If you hang upside down for long enough will your eyes eventually start to see things the correct way up ? :smack:
studmuffin, please use descriptive titles when starting a thread. I have edited the title to indicate the subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think the assumption behind the OP is that technically, images are projected onto the retina inverted, and the brain manages to flip it rightside up as a matter of course.
I don’t know - is the “auto-inversion” something that is innate in the wiring of the brain or is it psychologically learned? If it is the first, nothing short of brain damage or birth defects should affect it. If the second, then it would stand to reason that it could be “unlearned” with enough practice or exposure or even that there could be people that, for whatever reason, do not pick up the auto-inversion due to severe neglect or something.
Thread at randi.org about experiments with inversion glasses.
The brain does adjust and flips the image so you see right side up.
Not sure exactly what you mean by “correct way up.” Of course you perceive things to be the right way up regardless of the orientation of your head.
Perceptual adaptationwas demonstrated by the use of reversing glasses by Stratton as early as the 1890s. When the visual system is distorted, the brain can adapt in a matter of days to read input in the “correct” orientation.
So, this happens if someone is wearing goggles that invert the image, then the brain will turn it thed right way up after a few days. But will this happen if the person is upside-down? He’s not seeing an inverted image, he’s seeing a true image of things that the right way up.
Or, alternatively, what if he spends several days on the set of The Possession Adventure, will he start seeing the ship as being the right way up?
I’m guessing not.
Years ago, when the internet consisted only of zeros, I remember hearing about this through the nerd grapevine (actually before the net). Some dude wore these look at the world upside down googles. He eventually saw things right side up, which was cool and all. But, the scary part of the story as it was circulated was that it took him much much longer for it to flip back. I think the implication was that doing it for too long or too many times and it might not revert back to normal. Any truth to that part of the story?
Since you already seeing things the right way up even when you are upside down - the brain interprets this automatically - there is no need to make an adjustment. Nothing will happen.
There is no reason to suppose that would happen. Sounds like your typical urban legend type story.
People do not see images at all, they see the world around them. The images on the retinae are no more what we see than are the nerve impulses that that are generated in the optic nerve and the brain.
More recent studies than Stratton’s (which was published in 1897) have shown that when people adapt to inverting lenses, it is not nearly as straightforward as a world that looks upside down (when the goggles are first put on) coming to look the right way up again. It is much more that people who at first find it very difficult to coordinate their actions with the goggles on (they reach, and step, the wrong way for things, etc.) learn over a few days to coordinate very much better. The subjective experience remains paradoxical in certain ways, and it does not seem to be the case that the world comes to look ‘normal’, that is, just the same as it looked before putting on the goggles.
What is certainly the case in all these studies, however, is that the process of adaptation depends on the subjects attempts to act in the world. If they reach towards something that looks to be on their right, but it is actually on their left, they fail to touch it. But then, if they make a conscious effort to reach to the left instead, in what looks to be the wrong way, and they succeed in touching the object (and seeing their hand touch it), then their visuo-motor system has started the process of learning how to live with the new optical arrangement. After many such experiences (which won’t take long) it becomes relatively easy and natural to reach in the correct direction, and it comes to feel as though that is what our visual system is telling us to do, in teh same way that it did before we wore the lenses.
Hanging upside down is a very different matter, however. It does not invert the normal relationship between what you see and which way you should reach to touch it, because it does not just turn your eyes, but also your body, upside-down. There is nothing (regarding visuo-motor coordination) to be relearned.
As Colibri says, you do not see things the wrong way up if you are hanging upside down. You see them as they are in relation to you, same as always.
I don’t think so, and I just tried it out. What you see forms a picture in your brain. If youy are upside down, then the floor is at the top of the picture you see, and the ceiling is at the bottom.
Your brain can tell that the ceiling is “up” and the floor is “down” but you are seeing an image where the top is at the bottom.
That’s what I mean. Your brain knows which way is up, and which is down, even if the image is inverted.
As njtt indicates, the real issue is eye-body coordination. Unless these are at odds, there is no reason for the brain to start making adjustments.
Then you didn’t answer the question that the OP asked.
Let me rephrase:
In biology lessons when I was at school, I was taught that the lens in the eye forms an upside-down image on the retina, that the brain turns the image the right way up. I was also told that babies see an upside-down image of the world before their brain learns. We are sometimes told that if you wear inverting lenses for long enough, your brain will adapt and you’ll see the image the right way up (njtt contradicts this idea).
The OP is asking whether the same thing will happen to someone suspended upside down. When first suspended, he’ll see the floor at the top of his vision, and the ceiling at the bottom. Will his brain eventually flip the image, so he’ll see the ceiling at the top of his vision?
