Observing the extreme limits of human vision under ordinary circumstances

[Koko Ricky]

Sometimes I like to conduct experiments with my vision. Yesterday, completely sober, I was sitting in my house focusing on my partner and the surrounding area. There are several interesting things that happen when you sit still and focus on just one thing:

1) The granular nature of human vision, which is said to be about the equivalent of an 8k monitor, becomes very obvious, especially in dim light (which happened to be the sort of light I was in). There is a layer of random noise that can be seen everywhere, which is very much like the way film looks in poor lighting. This is normally invisible, due to the constant hallucinatory state we exist in. You rarely notice the grain, or your blind spots, due to how clever your brain is at covering everything up.

2) When the lighting is dim, you can literally witness your iris opening and closing, expressed as slight aperture changes. The entire luminance value of reality will brighten or darken very slightly, because the iris is struggling to find an ideal balance of light values. It's very subtle, but easily observed when focusing. It's akin to a camera's auto settings trying to find the ideal setting for the user.

3) Everything outside your foveal--that tiny spot in the middle of your vision where you have 100% visual acuity--looks terrible. There's not much in the way of color or clarity. Smeary stuff also starts to appear, which as far as I can tell are the "floaters" that are nothing more than reflections of the goo sitting inside your eye. There's all sorts of distortions that occur outside the foveal if you use your peripheral vision to look at them. I suspect we would have much better vision if our photo receptors weren't in the back of our eyes; some animals in nature have them in the front!

[pablogener]

I consider *DANGEROUS* anything that involves f*king around with your eyes....

[dew]

GoatLord said:

This is normally invisible, due to the constant hallucinatory state we exist in.

Obviously.

You're mixing bits of facts with weird conclusions. For example, your eyes use cone cells as the main photoreceptors during bright light. They pick up signal faster and at higher resolution and they're of different colour types to give you chromatic vision. There's just a few millions of them and they shut down in poor light conditions where you become reliant on the other type of photoreceptive cells - rods. They're slower and the signal is less precise, but they're much more sensitive to light, so they let you see in the dark. The "granularity" you're observing is the product of losing the sharp image information from the cones as there's not enough light for them to function. To combine the sensitivity of the rods' night vision and the sharpness of the cones' gaze vision (so the iris can stay narrow), you'll need a red light like the astronomers or submarine operators use. Btw, the rods collect the information from peripheral vision, so you can guess why you're not picking up sharp details from the corner of your eye.

Human eye is actually a very well balanced tool, other animals reliant on vision usually "overspecialize" one of the features. Those "weaknesses" you're noticing are, as you observed, artifacts when you're not using your eyes right, so to speak. If you start retooling your eyes, like slapping photoreceptors on your forehead, any advantage you gain will be counterbalanced by a slew of disadvantages. What I don't understand is how do you not know this even after spending so much time on the issue. Just punch in E+Y+E into google and click the second link and all becomes obvious. Unless electronic hallucinations cannot be trusted, I guess.

[HavoX]

Oh, geez... ANOTHER one of those threads that start with the *hits blunt* warning that GoatLard -- er, I'm sorry, GoatLORD, can't see. (No pun intended.)

Anyway, I agree with dew here... eyes are an essential part of the human body, along with the nose, ears and mouth. I don't see how I could possibly live without them.


@pablogener: you don't need to censor the swear words. Swearing is not forbidden at DW.

[Voros]

I can voluntarily move one of my eyeballs away from my nose.

[HorrorMovieRei]

Have you ever closed your eyes and rubbed your eyelids? You can't see anything for a few seconds once you open them. What's up with that?

[HavoX]

WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA

Dude, don't give us any ideas... o_O

[Koko Ricky]

HorrorMovieGuy said:

Have you ever closed your eyes and rubbed your eyelids? You can't see anything for a few seconds once you open them. What's up with that?

As a child I used to sometimes rub my eyes when closed, which would cause some geometric oscillations to appear. I don't recall too much distortion upon opening, but I'm sure it happened. I used to sometimes hallucinate as a child, and in fact I think most all children experience a disconnect between normal reality and imagination reality, until our parents and teachers convince us that one is "real" and one isn't, even though all experiences are different types of real.

dew said:

Obviously. ... You're mixing bits of facts with weird conclusions ... What I don't understand is how do you not know this even after spending so much time on the issue.

You know, I appreciate the science lesson--really, I truly do--but you don't have to be so dang salty about it. I'm not a scientist. I just like to ponder stuff. Sometimes I do research. Sometimes I do not. I've read up about the rods and cones before, but the information is a bit complex, so I haven't committed it to memory like I have with certain aspects of quantum mechanics. I mean, why assume that because I speak about a variety of scientific subjects, that I am as knowledgeable as you are on any one of them? I'm just thinking and typing. I'm not trying to pretend like I'm revealing some deep insight on vision or something. But again, I appreciate the information, I found it fascinating.

Also, not sure what "weird conclusions" I came to. I stated that vision can become granular under certain circumstances, and there is a wealth of information online suggesting that the resolution of our eyesight is about 8k (which is why there are currently no plans to extend VR or even TV resolution beyond 8k), although this has been disputed. There is also a lot of dispute over our perceived framerate, which is apparently variable rather than constant. I've heard anything from a few frames per second to hundreds. To me human vision looks remarkably like 30 or 60fps video with a shutter speed of about 50-60.

[Wovenloaf]

[RUSH]

^ Lol, this is pure gold!

[dew]

This is indeed invaluable and to be reused in future Goatlord threads.

[RUSH]

I completely lost it at *speculative realism*

Thank you for this, Wovenloaf.

