Sometimes out of boredom, I can look at a wall, with very little light in a room and if I stare at it long enough black spots will appear and eventually merge together making me completely blind, with my eyes wide open. I can usually hold it for awhile too, that is, until I move my eyes. What is that? Anyone ever do this before? Is it like my brain taking a pattern I’m focusing on and duplicating it? Weird.
Sorry, I double posted this in GQ mods, if you could please delete the other one? thanks.
I can do the same, but I never thought of it as “blind”. I’m simply ignoring my visual input. I believe my eyes move to some neutral focal point as well, which would tend to blur lots of stuff as I’m seriously nearsighted.
BTW, I can’t do this while exposing my eyes to a lot of visual activity. People or things moving across my line of sight inevitably catch my attention and raw my eyes to focus on them. Pretty much any static scene will do for me.
You’re exhausting your visual receptors. The cones which make up the central focus of your retina take turns firing from light stimulus, but if you hold very still, the ones which have been stimulated continue to get photic (light) stimulation, but are unable to fire anymore due to exhaustion of the neurotransmitters. Move slightly, and (relatively) unstimulated cone cells take up the slack, and your vision is back.
QtM, MD
I don’t get black spots merging. Looking at a blank white wall I have noticed gray swirls or blobs in the center of the visual area, but they don’t completely take over my vision.
As a young child made to attend Sunday Mass, I was often bored but during the service but couldn’t do much about it. So I stared at one spot like one of the big candles next to the altar and observed how everything became suffused in a hazy golden glow. I was discovering meditation techniques on my own, spontaneously.
It might be a meditative trance where you are just not paying attention to visual input.
I’ve experienced this too, but never to point of a complete loss of vision. Everything seems get several shades “darker” though, like someone turned the lights off.
Thinkabout the opposite: vision is only possible because your eyes keep moving. Search saccades
Very true. We’re actually looking through a network of blood vessels in the retina. Think of looking out the window through a screen. It’s hard to see anything, but if you move your head quickly, you can see through just fine.