What do you see when you close your eyes.

Originally Posted by Spatula

As my calling in life is to be most likely an accountant, not a optometrist, would any of you who may have studied biology, or even health sciences (good luck, considering this is a gaming forum and all), is there any explanation of why your eye has these "white spots" that you "see" when your eyes are shut, or when you are in a pitch black room? Is it because of the absence of light, your pupil dilates to as big as possible, and whatever is lacking that the light cannot sufficiently produce, it is "blanked" out by the white fuzzies? Yeah, this sounds like a pretty silly thing to do, but I'd never really given it much thought until I was just trying to get to bed just now. Man, the things you do when you're bored trying to get to sleep. =/

It's just retinal noise, really. Your photoreceptors, ganglion cells, etc are pretty prone to spontaneous activity. It's only when you cut off normal input that the noise becomes noticeable. Phosphenes are what happens when the noise is amplified (by mechanical stimuli or otherwise). Then again it's important to note that what you perceive does not necessarily correspond to receptor stimulation, since your brain slaps on a healthy amount of processing.

This might make for good reading:
http://www.jgp.org/cgi/content/full/125/6/641

How ya doing, buddy?