How to Make Your Eye Feels Like Its Closed Even Though It's Open

Alex

Here's something you can try at home: how to make your eye feels like it's closed, when it's actually open. Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily explains:

This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids' bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a minute or two I could begin to make out shapes in the room: A towel rack, the shower curtain. My eyes had adapted to the dark condition. Then I closed my right eye and covered it with my hand. I turned the lights back on, for a minute, until my left eye had adapted to the light. Then I turned the lights off.

I could still see the towel rack and shower curtain with my right eye, which remained adapted to darkness. But my left eye could see nothing. In fact, my left eye felt as if it was closed. I made every effort to open the eye, but it seemed that some unstoppable force was keeping it closed. The only way to make my eye feel as if it was open was to cover it with my hand. I still couldn't see anything with the eye, but at least I could convince myself it was open.

Link - via Miss Cellania

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Things That Are (Almost) Impossible To do With Your Body


Comments (23)

Newest 5
Newest 5 Comments

i tried this out and then immediately turned the light on and looked in the mirror to see the difference in pupil size and it was pretty intense! the left eye was significantly smaller than the right eye. just thought it would be fun to see, though i must admit i am easily amused...
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Hey Jennifer, I think your right. While we have fewer cones than rods, the cones are much more highly concentrated towards the middle of our retinae, which is where we tend to recieve the input that makes up our central vision. Rods are more highly concentrated towards the outer edges of the retina. Because rods are much more sensitive to light, when our eyes are adjusting an a dark room, we are better able to perceive light and shapes in our peripheral vision.
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Here's another cool trick to play on yourself in a dark room. I inadvertently discovered this a while back. I have a reading light that's attached to a headset, so that I can read in the dark and not disturb my sleeping husband. So I had been staring at the brightly lit pages for a while, and when I switched off the light, the room was instantly totally dark. I had zero night vision at that moment. I happened to have a package of glow in the dark stars on the floor which were faintly glowing... I noticed that if I looked straight at them, they disappeared completely, but if I looked away, I could clearly see them with my peripheral vision. I kept quickly looking at them and then away, effectively seeming to turn them "off" and "on". It was quite cool! I know this has something to do with the different sensitivities of the rods and cones in your eye.
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It told me "spam" is not a word! Just for that I'm going to send them hundreds of unsolicited e-mails for products and services they don't want or need!
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That was pretty cool, but needs work. There's nothing like an entire game with only 2 vowels (3 if you include y). I think at one point I had 4 S and 3 T, what do you do with that?
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Yup, that's fun. It'll need a better lexicon before it becomes really useful.

The other thing it could do with is detecting when you've a full line of consonants and bypassing the randomness to drop a vowel in. There are probably languages out there that can make a word from xdwtpkm, but English isn't one of them.
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What are the win/lose conditions? I got to a game over dialog. Why can't I just keep playing and racking up points? Is there a timer I'm not seeing?
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Thanks a bunch. I've been playing since I saw the posting, about 24 hours now.

I finally figured out the multiplier thingy (I know, I'm not too swift sometimes) and gaming that definitely upped my score, although the most I ever got was 600.
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