The Eye

When it comes to understanding vision issues, it’s helpful to think of hyperopia and myopia in terms of where light focuses in relation to the retina.

Hyperopia, as the term “hyper” suggests is the same as farsightedness. In this condition, light focuses too FAR away or behind the retina. You can visualize this as under-convergence of light rays, since they didn’t get bent enough to hit the retina. This means it’s corrected with converging lenses since the problem here was too little convergence.

On the flip side, myopia is nearsightedness. Here, the light focuses too NEAR to the lens and in front of the retina. You can visualize this as over-convergence of light. Since the light was bent too much by our eye we need a diverging lens to correct the issue.

In reality, the actual cause of these vision problems relates to the shape of the eyeball, where hyperopia results from an eye that is too short and myopia from an eye that too long thinking about them in terms of light convergence and divergence makes it easier to answer the various MCAT questions you could be asked about the topic.