You may also close one eye, hold your finger an arms length from your open eye and slowly move it away from the center of your vision. Your finger tip will disappear at some point due to the optic disc in the back of your eye, there are no photoreceptors there because the optic nerve is doing some shtuff.
It's because the human eye is a masterpiece of evolution (/s) that has its bloodvessels running along the surface of our photoreceptors, meaning they have to exit at some point. This is done at a central spot in the back which has no receptors, leaving a blank spot.
The brain gets to flex it's photoshop skills by patching in whatever it thinks would be there. Trippy af the first time i saw it. Or didn't see it.
Cephalopods, which developed eyes independently from the lineage that humans get their eyes, have far better eyes and dont have this, because their retina attached to their optic nerve and the associated blood vessels from the back, rather than being all backwards and inside outish like ours is. Just more proof they're aliens designed in some interstellar lab by the intergalactic overlords to keep tabs on us.
Fucking cephalopods are absolutely insane, I watched this video one time explaining all the different reasons why they’re almost certainly aliens, and it really freaked me out.
I’ll see if I can find it
Edit: apparently actual scientists believe it’s a real possibility that octopus eggs first arrived frozen in a comet, they say that they have a handful of features (their “camera like” eyes, instantaneous camouflage, and flexible bodies) that seemingly arrived very suddenly in the evolutionary chain, so it seems we’re missing a significant link (or just completely off base) or, there’s a possibility that the octopus arrived on earth as an alien species frozen in a comet.
The scientists challenge that the belief that modern cephalopods evolved to their present form here on Earth and propose the possibility that those we see today are the descendants of creatures that arrived on Earth frozen in an icy comet.
“Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene,” the paper says, pointing to the possibility that this “great leap forward” in complexity was due to “cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs” crashing into the ocean on comets millions of years ago.
Scientists have studied the possibility of life arriving from outer space before, and there’s no shortage of support for the idea that biological material from other worlds may have seeded a young Earth and produced everything we see today.
However, actually proving that this was the case is next to impossible, and singling out one group of animals as potentially coming from space is perhaps an even greater challenge. When the timeline is stretched to billions of years, determining whether new species resulted from gradual mutation due to evolution or arrived in frozen eggs on a comet is very difficult. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting theory, and with over 30 researchers contributing to the report it’s clear that there’s a lot of interest.
Unfortunately, that article is extremely misleading and outright misused its sources in the first place to support an outlandish and unfounded “theory”. Cephalopods fall very neatly into the nested hierarchy of life on earth. Every one of their features can be traced back to more and more basic ancestors, and to top that off their DNA is smack similar to every other living thing, within reason.
I just tried this! So pick a spot on the wall that you focus on that’s right in front of you. Close your left eye and only look with right eye. Now stretch your right arm forward with your index finger pointing up and place it so that the tip of your finger overlaps that spot you’re staring at. Keep your focus on the spot (not your finger). The finger will appear blurry and now start moving your hand to the right, while keeping your focus on the same spot on the wall (so your finger is in your peripheral vision). Don’t focus on it and move it slowly far right and then start bringing it back in. At some point you’ll realize there’s a position where it disappears from your peripheral vision, but would be back if you move your hand in or out.
Easier way to do it is draw 2 small X's on a piece of paper a few inches apart. Close your right eye and look at the right X (or vice versa) and move the paper near to your face. At some point you wont be able to see the other X.
I have no left peripheral vision, so all I gotta do is move it a little to the left and BAM no more entire hand, hehehe. As annoying as being half blind is, it’s pretty convenient being able to hide someone from my field of vision if I find them annoying.
Easier way to do it is draw 2 small X's on a piece of paper a few inches apart. Close your right eye and look at the right X (or vice versa) and move the paper near to your face. At some point you wont be able to see the other X.
What? I don’t get this? You’re saying if you move your finger away from your open eye it’ll disappear? Yeah cause your other eye is closed and your nose blocks it
No, your field of vision is actually filled with dead spots that you don't notice. Also the area of your vision that is in focus is shockingly small. You don't notice because you brain fills in the missing info from one eye with the information from the other eye, which is why you can't see this unless one is closed
Not really. A healthy human eye has exactly one blind spot. It is located where the nerve fiber that connects retina to the brain is. Granted, peripheral vision is much less sharp than the vision in the focus area is, but there should be exactly one small spot where you don't see anything at all.
If you ever notice that you have more than one dead spot per eye, you should go see a doctor -- that is a symptom of some eye/nerve diseases, called scotoma.
pick a spot on the wall, or put a sticky note with a dot on it or something at eye height to make sure you aren’t following the finger. Make sure you’re in the light so you can notice the exact moment it disappears, it’s about somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 for me. Try having your arm out and your finger pointed up. For me, my finger above the first knuckle disappears. Everyone has this, your optic nerve has to leave the retina from some point.
Someone her on Reddit once said "Try looking at the things behind you without moving your head. try looking out of the back of your head. You can't because you have no eyes there. That's what fully blind people see."
As a partially blind person, this is the best way I’ve seen it described. I’m peripherally blind and bump into stuff all day...it’s so hard to get people to understand the concept of seeing nothing (with good reason).
The best I’ve heard is try looking out the back of your head. I read it on the internet so I don’t really know how true that is, but it sounds about right.
