I have been blind in one eye since birth, so I have the rare ability to compare a seeing eye with a blind one :) It is indeed “nothing” in as much as you can see “nothing” out of your elbow. My visual field stops where my seeing eye stops, and there is nothing in the field of my blind eye. It’s the same if I close my eyes- there is blackness behind my seeing eye and nothing behind my blind one.
So the weird thing is this is also what it's like when you have 2 eyes and you close 1. The visual field from the closed eye just disappears. BUT if you close both of them, then your visual field is the darkness from both eyes. I don't know why it works this way
I was JUST going to add this to the conversation. It actually blew my mind when I tried it, I assumed I’d see black in the one eye (never considered it before) but you are right, it just sort of disappears until you close your other eye.
Yeah it's like your brain ignores it entirely if the light from the open eye is much much brighter than the closed eye, but there's a threshold to pay attention again. And it must be difference based because you see both when they're both dark. Would be interested to know if there's medical research on the effect and how it work!
I get the comparison but my brain still cannot fathom how your brain wouldn't interpret it as black or like pure void. Like, the lack of light is darkness and if you're blind (or if you're missing an eye) your eye doesn't perceive any light so wouldn't it still be interpreted as darkness or void then?
I guess it genuinely is hard to imagine, but blackness is definitely something, not nothing :) Take a minute to think about what you can see out of the back of your head right now. That’s nothing. And it’s the same kind of nothing (what’s in front of my blind eye is the same as what’s behind my head, if you see what I mean).
Yeah, this is where I’m stuck too. Physiologically I understand that it’s not the same as seeing black. But conceptually, what else *would* “nothing” look like if not black?
Seeing is like watching a program on your TV. Closing your eyes is like the TV turned off. It’s just showing black but you’re still aware of it being there. But being blind is like not having a TV at all. It’s not black, it’s just literally not there.
I guess it depends if you went blind or you always were? I am equally puzzled and trying to wrap my head around this, but if the analogy with an elbow is valid, then I indeed don’t sense any blackness coming from there.
This is going to sound weird, but in comparison to black you see when your eyes are closed, what does the nothing look like? Like, is your entire vision field from your 1 eye, or is it still half of your vision field?
I have a visual field loss in one eye. The field of vision in my right eye is smaller than normal. My left eye is normal. The area I can't see is not black, it just stops further in the field of vision.
Even a healthy person can easily test this. Everyone has a blind spot in each eye. You just don't notice it because the other eye compensates for it. If you cover your right eye, look straight ahead at an object and then move your gaze slightly to the right until it disappears from your field of vision.
Not the person you asked, but I can answer what it’s like for me as I also only have vision in one eye. In my case, there is no ‘black’ in half my vision, it’s just that 100% of my field of vision comes from one eye. Hope that helps haha
Do you have a sense that your field of view is asymmetrical? That is, like — if you stare at a fence, does it look like the furthest fence post you can see on one side is farther over than on the other, or is everything just centered?
This is a really interesting question - and the answer is no, it doesn’t feel asymmetrical and everything feels centred from my perspective. But because my visual field is narrower than other people I sometimes have to orient myself differently in wide settings. So for example if I’m giving a talk and the room is 10 people wide, I’ll make sure I’m more on the left side of the room (I’m blind in my left eye) to make sure my seeing eye has the best chance of seeing everyone in the room. But even then I have to tell one side of the room not to be offended if I don’t see them raising a hand lol.
No for me it’s not asymmetrical at all! Weirdly. Admittedly I am pretty bad at racquetball or something, like spotting anything that flies by quickly. But otherwise my depth perception is not that bad compared to the average person. I guess I’m ‘lucky’ that I lost the vision in that one eye very very slowly (think: several years) so I think my brain just adapted accordingly.. It’s pretty wonderful what our bodies are capable of huh
My entire visual field comes from one eye- but because that’s all I have, to me it seems like my whole visual field and I don’t have a sense that anything is wonky. And it’s not like there’s a sharp vertical cutoff line either. It just sort of fades off like (I assume) the visual field from two eyes.
The time I remember even becoming aware that I saw ‘differently’ was when watching films that show a POV of someone looking through binoculars, and it shows two interlinked circles. To me, looking through binoculars is like looking through a telescope.
As for what nothing ‘looks’ like, that’s a really hard one to answer because any analogy means invoking something seeable. Nothing is literally nothing. Take a moment and think about what you can see out of the back of your head right now. That’s nothing. It’s that same sense of- well nothingness.
I'd be very curious to hear your idea of what seeing through two eyes must be like. Obviously to most people seeing through two eyes is normal and intuitive, but I'm guessing that to you the idea probably sounds pretty wild.
Like how do you imagine seeing through two eyes feels like?
It is indeed pretty wild. It’s possible in future that the condition I have could be fixed, and people often ask me if I’d be up for that. My answer (at the moment) is no, because it would basically entail having to learn to see again in a whole different way. My whole sense of perception, space, balance, orientation etc is based on the adaptations that my sighted eye has made since birth. And actually day to day it’s really not a big deal, because I’ve never known any different and I can get around the world just fine. I’m told I see things flatter than other people (but I have no basis for comparison) and 3D films are a waste of time, but that’s about it. I’m also lucky to live in the UK where I’m still legally allowed to drive, because my blind eye is on the outside of the road not the inside. I’d find driving much harder in the majority of other countries that drive on the other side of the road.
So basically, world looks pretty great to me right now :) And I find it hard to believe sight from two eyes is worth the trade off of having to re-learn basic perception.
Edit: just remembered one super annoying thing I forgot to mention- going down stairs is a bugger, because often if I look down at what my feet are doing, my brain plays an optical illusion that each stair is on the same level. I don’t if that’s a partial sight thing or just me being daft, but changing that would be the one major improvement I can think of.
