After reading a recent thread, I was, and have been before this, wondering if there have been people who have exhibited outrageous eyesight?
Has there ever been someone with proven constant vision in many different lightings FAR better than 20/20, say 20/10 or 20/5? If so, did this person retain their good eyesight for a long period of time or was it a fluke?
I’ve got 20/10 in my left eye, and 20/15 in my left. A guy downstairs has significantly better vision.
Chuck Yeager. Apparently had 20/15 or 20/10…this of course contributed to his amazing abilities as a pilot.
You’re under the impression that 20/20 is perfect vision, aren’t you?
It’s not. In fact, it’s average. A significant portion of the population has better than 20/20 vision.
When I say that I have 20/15 vision in one eye, that means what I can see from 20 feet is what an average person would see from 15 feet.
Similarly, someone with 20/300 vision sees at 20 feet what a normal person sees at 300 feet.
Does this make sense?
I nearly had to wear glasses as a child, due to 20/10 in my left eye and 20/20 in my right. The difference was enough to cause some blurred vision and headaches. Sadly, instead of my 20/20 eye turning 20/10, it went the other way.
Jason Giambi has 20/13 in both eyes. Or he did before they were both infected with the staph or the thrush or some such disease. Good eyesight but still an asshole.
Actually, there is no way to have “super human vision.” The spatial resolution possible is limted by the optics AND the receptoral sampling. You could improve your optics, but if you did you would still limited by receptoral sampling. So, as ultrafilter pointed out 20/20 is just an average–albeit a HEAVILY skewed average. I wear contacts and could get a correction to 20/5 but i wouldnt “see” any better than say 20/15 or 20/20.
As terd_ferguson mentioned, there have been some baseball players that have/had remarkable eyesight, no doubt the reason they were such great hitters. Ted Williams, Tony Gwynn and Edgar Martinez have all said that at one point or another in their careers they could actually read what was printed on a baseball…AS IT WAS BEING HURLED AT THEM AT 90+ MPH!
Erich Hartmann once claimed that in 1400 sorties over five years of World War II, he was never spotted by an enemy plane before he spotted them.
Hans Joachim Marseille was noted for the same qualities–the ability to spot approaching planes long before anyone else in his formation.
Ted Williams incidentally was also a Marine fighter pilot, serving as a wingman for another famous eagle-eye, John Glenn.
The Joachim Marseille example was exactly what I was looking for. Someone who could identify something before a multitude of other people with the same perspective. Must be pretty cool.
My 1986 Guiness Book Of World Records lists Veronica Seider, a (West) German dentist, as having “…visual acuity 20 times normal…” She is evidently capable of such feats as identifying people from one mile away. As I recall she now specializes in microwriting without optical aids.
There’s a mention of her and a discussion of how somebody could have eyesight this freakishly good at http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/eye.html.
To tell you the truth, fuel I think there must be another component to that keen eyesight. My eyesight is still well above average and I sure as hell ain’t no superhero. I think that there is an element of perception in there which can apparently be developed with practice.
Part of Saburo Sakai’s training included star-spotting… during the day.
Way back in the 70’s, I was an Optometry Specialist in the Air Force. One day I was checking the visual acuity of a pilot ( part of his annual exam), once i had him in the chair, I turned on the screen at the other end of the room and asked him to read the smallest line he could. Expecting him to read the 20/15 line, the smallest line on this chart, he rattled off a bunch of letters that made no sense. A-M-E-R-I, ect. I asked him if he could see the T-V-C-E-L (the 20/20 line) and he said he could. I asked him what line he just read, he said the one two lines down fron the 20/20 line. As there was only one line below that, I walked to the other end of the room and checked, he was reading the really tiny copyright line, AMERICAN OPTICAL!
I know that there are “super tasters” and “super smellers.” They’ve got significantly more taste and smell receptors than the average person. Can’t see why there couldn’t be people with super dense photoreceptors.
From what I once read (in James Michener’s “Sports in America”) the basketball player (and US senator) Bill Bradley had/has freakishly wide peripheral vision.
A cute little report in the journal Current Biology of a few months ago chronicled superior underwater eyesight in a population of Southeast Asian sea gypsies. Children in this group were tested versus European holidaymaker age-matched controls, and they had significantly better resolving ability underwater. This was due to their ability to constrict the pupil to a very small size (IIRC 2 mm or so, so really pinprick pupils). I don’t know if this was trained or learned (one can voluntarily accomodate and have some control over pupil size I suppose) or genetic. Here is a link to the abstract:
Ted Williams is the most famous example I know of. Supposedly had 20/10 vision. I am sure there are other great baseball players, especially hitters, with such vision. In retrospect, I like to think my poor batting performance in Little League was due to my as yet undiscovered poor eyesight.