10-12-2015

Farsightedness means that it’s easy for you to see things that are far away, but your close-up vision is blurry. The technical term for farsightedness is hyperopia. People can have varying degrees of farsightedness, depending on their eyes’ ability to focus on close-up objects. If you can only clearly see objects that are very far away, you are very farsighted.

Two parts of the eye are responsible for focusing: the cornea and the lens. The cornea is the clear front surface of the eye. The lens is a structure inside your eye that changes shape as you focus on objects. The cornea and lens work together to refract (bend) incoming light, and then to focus that light onto your retina. The retina is at the back of your eyeball. It receives visual information and sends it to your optic nerve, which carries that information to your brain.

A perfectly formed curved lens and cornea results in a perfectly focused image. Your eye you can’t focus correctly when light enters if your cornea is too flat. This causes farsightedness. You can also be farsighted if you have a shorter-than-normal eyeball. This causes light to be focused behind your retina instead of on it.