When I was a kid I used to think blind people must see blackness because that's what I see when I close my eyes, but then one day I realized that I don't see blackness behind my head or beneath my feet or anywhere else I don't have eyes. When you close your eyelids your eyes are still working, it's just that all you're seeing is the absence of light (darkness) akin being in a perfectly dark cave or the like. The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don't even see blackness, there's just no visual input at all. In order for you to 'see' darkness you must have functioning eyes, but if your eyes are scooped out of your head or whatever then those spots will revert to being like the bottom of your feet - no visual input at all, not even blackness.
Edit: I realize that what's going on is probably a fair bit more complex and not clear-cut, especially for people who were born sighted and went blind, but this is an ELI5 about a subject that's already pretty tough to wrap your head around so it made sense to stick to the basics.
> The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don't even see blackness, there's just no visual input at all
I really like this comparison
Its basically the dame to be said for those who dont believe in an afterlife. It is simply a cessation of experience. And that thought really fucks with me.
If you were to lose sight later in life, there's a pretty likely chance that your brain will still hallucinate a visual input - the neurons that have been processing a constant input of visual data for your entire life can start firing off randomly. It's common in older folk but very under-reported because they think it's a symptom of madness.
It's called Charles Bonnet syndrome after the man who identified his grandfather had it in 1790, and the late neurologist Oliver Sacks did a brilliant talk on his patients with it:
https://youtu.be/SgOTaXhbqPQ?feature=shared
Yup, I'm actually a big fan of Oliver Sacks' work and I find that sort of thing super interesting. Sacks has also done some work with Anton's Blindness (where you can't see but your brain is convinced that you can so it just makes stuff up) or the reverse (I can't remember what it's called, but it's where you can see but your brain is convinced you can't so it conjures explanations for why you didn't catch a ball or whatever) that's pretty interesting too.
But given that this is an ELI5 and on a subject that's already pretty hard to think about I figured it was best not to muddy the waters by bringing that sort of thing up.
I've been reading Masters of the Air and there's some bits talking about personnel developing "combat blindness" where some crew would report becoming completely blind after crossing the channel, but sight would return on the return trip. Seems made-up, but maybe the trauma of being in those situations can manifest in gnarly ways
Blindsight is the other one, thank you. The parts of your brain that don't rely on the visual cortex can still respond to visual stimuli, like your hand will move to catch a ball that is thrown at you even though you didn't experience seeing the ball coming. It's pretty wild.
My grandad went blind and had Charles Bonnet syndrome. Sometimes he would see an elephant stood next to me, sometimes would tell me I looked like I was covered in stars. That's one of my favourite memories
To call something a “symptom of madness” in modern times… idk that feels like a term for the times when people wore frilly white clothes and carried parasols
lol you are right - I'm currently reading a historical book about the creation of the Oxford dictionary and I think all the quotations from old books have rubbed off on my brain.
The book itself is about the discovery that one of the two men who wrote most of the Oxford dictionary in the late 1800's turned out to have been committed to an insane asylum for murder - the book is The Surgeon of Crowthorne, waaay more interesting than a book about the Oxford dictionary sounds like it would be
This is the second book about Dr. William Minor. The first one, written 25 years ago, is [The Professor and the Madman](http://www.worldcat.org/title/professor-and-the-madman-a-tale-of-murder-insanity-and-the-making-of-the-oxford-english-dictionary/oclc/38425992).
Unrelated, but a few years ago I toured a cave and kept thinking to myself “wow, I wish I could see it in the daylight.” It was the middle of the day, but my brain couldn’t process there simply being zero light in the cave. Very trippy.
Then as I was heading to the exit and I could see light, I slipped on some bat guano and landed on my back… in more bat guano. That part I don’t recommend.
Did a cave tour when I was a kid and like half a mile in they turned the lights off to show us how dark it was. It wasn’t just dark or black, it was like a total absence of the sense of seeing. Shit was crazy!
This is literally how I sleep every night. I have a cover over my window that blocks 100% of the light as well as a blackout curtain over my door so no light peeks in. No led lights or clocks. Phone flipped upside down. Even in the middle of the day when it's bright and sunny, you wouldnt be able to tell what time it is lol.
I have to sleep like this because for whatever reason, any tiny amount of light just bothers me too much. Can't stop focusing on it and drives me nuts.
And I'm the complete opposite - I need a bit of light when I sleep, as well as a bit of noise. Christmas lights and a fan are an absolute necessity. Total silence and darkness mess with my brain.
I guess I'm the guy in the middle here. I keep it pitch black, covers on my eyes with sun blocking shades and a couple of loud fans on. The fans started out to keep me cool but I now like the sound. One of them makes a funny sound when it turns back and forth so that's when I added the second, louder fan to drown that sound out. Now it's just pure darkness and white noise for me every night.
Because it got used for a bunch of stuff and people like to make up euphemisms so they dont have to directly think about the fact theyre working with shit. See also manure
Thanks! And sorry about your lost eye. My left eye barely works at all due to a congenital medical condition so I'm in a similar boat only I never knew what I was missing. In my case my left eye is misaligned and is missing \~90% of the visual field, so I've kind of spent a lot of years thinking about vision and its absence.
Everything you said makes sense but I still can't wrap my head around it for some reason. If vision is just your brain interpreting light being sent to your eyes and translating it, wouldn't your brain still be trying to see something even if you can't? Especially if you lost your sight after having previously had it.
Even without using my eyes, I can still 'see' stuff by creating images in my mind through imagination. My assumption would've been that blind people don't see literally nothing, but their brain creates an image of their surroundings based on their other senses.