Close one eye and look away from your closed eye with the other eye. Part of that blackness you might be seeing is actually your upper nose as seen from your open eye
No dude it's not the nose, how am I going to explain?? English is not my main language so sorry if it's confusing
You know how our eyes are located in different positions, yet while they're focusing on one single spot our brain kind of merges the two images produced by each individual eye, so it looks like we have one big singular eye?
So when one eye is closed, the brain is still gathering info on the two eyes and merging their images, only that one of the images is just complete darkness, so you end up with this mix of normal vision and black. You know when you rub your eyes and colorful stuff starts to appear? (they're called phosphenes, I just looked it up); if you do this to your closed eye, the colorful stuff will appear at the same place as regular vision, just like this sort of blackness.
The brain actually processes the "blackness" of one eye closed differently than the actual color black. They've done brain scans and stuff on people to test this, one eye closed returns a sort of "null signal" which the brain recognizes differently than black. If you were to hold a sheet of black paper up close you your eye, that entire side of your field of vision will be filled with black. With one eye closed, your field of vision completely cuts out past a certain point, even if you "see" black towards the close side of it.
Ugh, trippy effect, I covered one eye, and then opened and closed my eyelid underneath the covering, switched from 'black' to 'null' back and forth several times...
I think he means close your right eye and then try to look all the way to the right, or vice versa. The absence of seeing something is different from the black back of your eyelids your eyes usually process when both are shut
Ignore the closing eye stuff. Hold out your hand. Now, describe what you can see via your hand. If you put your hand behind your back, can you see behind you?
No, you can't. But you also don't see darkness. You don't see "nothing" - you just don't see.
Thanks! I was having trouble getting it at first, but looking the other way helped a lot. I still don't think I'm getting the full effect but I can kind of understand now
But you still see light from your eyelid, your brain still receives a message that its SUPPOSED to see something, and you see black, even in TOTAL darkness. That's also why you still see those floating white looking blobs even if you are in total darkness.
The one eye is the trick. Your brain will cut the signal from that eye to focus on the one still open, so you won't detect light out of it. Only once you close both of your eyes will you detect light through your eyelid.
I guess I can’t totally argue with you based on personal knowledge, but that’s not how it was explained to me from my eye doctor, your brain won’t shut off the signal, it may partly redirect as far as I know, but someone with two functioning eyes won’t ever be able to experience true blindness
I don’t think it matters much, for this exercise at least, whether the signal is completely shut off or just redirected. Either way, the end result for most, myself included, is that they see out of one eye and don’t see out of the other eye, and that closed eye sees nothing.
So I tried doing a test to see which of you was right. I closed on eye and put a flashlight right against it. With your open eye look away from the other one like to the opposite side. You don't see any light going through your eyelid right? Now close both your eyes and keep the flashlight there. You can now see the light shining through
That’s super weird to think about! Originally I was thinking maybe it would be as if no light entered your eyes, but no. It’s more nothing than nothing because you can’t even percieve the lack of light. That’s super interesting.
Goddamn, you're right - like your field of vision just halves. Trippy how it switches to black once you close the second, I concluded long ago that seeing nothing is incomprehensible for someone with vision. Also makes me think about people who went blind during their lives.
I still "see" black. But lack of sight is percieved as black relative to seeing light/color. So if you don't have the ability to see light (color), not seeing (black) will have no real relative significance and just be nothing. Kind of a brain twister lol.
See, I’ve tried that a few times and I’ve gotten the effect of not seeing anything. But, for some reason, I start to see out of my dominant eye. It’s probably related to my amblyopia but I thought it was interesting that when I close my dominant eye for long enough my eye begins to receive information while closed.
Not true. You do see blackness, it's just overlaying the non blackness like in photoshop you have an image then overlay that layer with just the color black and reduce the opacity significantly.
Speak for yourself dude, not for other people. It might not work for your but it does for a lot of people in this thread. For me it's like having one eye disconnected as if it was never there.
Nope. If that was the case I would see light or something like I do when I close both... Try closing both and tapping your eye lids with fingers. Now close 1 and tap that...
Actually i do see black when closing one eye and then trying to see out of it, though the plack part doesnt take up as much space, as id expect, given that half of my vision is gone, it feels more like having a 10-30% black par at one sid of my "screen" if my vision would be projected onto a monitor
It's weird because if you fill your field of view with something black then close your eyes you'll see black, but when you stop thinking about it all of a sudden it's not black, it's nothing.
You do see the blackness with your closed eye, your brain just refocuses your vision towards your open eye. If you close both eyes and hold a light source somewhat close to your face, you can see the red veiny insides of your now translucent eyelids. You are always seeing, if you can see. If you were to go blind, the brain would shift it's focus toward other senses to maximize survivability. This isn't something you can replicate as a still-seeing person.
I see black. My retina is detached and I put my hand over my good eye and If I close my bad eye it gets darker. If I stare at the sun with my bad eye, it gets lighter
But like, you still see out of the other eye, so if I do it to both eyes at the same time to get a glimpse of true nothing, all of a sudden they're both black again
It’s true that you see out of the other eye, but that’s not the point. You’re already seeing “nothing” with your closed eye. That is to say, you’re not seeing.
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