On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 3:26 PM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas@gmail.com> wrote:
One my supposition is that during the reading there is
very intensive two-directional signalling between eye and
brain. So generally you are correct, the eye is technically
a camera attached to the brain and simply sends pictures
at some frequency to the brain.
But I would tend to think that it is not so simple actually.
You probably have heard sometimes users who claim something like:
"this text hurts my eyes"
For example if you read non-antialiased text and with too
high contrast, you'll notice that something is indeed going wrong
with your eyes.
This can happen probably because the brain starts to signal
the eye control system "something is wrong, stop doing it"
Since your eye cannot do anything with wrong contrast on
your screen and you still need to continue reading, this
happens again and again. This can cause indeed unwanted
processes and overtiredness of muscles inside the eye.

The downards-projecting signals from the brain to the eye are heavily studied.  In fact I have friends who specialize in studying those connections specifically.  They simply don't behave the way you are describing.  You are basing your claims on the superiority of certain sorts of glyphs on conjecture about how the brain works, conjecture that goes against what the evidence says about how the brain actually processes visual information.  Yes, the quality of the glyphs can make a big difference.  There is no indication, however, that the number of possible glyphs can.

> And it also makes no sense that it would cause visual impairment, either.
> Comparing glyphs is a higher-level task in the brain,
> it has little to do with your eyes.

You forget about that whith illegible font or wrong contrast
for example you *do* need to do more concentrarion,
This causes again your eye to try harder to adopt
to the information you see, reread, which again
affects your lens and eye movements.

I don't want to imply bad faith on your part, but you cut off an important part of what I said: "The size of the glyphs can make a difference, but not the number of available ones.  On the contrary, having more glyphs increases the information density of text, reducing the amount of reading you have to do to get the same information."  Badly-antialised text can be a problem from that standpoint too.  But again, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the number of glyphs, which is your complaint. 

Again, I don't want to imply bad faith, but the argument you are making now is completely different than the argument I was addressing.  I don't disagree that bad text quality or too much reading can hurt your eyes.  On the contrary, I said explicitly that it can.  The claim of yours that I was addressing is that having too many glyphs can hurt your eyes or brain, which doesn't match with anything we know about how the eyes or brain work.