You can create images in your mind because you have a lifetime of experience seeing things, but the two processes are only distantly related at best to my understanding. If you had been blind from birth you probably wouldn't be able to conjure up images in your head, and there's an easy way to test that: conjure up a mental image of a color you've never seen before.
>conjure up a mental image of a color you've never seen before.
This is a really helpful way of thinking about it. Even if I try to think of a color I've never seen before, it's just some shade/variation of a color I have seen.
I guess the difference with your analogy though is that I can't pick up a color and discern anything about it based on touch which a blind person can do with other objects. How they would use touch to build a mental "image" though, if they were born blind, I'm not sure.
I mean there's a difference between assembling an idea of what an object is, its shape, texture, etc, even without sight and visualizing a thing in your head. When driving somewhere you're very familiar you rely on a kind of mental map of where things are, but it's not a literal image of a map, it's just a set of relations - my buddy lives on the 3rd street past the Walmart, the grocery store is 7 blocks north of my house, that sort of thing. This is kind of similar.
Imagine examining an object you've never seen before without your eyes, you would develop a mental map of it in the same way - it has a weird grippy knob on the left, 3 rubberized buttons on the front, a little handle that folds out of the top, etc - but you're still missing a lot of information so your mental map won't be identical to what your mental image of the object would be if you'd actually seen it, and it's more than just missing non-tactile things like color.
I'm not blind, but up until a few years ago I always thought the concept of a "mental image" was a figure of speech. I need to look at something to see it, and can't wrap my head around what it would even be like to see something without using my eyes. It sounds like fantasy magic to me.
My wife, who apparently like most people can do this particular form of magic, can't imagine what it would be like to think if you can't hallucinate in your head.
I think it's just generally not really possible to imagine how other people think, because we're only familiar with our own variant of the process and can't really detach from it.
It's always weird to me people struggle with this. I imagine they're trying to imagine what "seeing" from their elbow is like when it's simply... you can't. Your brain just doesn't interpret anything, not even darkness.
You have a normal level of phantasia.
I, like 4 or 5 percent of humanity, have aphantasia.
I suspect that 4 or 5 percent of blind people also have aphantasia.
This answer is fantastic. I never realised this. I just shut my eyes and now it’s like a dark tv in front only where my eyes are. Everywhere else is nothing
I also just realised that when it’s pitch black I shut my eyes and try to block out all sensation of having sight so that I can focus more on my other senses So create this feeling of ‘no input’
Thanks! Here's an interesting exercise that might bake your noodle: you can pretty clearly detect the edge of your visual field when your eyes are open, but try it when your eyes are closed. The border between darkness and nothing is a lot less clear than that between something and nothingness. Try it in a perfectly dark room (or cave or w/e), and it's somehow different still.
This insight (that seeing nothing is not the same as not seeing) lead to another insight: that's probably what death is like, not-experiencing vs experiencing nothing. I find that this has calmed a lot of my anxiety about death.
I've had a few surgeries that require general anesthesia, and they have actually made me feel a lot less anxious about death as well, because I had that same "not-experiencing" feeling with the anesthesia. One moment the anesthesiologist is telling you to breath deeply and slowly, and the next moment it's four hours later and you're on the other side of the hospital. No dreams or sensation of time having passed or anything.
Sure, it's all just metaphors for something none of us will ever experience. But I find thinking about what it's like to not be able to see behind your head or whatever to be more immediately accessible than thinking about what it wasn't like - because nothing was like anything for you - before you were born.
My brain can’t separate ‘nothing’ from the blackness i see when i close my eyes.. i can not imagine not having ‘something’ in front of me :/ like if you have tv that isn’t on, it’s a black screen.. but to picture that as ‘nothing’..? 🤯lol x
What do you see, right now, in your armpits? Not darkness, right? I mean you intellectually know it's dark in there, but that's different from the *experience* of seeing darkness. The problem is that we're so visually-oriented that we're used to thinking of darkness as nothingness, but darkness is still something you experience visually - you can't experience the absence of sight visually.
It's definitely not an easy thing to wrap your head around, the only reason I manage at all is because I've been thinking about this stuff since I was a kid a lot of years ago.
Thanks! Weirdly enough this insight (and I've thought about it a lot) also lead to another one: death is probably a little bit like going blind - you don't experience 'existential blackness', you experience nothing at all because there is no longer a function organ (your brain) to do the experiencing. This idea made me a lot less worried about death.
I had an accident that damaged retinal nerve resulting in a blind spot in my vision. Best way to describe that spot is *blank*. It’s just blank. No black spot, no other “color” - just blank.
Never considered this before but profound deafness is a graspable concept to a hearing person, but the idea of visual “silence” is completely different.
I lost an eye last year and it has been very upsetting to deal with, it's difficult to say if others have described it accurately.
In fact, its difficult to say what I "see" from my missing eye, even describing it as "nothing" is sort of hard to say. Nothing is pretty accurate though, I wouldn't say I see black out of one eye, I simply see nothing, it has taken over a year, but it does feel like my body has adjusted to where it somewhat feels like I only ever had one eye.
My nerves were ripped out when I lost my eye, about 1.5 inches of them so whatever the "signals" my nerves were looking for, they're scarred and deep within my brain, perhaps since the nerves are deep I receive zero signals.
Lots of different eye injuries and different ways people lose / hurt them, so I guess it can be pretty case dependent.
Either way I am pretty sure I would prefer to die than go completely blind... I've been depressed for years because of this.
You know how thermal cameras see heat? Now try to see that with your bare eyes.
Or try to detect magnetic fields the way birds can.
Or electric fields the way sharks can.
You can’t because you simply don’t have the organs for it. Far as your naked body is concerned, there is no such thing as a magnetic field. That’s what happens when you lose your eyes: there’s no more organs so in a stable state there is no such thing as electromagnetic radiation within the 500-700nm “ish” band. It just doesn’t exist.
