Yep. Bright light does the same thing. Also, in dim light, I'd expect this to make it pretty hard to see. My optometrist mentioned it to me, but neither of us could see the point.

> but neither of us could see the point

... maybe you should be using it then? (Sorry... but not sorry.)

You can focus things by looking through a pinhole formed by curling your pointer finger and thumb.

Hm, sometimes I pinch thumb and forefinger together and then bring the opposing forefinger in to join them, forming a triangular aperture. Takes two hands, but I guess I like the level of control. :p

or squinting

That deforms the eye a bit, and the aperture is too wide. Doesn't work nearly as well as a pinhole made by other means.

I suspect the "aperture" is actually holes made with your eyelids top and bottom with your eyelashes on the sides.

>gently shrinking

"Gentle" or not, is this actually safe for long-term use? Your pupil dilates in indoor light for a reason, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to fight that. You'd be better off just increasing ambient light levels to match sunlight.

I can’t imagine it being unsafe (assuming the drug itself doesn’t do damage) since the restriction would let less light in. It’s not like forcibly dilating the pupil which could let in more light than the eye could handle. It could make things appear too dark while it’s happening though.

Wait, is this why when I'm having trouble seeing something small, it becomes easier when I get way more light on it?

I just assumed more photons results in a stronger signal to my rods and cones. But maybe it's making my eye shrink the aperture instead (or both).

Oh it's worse than that just pupil shrinking in dark. Basically, cone cells see color and detail but need more light, rods see in low light but mostly serve peripheral vision. So your vision system is just wholly optimized to only doing detail work in fairly bright light; nighttime is for predator evasion.

Another way to look at that: We likely evolved decent color vision to identify edible fruits. That wasn't doable with vision in the dark (and we opted out of the olfactory tech tree), so now your accurate-vision tasks are optimized for daylight.

This is probably why I need to have my phone at 100% brightness to read it.