why does squinting help when trying to read something small or far away?
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Your eyeball is a lens, and its job is to focus light coming at your eyeball to the center of your eye. You have muscles on the top and bottom of your eyeball that focus light from different distances. For most people, your eyeball is pretty good at it’s job!
However, when things are really far away, (or really small,) your muscles can’t squish your eyeball enough to focus, and your eyeball actually blurs the image! You can see this by imagining parallel beams of light going through the lens, but instead of focusing at a point on the back of your eye, it is instead all focused slightly behind (or in front) of the back of your eye.
However, if you restrict the amount of parallel light coming into the lens, this error decreases, and the back of your eye has a smaller footprint hitting it, which looks like it is more focused.
You can do a very extreme version of this by curling your finger down so it only lets in a very, very small amount of light, and then using this like an extreme version of squinting.
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