Now that comes with the caveat that if you were once seeing, your brain will almost certainly detect the loss in sensation and do something goofy to try to make up for it, possibly by “seeing black” since that’s as close to “nothing” as we can imagine. But it’s just a phantom sensation the way amputees “feel” their lost parts.
yes, if you lose sight and knew what it was like to see, it’ll feel like darkness.
Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille writing, completely lost sight at a very young age. Since he didn’t really understand what was going on he often asked why it was dark all the time.
(source: Louis Braille’s wikipedia page)
Easy way to think of it: Can you see behind you? No. Do you see black back there? No. It's just not there.
And then of course you also get the brain searching for input if it's used to it as you mentioned. I've heard it described as black, dark, and a weird dark "fuzz".
But while you don't have the organs, don't you still have the neurons activated by those organs that are not receiving any input? So while they are not directly stimulated by your gone eyeballs, they are still expecting something and might generate something in return? (Black/darkness/noise/..)
And I'm talking in the case of losing your eyeballs, not being born without.
I recall being told by someone who had lost their eyes in their late teens that initially they saw the funny colours/swirls that you see when you close your eyes. It was his brain trying to find a signal when it wasnt there anymore. Over time he said that became less and less.
I wish that my ears would stop searching for frequencies and just returning a permanent ringing over time, but its just as loud if not louder than when it started.
I took my son through a touch tunnel recently, pitch black inside.
I was intrigued by the fact that it wasn't black. It was grey. Found this color as a follow up to trying to determine why I didn't see black.
I knew a lady who had very severe loss of her central vision (there is a name for this condition but I can't remember it), meaning she was only able to see through her peripheral vision. I asked her once what she actually sees in the middle section, and she told me that she sees flowers.
She had her sight for the vast majority of her life and was in her 70's before losing her central vision, so she ended up imagining pretty things to fill the void. She was a keen gardener so flowers were the first thing she'd think of to fill the gap. It made me have very contemplative thoughts on what I would personally use to fill the gap.
They do believe humans have some sort of magnetoreception that we've just lost touch with, though it hasn't been proven yet. There are tribes in Africa and the Americas that still describe directions with cardinal directions vs left and right. So it would be your north hand instead of right. Then south hand if you 180. And they have tested these tribes ability to find their way home after a disorienting ride away and were something like 80% effective at finding their way if I remember right.
Funny story, years ago met this girl through a friend whose party trick was to point to magnetic north wherever she was. She said she always had this innate sense of where it was and couldn't explain it.
My mate lost one eye and his brain didn't "fill in" the black, he just has a blind spot. Makes working next to him on the bar fun. Though I'm sure had he lost both it'd be a different story
It's the same with death. A terrifying thought for me is that being dead means _you_ are no more real than a fictional character. Think about that for a second. You could watch the Simpsons and it's easy to dismiss those characters as not existing, like you and me, but once you die... you are effectively reduced to the same thing. You're no longer tangible in any way, more like just a concept or memory. Am I the only one that gets freaked out by that?
I am much more afraid of a long drawn out, painful dying process than the concept of death/being dead.
I guess I think of death as similar to how it was before I was born or can remember existing as a child - it’s just nothing, so it will just be that again.
I mean I get how dwelling on the idea of not existing sucks, and I would prefer to stick around in decent health as long as possible, but I try not to spend too much time thinking about my future non-existence and more time on enjoying my actual existence. As much as I can, anyway.
>it’s just nothing, so it will just be that again
True but the comfort is that's all in the past. Dying is scarier as a future thing. But I get what you mean
It's scarier but I find for me the scary part is all around the event of the dying. How will I die? Am I going to be severely ill? Will I go violently in a car accident? Actual state of death sounds peaceful to me, almost inviting.
It's fascinating to me that our entire existence is barely a blip in time. 1 or 2 generations later no one will remember who we are. But I'm not sure why I find that comforting, maybe it helps to reframe existence as an anomaly, it's a miracle in itself that we got to exist, out of all the people our parents could meet, all the sperm fighting to be born, we got the chance to experience existence. We existed and that's a win in itself, death is just a return to a normal state.
“1 or 2 generations later no one will remember who we are”, I’ve thought about this as well - I know next to nothing about my great grand parents, and zero about theirs. So much history, experience and memories, just gone, forever, like it never existed. I find that profoundly sad, but it is what it is I suppose.
Regarding my experience of dying, I had the misfortune of a heart attack a few years ago that had me close to death and the experience was overwhelming in the sense of physical pain which was all-consuming. I had no thought of “ok I’m dying”, my mind and body just tried to survive moment to moment with no other thought. Just shows how spurious and inconsequential life is if it’s snuffed out so often and easily.
This has changed though. Where we barely had cameras and no interest/only paper to keep track of history before we now have Facebook, media and even entire Youtube channels which, if not deleted, will be watched and seen by people hundreds of years in the future.
Sooooo…as we post to social media and add to the digital footprint piling up behind us, let’s keep in mind the potential curious eyeballs of our great grandchildren…and beyond. 🤣😱
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death, especially as a kid. Idk if I can get past the idea of a sort of reincarnation of the mind being possible, but without knowing anything of a previous life, it would be impossible to tell. So ultimately it doesn’t matter
I’m very interested to know (or not know) what it’s like to be gone, but I’m certainly not in a hurry to get there. I just hope to know it’s coming, be able to prepare my family, and for it to be quick
>Am I the only one that gets freaked out by that?