[Captain Toenail]

You ever have those moments where:

-you go inside after an extremely bright day and everything inside turns green?
-you stare at the wall hard enough that you can see your vision rippling and warping slightly?
-you get this weird flickering halo in the centre of your vision for a while?

[pablogener]

Captain Toenail said:

You ever have those moments where:

-you go inside after an extremely bright day and everything inside turns green?
-you stare at the wall hard enough that you can see your vision rippling and warping slightly?
-you get this weird flickering halo in the centre of your vision for a while?

Now I know where that expression came from: "It's all fun and games until someone pops an eye out"... oh. no, wait... :p

[Koko Ricky]

Okay I'm pretty goddamn humbled by that fan art.

Captain Toenail said:

You ever have those moments where:

-you go inside after an extremely bright day and everything inside turns green?
-you stare at the wall hard enough that you can see your vision rippling and warping slightly?
-you get this weird flickering halo in the centre of your vision for a while?

The first one, I feel like I've witnessed, that would be like noticing your internal white balance adjusting. Second one seems to happen after I've been outside for awhile, it seems like I'll see that going on right before I go inside. I know some kind of trick is going on but I dunno what. Haven't experienced the third, but I have seen a brief instance of a flicker that seemed to be something my eyes were doing.

I'm touched that someone would go to such lengths to provide metaphysical absurdity in my life...when strangely I had been thinking, I think yesterday, "What is the most absurd impact I could have on Doomworld?"

[Deleted_Account]

Sometimes I see shadows in my peripheral vision.

[Wovenloaf]

Heh, glad my picture was a hit. :3 Just a little ribbin'. I had already been aware of GoatLord's affinity for psychedelics, which includes shrooms, which kind of rhymes with Doom; so between that and his recent posts about what it means to know and to hallucinate, well, I saw an opportunity too rich to pass up.

[VGamingJunkie]

Did you know you can wear out color receptors in your eyes and looking at inverse colors makes a black and white image appear colored?

[plums]

There's also the fun blind spot trick.

http://i.imgur.com/X24ejIq.gif

Open that image in a new tab, close your left eye, focus on the dot with your right eye, and move closer to your monitor. There's a point where the cross will just disappear. Because of where your optic nerve is, there is a spot on your eye with no receptors, and so your brain fills in that area automatically based on its surroundings.

[Jaxxoon R]

Sometimes I go outside in bright light and I sneeze.

[PureSlime]

I read the initial post, but absolutely none of the information in it made the journey from my eyeballs to the reading comprehension centre of my brain.

[Deleted_Account]

PureSlime said:

I read the initial post, but absolutely none of the information in it made the journey from my eyeballs to the reading comprehension centre of my brain.

I think the trick to comprehending GoatLords posts is that before you read it, you must first hit a blunt. Then it becomes clear. I think?

[PureSlime]

Piper Maru said:

I think the trick to comprehending GoatLords posts is that before you read it, you must first hit a blunt. Then it becomes clear. I think?

*Carl Sagan voice*
If you wish to read a GoatLord post, you must first hit the blunt.


(this was funnier in my head)

[Deleted_Account]

PureSlime said:

*Carl Sagan voice*
If you wish to read a GoatLord post, you must first hit the blunt.


(this was funnier in my head)

Blunts will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

[Aliotroph?]

Yes, vision is susceptible to all kinds of sensor noise, rather like cameras. Slam your eyes shut really fast and you'll see lots of phosphenes. Neat stuff. There's another term for the sort of persistent, static-looking noise that always appears in the background, but I can't find it right now.

The things MetroidJunkie and plums posted are good examples of how much your vision relies on your brain. A simpler version of the colour experiment is just to saturate your eyes with green or pink for a long time. Your colour vision will be messed up for a while when you look away.

More crazy stuff happens if something happens to your vison. Looking at the article on retinal detachment, I realize I've had every one of the treatments done to one of my eyes. Scary but neat. Fluoropropane bubbles look cool at night.

[Mobius]

GoatLord said:

Sometimes I like to conduct experiments with my vision. Yesterday, completely sober, I was sitting in my house focusing on my partner and the surrounding area. There are several interesting things that happen when you sit still and focus on just one thing:

1) The granular nature of human vision, which is said to be about the equivalent of an 8k monitor, becomes very obvious, especially in dim light (which happened to be the sort of light I was in). There is a layer of random noise that can be seen everywhere, which is very much like the way film looks in poor lighting.

That's called Troxler Fading

Goatlord said:

This is normally invisible, due to the constant hallucinatory state we exist in.

No.. that is the hallucinogenics you've taken one too many times. Put that blunt down and stay down.

Essentially the entire post right here

[Koko Ricky]

I've seen this grain my entire life. That's just how vision works. It has a finite resolution and with careful observation the noise is visible, just as film grain is visible. Your brain covers it up unless you pay attention. This is basic stuff, it has nothing to do with hallucinogens, which tend to produce geometric and multi-dimensional imagery, not a bunch of visual noise. If you want to make jokes about psychedelics, do some research first :)

[AndrewB]

You know those stupid blinking blue lights that everyone has in their car dashboard? You can only see that light with your peripheral vision; it's invisible when you stare at it directly.

[Robo_Cola]

Goatlord, do you go on Shroomery often?

All jokes aside, I wonder if the human eye evolved to have blind spots on the sides (whenever you focus in) for a reason? Such as helping us center in on prey from a distance in the paleolithic era.

[AndrewB]

From what I remember, the reason we have blind spots is due to a "design flaw" in how the eyes evolved. The blind spots are unnecessary, but in order to not have blind spots, the entire eye would have to be scrapped and redesigned from scratch, which is something evolution doesn't do, especially for such minor problems.