speech to say that the "Bright Lights" are jazzy. Men do speed up when under bright lights and slow down under dim ones.
Probably you have no need of being sped up, however. So spare your eyes. Find out by tests at which degree of brightness you read easily. And then make a practice of shunning brighter lights.
Experiment on yourself. Try sitting at various distances from a light of known intensity. Also try reading with bulbs of various wattage at a given distance. When I tried this on myself some years ago, I was amazed to find how little light I needed, in order to keep up the immense reading I do. Many people exclaim at the darkness of my library, and I have to explain that I am not trying to save forty cents a year on my electric current bills.
No two people are alike in this sensitivity. All the more reason for your checking up on yourself with care. Bear in mind that excessive brightness is more likely to prove troublesome than excessive dimness, though at the moment of reading the latter may seem worse.
As for uneven illumination, this can be grave indeed. There are two varieties of it:
- Continuously uneven lighting - as when the light falls on the page from far at one side of the reader.
- Broken or mottled light, which in turn may be stationary or moving, with respect to the page.
The second sort is always serious, whether light strikes the eyes unequally or not. The stationary mottling of the page caused by a bright light throwing the shadow of a window frame or a lattice or the leaves of a tree on the page so that bright and dark spots or lines alternate across it is most harmful. Why? Because the eye must readjust the pupil several times as it crosses the page; and, as the eye will outrun the pupil in these adjustments, the result is that the retina receives too much and too little light from the spots in quick succession.
One degree worse is the moving figure of light and shadow. You get this whenever you sit under a windblown tree in the good old summer time and strive to read with the light that filters through the fluttering leaves. You get it still more obnoxiously whenever you sit on the sunny side of a train and read, holding your book so that the sunlight strikes it, flinging across the page the swiftly moving shadows of telegraph poles and wires, trees, tower houses, and other passing trains.
Though I cannot prove it beyond my own personal experience, I am quite convinced that many business men impair their reading ability for the day by trying to peruse their morning newspapers in this manner. Only a few minutes of such a terrific strain on the eyes is needed to set up tensions and accompanying irritations which will make later reading in the course of the day's work highly uncomfortable, if not slow and inaccurate.