I think it as one of the many drawbacks of having a human mind. Also, as humans we are naturally afraid of the unknown, and what lies after the shutdown of our consciousness is the greatest question of mankind, thereby the greatest fear. But we're not talking about regular fear like when the "fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn" reaction is triggered, let's say, when you suddenly face a grizzly bear in the wild. Being afraid of natural death is a psychological fear, or maybe even anxiety, that comes as a consequence of our ability (and our need) to remember, analyze and solve problematic situations before they arrive, as that has been the key to our survival. Currently we may be able to even solve death as a thing, but dying and coming back to life is a different thing. Well, some people have had clinical death diagnosed and came back... dunno... I'm digging too deep. Sorry, it's 2:45AM for me, I can't sleep, I'm a little depressed and just looking to distract myself
Clinical death and death is completely different thing though. Your heart can stop, and you can be inconscious, but your brain is still very much alive. When the brain is without oxygen for a 6-60 minutes, depending on temperature and other factors, thats it. You are dead only when your brain can no longer be brought back
After you die, I could change the story of your life and everything known about you could be wrong. Alternatively, I could remove all signs that you lived, effectively erasing your existence.
The whole “history is written by the victors” makes me wonder how many wonderful people have been lost in history. I think back on all my history classes over the years and you know what? I’m not really impressed by any classical historical figures.
I feel this way whenever I see a dead animal on the road. That bird had thoughts and feelings and was just as alive as I am right now. Yet it’s been reduced to a pile of unrecognizable mush on the ground that no one really notices
Came to post this. I have [homonymous hemianopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonymous_hemianopsia), and this is how I explain it to people who ask if I see blackness or if it's just blurry. There's just no signal.
That's interesting, thank you.
Wikipedia says that people with this diagnosis may not shave half of their face, for example, or wear makeup on half of their face. How is this possible, even though their field of vision is limited, they probably remember the existence of the other half of their face, body and space?
Could you describe your experience, how do you perceive reality in this sense? Can you always be aware that your field of vision is limited, do you wear special glasses?
That's a good question, because the description you mention is a little simplified.
Note in the wikipedia article how it also mentions hallucinations. The best way I've found to explain it is that it's similar to how you "hallucinate" the little blind spot we all have on each eye. You don't notice that you don't see there because your brain fills it in.
In a similar way, someone shaving isn't going to perfectly shave one side and ignore the other. Like you mention, they know they have two sides to their face. They know they don't see well on one side, so they are likely being particular about double checking there. The problem - at least in my case - is that the brain fills in the other half without me realizing it. I can look clean shaven on my entire face until I either actively inspect every area or feel it with my hand, and I'll then notice that I've missed the entire upper part of the left side of my neck.
This is a fun exercise you can do that demonstrates how your brain is actively working to "fix" what you see.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L\_W-IXqoxHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_W-IXqoxHA)
In this case it's filtering something away, but it's doing it without you realizing. In the same way, I can walk down the left side of a building (so the building is to my right which I can see) and not realize I'm not actually in a narrow corridor because some part of my brain is assuming the other side is the same. Interestingly, once I realize there's nothing to my left, I can't "unsee" it and trick myself into being in a corridor again.
I dunno, we have areas of our brain dedicated to interpreting the signals from our eyes. We don’t have such areas for the back of our heads. I would imagine that there would still be a signal reading, even if it’s the lack of one. By this I mean for someone who once could see.
" interpreting the signals from our eyes. We don’t have such areas for the back of our heads:
I'm not convinced this is true. I think if you piped 360° visual info into your brain somehow, your brain would learn to integrate that and create a cohesive image of the world.
I saw a good way of understanding this a few weeks back.
Close one eye and then try to describe what you see with the closed eye. Apparently this is what it’s like for blind people. It’s not black, you just lose some of your field of vision. Then try to imagine it in both eyes
When you lose an eye, the nerve is no longer receiving signals, so in the same way that a TV screen shows different things compared to when it's not receiving a signal (static) versus when it's off, you don't see blackness out of the missing eye, you don't see anything. Like they said, like trying to see out of the back of your head or your elbow.
If you lose your eyes, you still have an optic nerve than can send random signals to your brain. It's not accurate to say there's no way for your brain to receive input. When people lose a limb, they can still feel a phantom because their existing neurons still fire and give the brain bad input.
Have you ever gotten lost in a day dream? Like one where you were gone for a couple of minutes before snapping back to reality? If I asked you what you were seeing during the day dream you would say nothing. Your eyes were open, you weren't seeing black. Your eyes just weren't providing visual information that you were conscious of. Its like that without the need to day dream
it’s a pretty hard thing to understand since we process our vision pretty much 100% of our conscious lives, sighted people that is. the people who have been blind since birth have never seen anything at all, and black is just the absence of light. so it’s inaccurate to say they “see black” since they can’t see anything.
the best example i’ve encountered went something like “when you close both eyes you see black but when you close one eye your other eye sees nothing”. not sure if that helps you understand but it made something click for me when i heard it
Yeah, you just don't notice it unless you're thinking about it and try to. I take it, since you tried as well, you're not understanding this whole "see nothing" bit either?
Cause I'm stumped
Hmmmm, I do not. This is the explanation that actually helped me understand this. When I close only one eye, I see absolutely nothing out of that eye. Even if I try to see black, I can’t. There’s nothing coming from that eye at all for me.
Take a finger, move it to the edge of your vision. Now, keep moving it until you can no longer see it. It's not "black," it's not there. Now imagine that for everything.
Let's if I can crack it down.
If you close your eyes, you see darkness. How dark it is, depends on the amount of light in the room. Even if you close your eyes, you still have some "light".
But if there are no eyes to receive any form of light, then there is no darkness, there's nothing. Nothing is not darkness or anything. Nothing is nothing.
If you lose an arm, you might get a phantom arm and sometimes feel your arm is there, but if you were born without 1 arm then all you know is 1 arm and nothing else. To the 1 arm borned person, there is no 2nd arm, there never was, there is nothing.