No, for the reasons already explained.
As we already know, if we use glasses or goggles that invert our vision so we see everything as upside-down, our brain will eventually compensate and adjust for it.
But the OP is a different matter, because the above experiment doesn’t factor in proprioception (our ability to know where parts of our body is in relation to itself, and orientation which is due to gravity or inertia affecting our inner-ear’s vestibular system) and how our brain reconciles that with exteroception (basically, our senses).
Astronauts in zero-G, as far as I know, have had no brain/vision anomalies due to the removal of gravity, but they’d still have inertial cues.
While I’d guess that the brain wouldn’t alter your perception of vision if hung upside-down for days (or if somehow given the ability to move around in the world upside-down, I’d be curious if there’s been any actual documented experimentation. Our brains have a remarkable tendency to surprise us.
You were taught wrong. It is true that the optical image on the retina is upside down, but that does not matter as, as I said, this image is not what we see. There is no little eye inside the head looking at this image. The brain does not turn it the right way up (it does not need to because, again, there is no eye inside there to see any such right-way-up image), and babies do not see the world upside down. That is pure nonsense.
Damn, first the tongue map, and now the eye.
So what do I know wrongly about the ear?
This is where you are going wrong. No it doesn’t.
Or, to be strictly accurate, there is a sort of (very badly distorted) picture of what your eyes are pointing at moment to moment that is formed in your brain,* but it is irrelevant to the issue because it not what you see. Nobody is looking at this image (unless your head is in an fMRI scanner and people are looking at the output). That ‘image’ is just a byproduct of the way that your brain is wired up to process the incoming information about the world.
*The ‘image’ in your brain, and the one on your retina, is also, under normal circumstances, changing radically moment to moment as you eyes flit about, looking in different directions, usually several times per second (unlike your experience of the world around you, which remains stable). Even the guys with the brain scanner can only see and make any sense of this ‘brain image’ if they make sure your eyes are held artificially still while they do their scanning.
cmyk, I don’t know why you think proprioception and vestibular sense are relevant. If you are upside down, those senses are still giving you accurate information about the disposition of your limbs and your orientation in space, just as sight is still giving you accurate information about where things are in relation to you. Sure, you will feel weird, but that is because your vestibular sense is telling you, quite correctly, that you are not the way up that a person is supposed to be.
Well, you probably were not taught (it is rather a recent discovery) that the cochlea of the inner ear generates its own internal sound waves,* so that what actually stimulates the receptor cells is not the incoming sound but the interference pattern produced by the interaction between the incoming sound waves and the internally generated ones. Probably, the frequency of the internally generated waves is dynamically adjusted so as to selectively amplify certain frequencies of interest in the incoming sound.
*In very bad cases of tinnitus, they can actually be heard by someone else, as a faint buzzing sound coming out of the sufferer’s ears.
The sensory input in our eyes forms an image in our brain that is both accurate, yet deceivingly so (because of the complex ways our brain makes sense out of what we’re seeing, and what experience has taught our brain to fill in some blanks… which is why some optical illusions can be so astounding and convincing, even when you’re in on the “trick”).
So, experimentation has been done on flipping someone’s vision, upside-down, and over a matter of days, their brain does indeed compensate for this, and the individual will begin to “see” the world right-side-up again.
It seems, the consensus on a hypothesis here is that just hanging upside down, wouldn’t cause your brain to undergo any such adaptations, because it knows it’s upside-down. We seem hardwired for how gravity and inertia affects our vestibular system, but also, proprioception shouldn’t be ruled out, because of how connected it is to all of our senses.
This is all quite wrong. Please read my other posts in this thread where I have already explained at some length why this is so. No image is formed in one’s brain (or at any rate, no image whose orientation, or any of its other features, are ever experienced by the subject), and although people do adapt to reversing goggles in the sense that they gradually become able to cope with the situation quite well (and must re-adapt, also gradually over several days, when they take the goggles off) they do not experience this as the world, still less an image of the world, flipping from seeming upside down to seeming right way up again (which indeed, is not something that could conceivably happen gradually, the way the actual adaptation does).
And, again to repeat, the situation with hanging upside down is quite different to that with reversing goggles, and no particular perceptual adaptation is required, either in vision, proprioception or vestibular sense. They all continue to work normally, and as veridically as ever, in that situation. There are ways to confuse proprioception and vestibular sense, as there are ways, such as reversing goggles, to confuse vision, but hanging upside down is not one of them. All these senses will tell you that you are upside down (which you are) and that this is not the right way up to be.