I was lying in bed last night, sweltering in the midnight heat. The curtains were closed, the light was off and it was very dark. I closed my eyes and the usualy black and red and purple blobs floated in front of my eyes.
I then moved my arm up in front of my eyes and saw a black line where my arm would be. I tried making shapes with my arms and the black line would take on whatever shape my arms made.
I figured that some light must be getting through my eyelids so I upped the difficulty and placed a pillow over my eyes to prevent any ambient light in my pitch black room from getting in.
Tried it again, and whilst there were less red and purple blobs in front of my eyes, I could still quite clearly make out whatever shapes my arms were making. I struggled to focus my weird x-ray vision and found that eventually I could make out the two bones in my forearm.
Very strange.
I tried this with the light on and without the pillow and it didn’t work. Can anyone explain how my dark adjusted eyes can see through stuff? I recommend trying this out for yourself tonight. Also, my wife says she sees pixelated blobs when she closes her eyes, whereas I see red/purple/black pulsating and coalescing blobs. What do you see when you close your eyes?
I’m pretty sure your visual cortex (not your mind) is making that up. Much like sometimes, blind people will “see the light” when they feel the heat of the light source on their skin. You see it because you know that it’s there. As a simple test, have your wife move her arms in front of your eyes, and tell her which shape she’s forming.
There seems to be a bit of leakage between proprioception and our visual field, It makes us think we can see our hands in total darkness, when in fact we just know very well where they are, and exactly where our eyes are pointing.
The X-ray armbone stuff is just typical fantasizing over a signal that’s too weak to make clear sense of. Our brains love to find sensible patterns in chaos.
Aha, I guess some kind of signal bleed from the proprioception part of the brain to the visual cortex would explain things then. At least I can (probably) rule out an acid flashback
One of the things most people don’t realize is that our system of vision is not like a camera. The eyes are, maybe, but we don’t see what our eyes see. There’s a hell of a lot of post-production editing that happens in the brain. Most people only become aware of this under unusual circumstances like poor health or what you’re describing.
I see fractals in glowing white or yellowish-white light and black. I’m constantly zooming in toward the center, but since it’s a fractal, there’s no real sense of getting closer. If I push on my eyes at the same time, it gets much more dramatic and sparkly, but same basic pattern.
The GQ seems answered, so my MPSIMS-worthy addition: I see black and white concentric circles that emanate from a couple places, with flashes of purple where these circles intersect and the patterns interfere with each other. It’s a fairly complex pattern, and pretty trippy.
That is completely true. The eyes are not the primary sight organ just like the ears are not the primary brain organ. They just provide the input to be processed.
I have a weird one that is similar. If I sit still or lay in a very dimly lit room for a few minutes, I can close my eyes and still ‘see’ everything that is there even though there is no meaningful light reaching my eyes. I have never heard anyone ever mention that before and it only happens under those conditions. It is like a 3-D photograph that I can still navigate visually and mentally even though there is no sensory input. I just tried it now and it works fine. I normally couldn’t tell you the color shirt I am wearing without looking down under normal conditions but I can ‘see’ most every detail in the room in a way that I couldn’t hope to normally when I do that including the order of book titles although it appears very dim. Has anyone ever heard of that?
Yeah, it’s pretty standard eidetic memory. It’s s pretty neat trick, and it does work better than normal memory, but research suggests it’s nowhere near as good as you think.
Your brain tends to focus on the things that you can recall, such as book titles or the colour of a shirt, whereas the lack of recall stops you focussing on the things you can’t. So as a result you *think * that you can recall the details of everything that you focus on, whereas the reality is that you focus on everything that you can recall the details of.
The only real way to test it is to get another person to ask you random questions while you re blindfolded, to force you to focus on random things. If you’re like everybody else ever tested, you’ll find if you do this that you don;t even recall the existence of a great many objects, much less the level of detail you believe you have.
Once again, it’s a great example of the ability of the brain other centres to bleed over into visual, as well as a sterling example of our brain;s ability to fool itself.
Some nights, when I go to bed and try to sleep, when I close my eyes I sometimes get the very real and strong feeling that my eyes are still wide open and that, although it’s dark or even pitch dark, I can still somehow “see”. It’s really frustrating because I can’t go to sleep with my eyes wide open, even if it’s just my brain thinking that and that they’re really closed.
I get many of the mentioned spiffy visual effects =) in addition to a visual wierdy that new agey bunny huggers are trying to convince me is seeing auras … if I look at people, I can generally see a thin rim of pale blue light outlining them. Meh. If I was seeing auras, they would theoretically [according to the same damned freakoids] be showing colors pertinant to their health or psychic state - black, red, green, yellow and whatnot.
Nope, I see light blue. It is obviously some sort of visual artifact.
I like watching the phosphemes against my eyelids when trying to drowse myself to sleep. I really like the swirly checkerboards, though when I get imprinted scenery as well it is sort of fun. I make up sf or fantasy stories about the scenes and swirlies. Sometimes I watch the phospheme scenes and try to make them into prophecies for the future, and remember vivid scenes and see if something matches up [never has]
I was just thinking, beta blockers like ketamine give people hallucinations because they block nerve signals from travelling to the brain and the brain just makes stuff up that it thinks should be there. Do you think that the lack of vision when you close your eyes causes your brain to start making up stuff to replace the neural input that it would normally get from the optic nerve? Is that what causes the nifty patterns?