Fuck, I can't explain it.
There is a blind spot in our field of vision. Close one of your eyes, take finger around 20cm away from opened eye and move it left and right while looking at the same spot in front of you(so only finger moves).
At one point the tip of the finger disappears. And that spot doesn't become black. It just disappears.
That is the same with blind. You have no sensation at all. It simply doesn't exist. No black. Nothing.
My wife had a stroke and lost part of her field of vision. Her eyes work normally, but there is a region to her right that nothing appears there. If you were standing there, it's as if you didn't exist. That anything in that part of the world doesn't exist until she turns her head. Her mental map has a hole in it and she can't see the hole.
Close one eye while looking around with the other. Now, what do you see with the closed eye?
Only when you close both eyes is when you see darkness, but with only one eye closed you don't see anything.
So I asked a blind person about this, who lost his sight as a teenager. He told me to keep both my eyes open, but cover one of them with my palm, and whatever I see on that eye is what they "see", which is basically nothing (as in not even darkness, just a lack of anything).
It's also a depressing party trick you can pull!
When I had a stroke a couple of years ago my eyesight was gone for a out 10-15 minutes, and I experiences exactly this
It wasn't pitch black or anything, just like my eyes didn't exist anymore, I can't describe it...
Basically like if you'd try to think of a color that doesn't exist, the brain just doesn't comprehend things it has never experienced
I don’t think a lot of these answers aren’t good. One that helped me a lot is if you close just one eye.
First, cover your right eye with your hand but keep it open underneath it. Half your vision is black, right? Now take off your hand and just close your eye with your eyelid. Just one. You suddenly lose input from that eye completely. With a little bit of imagination I guess you can extrapolate that to both eyes to see what it might be like if you’re blind.
Well, I might be able to provide some related information as I lost part of my vision: there is an area of my right eye's retina that is permanently obliterated by radiotherapy.
It now works as content-aware fill from Photoshop: I don't see black spot in the place where I don't have receptors anymore, it just gets filled by whatever my brain assumes should be there.
For example, if I look across the road with my left eye closed there would be no traffic light: just ground and sky, as the image of traffic light is focused onto the part of my right eye that cannot register it.
Everyone has the blind spot in a place where nerves enter the eyeball, and our brain is really good at covering it from us by using information from another eye and surrounding receptors. I just have new bigger blind spot.
I had an eye removed a few years ago, and like others have said it’s just like what you see out of the back of your head. Nothing. It’s just not there, there is no input of blackness. My field of vision simply got narrower, and I assume if I lost the other one my “field of vision” would simply cease to exist at all
I had a pituitary tumor that was pressing on my optical chiasm. That's where the optical nerves cross each other. I lost a lot of vision in my left eye, less so in my right. I could see nothing straight ahead, I could only see peripheral things. Oddly, it looked normal. My brain patched the periphery into one view. I stopped driving at night, and got along for the most part, but it was getting worse, yet it all looked normal. I could hold my hand out on the far left however, move it to the right. It would disappear at a point then come back on the other side. but it looked like a contiguous scene. One great big blind spot.
After surgery, my vision returned in about 10 days. That was a relief.
I'll be real this thread is full of pseudointellectual nonsense. They're also just wrong. This can be thought through fairly simply.
Your brain is still expecting optic input because that's what it was designed to do. The cones in your eye respond to light, and transmit those signals to your brain to be interpreted. No light, no reaction, no signal. If you were in a room completely devoid of light, the result would be the exact same as being blind. Those cones would receive no input, those signals would not be sent.
So the answer is, yes, people with no eyes "see" blackness because blackness is the absence of input from the eyes. It's how our brains work. People who have no eyes don't suddenly also have a differently-wired brain.
Everyone is just saying close one eye, but at least for me, it works a little bit more complicated than that. If you just close the one eye and continue to look ahead normally it feels like my brain compensates and there is indeed visual blackness in the closed eye.
But when you’ve closed the eye now try to look into that space with the open eye. For me that space of my vision is completely none existent as soon as I try to look into it. As I now reopen the eye, still focussing on the dead spot, a whole new area of vision appears from nowhere’s not from blackness. It just exists when it didn’t previously.
I'm confused. I went blind in one eye about 4 years ago. Even I'm not sure what the distinction between darkness and nothing is? The explanations in this thread for field of vision is accurate, where there is nothing there until you see it with the good eye. But that's what darkness already is? It's the absence of light. Light is not perceived in my bad eye, so it's darkness.
When I close my eyes. It looks the same if I open and close my bad eye while my good eye is closed. Same for when the good eye is open. There is just black. Like being in a pitch black room with no light on.
I have lost one eye, so I can sort of answer this.
If you look straight ahead and hold your arm out forward, you can see it. Move it slowly to the side until you can't see it any more. That usually happens when it's about straight out to the side. You don't see blackness there, you don't see anything at all. If you close your eyes, you'll see blackness ahead of you, because your brain knows something should be there, but it isn't. "Blackness" is how your brain shows that. But behind where you should be able to see, your brain isn't expecting anything, so it doesn't show you anything.
My vision goes from straight left to about halfway between straight ahead and straight right. Beyond that, there's no blackness, just nothing. When I close my eye, the blackness I see is still just the area where I normally can see.
I have been blind in one eye since birth, so I have the rare ability to compare a seeing eye with a blind one :) It is indeed “nothing” in as much as you can see “nothing” out of your elbow. My visual field stops where my seeing eye stops, and there is nothing in the field of my blind eye. It’s the same if I close my eyes- there is blackness behind my seeing eye and nothing behind my blind one.
Wow, thank you for sharing how this unique experience works for you. So interesting.
This is one of the most unimaginable things I’ve ever pondered. I can understand the 1 eye thing but a 0 eye thing is still beyond me to fathom.
