You somehow magically sense something there through your eyes, but you don’t see it at all. It’s stronger if you don’t look at it directly and move your head about a little. It’s like there’s an unconscious observer reporting where things are, and you just take the info and acknowledge it, but you don’t see it. Anyone else get this?
When I was a child we lived in a house in the countryside, so nights were very dark and very quiet. I’d wander around the house in the dark quite often and noticed that as well as peripheral vision, the acoustic of the room gave me information, I could sort of hear the sound of my footsteps change if I was walking towards a closed door rather than an open one. Similarly the air moved differently going from one room to another. None of these senses had enough information to navigate alone, but all added to the model of where I was and what was around me. Of course this was in a place I knew well. When walking outside, I could ‘hear’ the echo of the hedges and walls beside me which kept me in the middle of the path. At the time this didn’t seem unusual. It goes to show that we use all our senses all the time, one helps the other to fill in the gaps.
I’m much older now, the eyesight and hearing are both failing, but it was fun while it lasted.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Your peripheral vision works better than the center of your vision in low light, that’s why you can sort of see things in the edge of your field of view but not when you directly look at them
over_clox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Above and beyond that, scientists say the rods of the eye are sensitive enough to detect individual photons.
I can’t confirm that myself, but it seems about right to me.
Bigfish@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
Yeah, we did a lab on this in college. Rods are sensitive enough to be triggered by <10 photons, cones take around 100x more to fire.