h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Adam -
yeah that is a first, a doctor recommending you to poke youreself in the eye!!! I have treid it and its way cool - I wish I was artistic enough to draw what I see, im sure I'd be a millionare by now!!
This morning (actually its afternoon but I only just got out of bed, having been on here until the wee hours thismorning!!) Im mostly Yellow, with some reds and green dotted in, when I press, the colour come out more and the black goes away a bit, but then eventually it all ends up black and blue-white as per usual.

My neice has occular albinism (we think sees as if through a colander (ie thing you use to drain pasta), the doctors have told us that her eyes dont have enough pigment to take light and turn it into images (only some of the cells on her retinas as she is not totally blind), but as she is only 5 it is kind of hard to ask her what colour she sees when she closes her eyes - could be an interesting question for the future. i think it will aslo be interesting to ask her if in her dreams she sees the same way as she does IRL - could help supply an answer to my other question (see 'what do blind people dream' thread).

Isack Newton didn't just discover gravity and calculus, he was also (I think) the first person to unweave the rainbow, working out that white light comprises lights of all colours.

He would stick pens, cutlery and other objects into his eye sockets to distort his eyeballs and disrupt his vision, in an attempt to understand the difference between reality and perception.

Do not try this at home! On several occasions he blinded himself for days at a time, and on at least one occastion he blinded himself for a week.

Strange man.

Interesting thread Tabitha.

What a strange thing to do, I never knew that about him - where do people find out this stuff?????

You don't now what he worked out do you?

Me, too - just the black with yellow dots if I'm lucky, the white bits from the shapes of windows etc I've been looking at disappear quite quickly. Should I get my eyes or my brain tested or am I just lacking imagination?

Not necessarily lacking imagination as such, just different - its interesting to note that some people do actually see all sorts of things (or at least percieve that they do).

Hi Tabatha

I've beeen meaning to tell you about this for a while. What I see behind my closed eyes changes if I have been doing yoga or meditating, which I find pretty freaky.

Normally I get a brown background with flecks of red, lime green and purple. Sometimes this dances, and sometimes it swoops round in whirlpools, mainly before I go to sleep. Either of these is "normal".

If I have been doing yoga or visualisations or meditating, then almost all the movement goes, and the granualarity evens out. It is much smoother and calmer.

Interesting, huh?

gcB

Very interesting ben.... so maybe it is to do with your level of excitement - ie somethng to do with blood pressure or heart rate...
very interesting - thanks for that

cya
tab

Blood pressure, heart rate, also brain waves - if you are meditating you are definitely in alpha. (You know about alpha waves and beta waves?)
B

*What* a classic thread!

I get billowing purpley stuff when it's dark and... *serruptitiously (sp?) types with eyes closed*...kind of yellow laid on top of purple at the moment (what passes for daylight in this office).

Mood and meditation affects it? Have to give it a go...

A

*surreptitiously boots up spelling checker in Word*

Oh..really?

A

I get the redish brown, how light depends on the brightness around me.

DJ, White noise is a general term for unfiltered random noise from many different types of source. A complete pain in the but for electronic engineers (and students of electronic engineering).

Thought I'd bring this back before deleting it as it was a very interesting conversation at the time and there isn't an enormous backlog

Good idea

Had some interesting visual effects while undergoing an angiogram of my carotid artery (to find cause for unexplained stroke). Sort of like having your head microwaved....

You have to close your eyes, and remain as still as possible, for a time of perhaps 5-8 seconds, while a dye is injected into the artery being viewed. They told me I would have "visual disturbances". What I got was a black background, shot through with yellow streaks, along what seemed like veins, which lasted as long as the huge fuzzy machine hummed.... Have no idea what the streaks meant, but I can still see it, if I close my eyes and think back.

SC

Oh, yeah...my ZX Spectrum used to do that while it was loading. Are you sure they didn't have you hooked up to a cheap computer game?

B

SC,

Basically it sounds like what you experienced was momentary hypoxia to the area of the brain served by the carotid artery under investigation. This is cos the blood is temporarily replaced with the dye. Either that or you are indeed a ZX Spectrum.

It is good to see the old threads coming slowly back. I followed this but never contributed because my own version would have been dead boring compared to everyone else's. However - it's put me in mind of another question I might ask. Keep a lookout for it...

Seeing as it's quite late here, I'm going home to study the backs of my eyelids

I had brightish lightish blue the other night. This is very different from normal, which is brown, orange and octarine (a kind of greenish purple). I couldn't work out why the sudden change - no strange chemicals, no other changes I could think of, but I may have been unusually tired. The blue hasn't observably returned though.

Ben

"Basically it sounds like what you experienced was momentary hypoxia to the area of the brain served by the carotid artery under investigation."

This sounds at least plausible. It was a very odd experience!

I notice also that when I first lay down in bed, with closed eyes, I will get a "electric discharge"(?) which circles the outside edge of my field of vision, looking either white or pale yellow and almost exclusively in my left eye. Anyone heard of this?

Just curious

SC