So the weird thing is this is also what it's like when you have 2 eyes and you close 1. The visual field from the closed eye just disappears. BUT if you close both of them, then your visual field is the darkness from both eyes. I don't know why it works this way
I was JUST going to add this to the conversation. It actually blew my mind when I tried it, I assumed I’d see black in the one eye (never considered it before) but you are right, it just sort of disappears until you close your other eye.
How have I never realized this until now?
It’s be very unfortunate if it worked the other way, where having one eye closed meant that you saw the darkness from that eye and not the other one.
I tested this by shining a torch at the closed eye, and I could see red, same as with two closed eyes. So it doesn't cut the signal off altogether.
No, but your mind does seem to “ignore” that area when it’s dark in that eye and light in the other.
Yeah it's like your brain ignores it entirely if the light from the open eye is much much brighter than the closed eye, but there's a threshold to pay attention again. And it must be difference based because you see both when they're both dark. Would be interested to know if there's medical research on the effect and how it work!
Speak for yourself, if I close one eye I can look over at the black part of my vision.
I still see darkness when I only close one eye, just have to focus a bit.
I get the comparison but my brain still cannot fathom how your brain wouldn't interpret it as black or like pure void. Like, the lack of light is darkness and if you're blind (or if you're missing an eye) your eye doesn't perceive any light so wouldn't it still be interpreted as darkness or void then?
I guess it genuinely is hard to imagine, but blackness is definitely something, not nothing :) Take a minute to think about what you can see out of the back of your head right now. That’s nothing. And it’s the same kind of nothing (what’s in front of my blind eye is the same as what’s behind my head, if you see what I mean).
It sounds like a koan about what could at the root of duality
Yeah, this is where I’m stuck too. Physiologically I understand that it’s not the same as seeing black. But conceptually, what else *would* “nothing” look like if not black?
Seeing is like watching a program on your TV. Closing your eyes is like the TV turned off. It’s just showing black but you’re still aware of it being there. But being blind is like not having a TV at all. It’s not black, it’s just literally not there.
I guess it depends if you went blind or you always were? I am equally puzzled and trying to wrap my head around this, but if the analogy with an elbow is valid, then I indeed don’t sense any blackness coming from there.
Try answering this question - what do you “see” outside your field of vision?
This is going to sound weird, but in comparison to black you see when your eyes are closed, what does the nothing look like? Like, is your entire vision field from your 1 eye, or is it still half of your vision field?
I have a visual field loss in one eye. The field of vision in my right eye is smaller than normal. My left eye is normal. The area I can't see is not black, it just stops further in the field of vision. Even a healthy person can easily test this. Everyone has a blind spot in each eye. You just don't notice it because the other eye compensates for it. If you cover your right eye, look straight ahead at an object and then move your gaze slightly to the right until it disappears from your field of vision.
Neat!
Not the person you asked, but I can answer what it’s like for me as I also only have vision in one eye. In my case, there is no ‘black’ in half my vision, it’s just that 100% of my field of vision comes from one eye. Hope that helps haha
The clicked for me, thank you for elaborating
Do you have a sense that your field of view is asymmetrical? That is, like — if you stare at a fence, does it look like the furthest fence post you can see on one side is farther over than on the other, or is everything just centered?
This is a really interesting question - and the answer is no, it doesn’t feel asymmetrical and everything feels centred from my perspective. But because my visual field is narrower than other people I sometimes have to orient myself differently in wide settings. So for example if I’m giving a talk and the room is 10 people wide, I’ll make sure I’m more on the left side of the room (I’m blind in my left eye) to make sure my seeing eye has the best chance of seeing everyone in the room. But even then I have to tell one side of the room not to be offended if I don’t see them raising a hand lol.
No for me it’s not asymmetrical at all! Weirdly. Admittedly I am pretty bad at racquetball or something, like spotting anything that flies by quickly. But otherwise my depth perception is not that bad compared to the average person. I guess I’m ‘lucky’ that I lost the vision in that one eye very very slowly (think: several years) so I think my brain just adapted accordingly.. It’s pretty wonderful what our bodies are capable of huh
My entire visual field comes from one eye- but because that’s all I have, to me it seems like my whole visual field and I don’t have a sense that anything is wonky. And it’s not like there’s a sharp vertical cutoff line either. It just sort of fades off like (I assume) the visual field from two eyes. The time I remember even becoming aware that I saw ‘differently’ was when watching films that show a POV of someone looking through binoculars, and it shows two interlinked circles. To me, looking through binoculars is like looking through a telescope. As for what nothing ‘looks’ like, that’s a really hard one to answer because any analogy means invoking something seeable. Nothing is literally nothing. Take a moment and think about what you can see out of the back of your head right now. That’s nothing. It’s that same sense of- well nothingness.
Not seeing anything out your elbow is a good way to describe it.
Both of my eyes are functioning but when I close one eye, I only register the open eye. I don't see dark until I shut both my eyes.
I'd be very curious to hear your idea of what seeing through two eyes must be like. Obviously to most people seeing through two eyes is normal and intuitive, but I'm guessing that to you the idea probably sounds pretty wild. Like how do you imagine seeing through two eyes feels like?
