What do you see when you close your eyes.

I'm guessing the intial reaction by basically all of you would be Gee, duh, what else? BLACK!

But let's take a step back and examine if the color of pitch black is what we really see. When I close my eyes right at this moment, the last lighted object that produces or reflect light, such as my LCD monitor the recessed lighting on my ceiling gets captured right into the rods/cones in the back of my eyeball (mind you, I'm no expert in the mysteries of the human eye), it makes a splash of "light" that almost forms a degrading circle, slowly shrinking, then is quickly followed by little "fuzzies" that scurry around.

So, here's an experiement, try these several tests with the following conditions and tell me what you find.

1) Close your eyes right now for 30 seconds and tell me what you "see".

2) Turn off all your lights, and try to make the room as pitch black as possible. If you have to wait till nighttime in your washroom or bedroom with the lights killed, that's fine. Keep your eyes open and "see" what you can "see" without the prescence of light.

3) Follow step 2, but this time close your eyes completely. Again, tell me what you see.

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. =/

Jam it back in, in the dark.

1) Yes, I am that kind of person.

2) Is dat sum Haibane Renmei wannabe.

3) Is it that hard to close your eyes for 30 seconds and tell me what you "see"?

<3 Greykin.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Ah, thank you very much Bigblah for that. Yeah, I thought it was basically something that the retinals didn't have ample light to be activated, therefore would fill in these lack of stimulus with just blanks - or the "white noise". Actually, after opening and closing my eyes for extended periods of time, say about 2 minutes, this noise does stay around even when I open my eyes. I can see litte patches of the noise even if my eyes are working nominally with the eyelids open.

Also, I changed step two to not include using a blindfold. How the hell is someone supposed to keep their eyes open and have a blind fold wrapped tightly around them. So basically keep your eyes open in pitch black environment.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Quote:

Sometimes with both of these my imagination seems to give me images of what I imagine is around me.

Actually, I find that happens a lot as well. Your brains starts filling the pitch black void with mental images, whether your eyes are closed or you are in a pitch black environment, however when I eye lids are shut, it seems that the images projected from the brain are much stronger, like a person's face, a landscape, an artwork etc.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?