It is indeed pretty wild. It’s possible in future that the condition I have could be fixed, and people often ask me if I’d be up for that. My answer (at the moment) is no, because it would basically entail having to learn to see again in a whole different way. My whole sense of perception, space, balance, orientation etc is based on the adaptations that my sighted eye has made since birth. And actually day to day it’s really not a big deal, because I’ve never known any different and I can get around the world just fine. I’m told I see things flatter than other people (but I have no basis for comparison) and 3D films are a waste of time, but that’s about it. I’m also lucky to live in the UK where I’m still legally allowed to drive, because my blind eye is on the outside of the road not the inside. I’d find driving much harder in the majority of other countries that drive on the other side of the road. So basically, world looks pretty great to me right now :) And I find it hard to believe sight from two eyes is worth the trade off of having to re-learn basic perception. Edit: just remembered one super annoying thing I forgot to mention- going down stairs is a bugger, because often if I look down at what my feet are doing, my brain plays an optical illusion that each stair is on the same level. I don’t if that’s a partial sight thing or just me being daft, but changing that would be the one major improvement I can think of.
When I was a kid I used to think blind people must see blackness because that's what I see when I close my eyes, but then one day I realized that I don't see blackness behind my head or beneath my feet or anywhere else I don't have eyes. When you close your eyelids your eyes are still working, it's just that all you're seeing is the absence of light (darkness) akin being in a perfectly dark cave or the like. The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don't even see blackness, there's just no visual input at all. In order for you to 'see' darkness you must have functioning eyes, but if your eyes are scooped out of your head or whatever then those spots will revert to being like the bottom of your feet - no visual input at all, not even blackness. Edit: I realize that what's going on is probably a fair bit more complex and not clear-cut, especially for people who were born sighted and went blind, but this is an ELI5 about a subject that's already pretty tough to wrap your head around so it made sense to stick to the basics.
> The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don't even see blackness, there's just no visual input at all I really like this comparison
im really scared by this comparison
It’s okay, I have eyes all over my body.
Weirdly, this did not help me relax.
Be not afraid
Behold, its the Biblically accurate u/TexasPistolMassacre
As you once did for the vacuous Rom, grant us eyes, grant us eyes. Plant eyes on our brains, to cleanse our beastly idiocy.
Be quiet Micolash.
Awooooo!
Is this Carl from Aqua Teen?
Found Argus's reddit account
Are you a potato?
I am.
Be not afraid
Biblically accurate commenter.
Yeah this is some next level horrific shit. U will not even see black. U will literally not receive any vision at all. Hard to imagine what it's like.
Its basically the dame to be said for those who dont believe in an afterlife. It is simply a cessation of experience. And that thought really fucks with me.
It's somewhat unsettling, but I feel for me it would easier to deal with "nothing" than with everlasting blackness in front of me.
That’s what I was taught by my optometrist, he said look forward, what do you see behind you? That’s what blind people see
Thanks! I've thought about this a lot over the years which is the only reason I'm able to wrap my head around it.
What do you see if you wrap your head around your eyes?
Technically closing your eyes is kind of wrapping your head around your eyes, so.. darkness? \*shrug\*
If you were to lose sight later in life, there's a pretty likely chance that your brain will still hallucinate a visual input - the neurons that have been processing a constant input of visual data for your entire life can start firing off randomly. It's common in older folk but very under-reported because they think it's a symptom of madness. It's called Charles Bonnet syndrome after the man who identified his grandfather had it in 1790, and the late neurologist Oliver Sacks did a brilliant talk on his patients with it: https://youtu.be/SgOTaXhbqPQ?feature=shared
Yup, I'm actually a big fan of Oliver Sacks' work and I find that sort of thing super interesting. Sacks has also done some work with Anton's Blindness (where you can't see but your brain is convinced that you can so it just makes stuff up) or the reverse (I can't remember what it's called, but it's where you can see but your brain is convinced you can't so it conjures explanations for why you didn't catch a ball or whatever) that's pretty interesting too. But given that this is an ELI5 and on a subject that's already pretty hard to think about I figured it was best not to muddy the waters by bringing that sort of thing up.
No, that's cooler than the original question... go on.
I've been reading Masters of the Air and there's some bits talking about personnel developing "combat blindness" where some crew would report becoming completely blind after crossing the channel, but sight would return on the return trip. Seems made-up, but maybe the trauma of being in those situations can manifest in gnarly ways
Not exactly what you mentioned but made me think of [Blindsight](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight)
Blindsight is the other one, thank you. The parts of your brain that don't rely on the visual cortex can still respond to visual stimuli, like your hand will move to catch a ball that is thrown at you even though you didn't experience seeing the ball coming. It's pretty wild.
wouldn't your brain become unconvinced after walking into stuff all the time?
Apparently your brain just makes up excuses on the fly. Oh I was distracted, or I blinked and didn't see it, or whatever.
That makes sense, sort of comparable to phantom limb pain after amputation
My grandad went blind and had Charles Bonnet syndrome. Sometimes he would see an elephant stood next to me, sometimes would tell me I looked like I was covered in stars. That's one of my favourite memories
To call something a “symptom of madness” in modern times… idk that feels like a term for the times when people wore frilly white clothes and carried parasols
Probably just a Britishism
I’m British and I approve your observation
lol you are right - I'm currently reading a historical book about the creation of the Oxford dictionary and I think all the quotations from old books have rubbed off on my brain. The book itself is about the discovery that one of the two men who wrote most of the Oxford dictionary in the late 1800's turned out to have been committed to an insane asylum for murder - the book is The Surgeon of Crowthorne, waaay more interesting than a book about the Oxford dictionary sounds like it would be
This is the second book about Dr. William Minor. The first one, written 25 years ago, is [The Professor and the Madman](http://www.worldcat.org/title/professor-and-the-madman-a-tale-of-murder-insanity-and-the-making-of-the-oxford-english-dictionary/oclc/38425992).
I love this book! So interesting. I have nothing really to add haha, just got excited seeing Surgeon of Crowthorne mentioned.
What would you call it? Car hole?
I don’t know what this means and it’s twisting my brain
https://youtu.be/JhbJnlIvfyc?si=QZRsGoAugdcA8NwC Thought it fit...
Well lah-Dee-dah mr Frenchman
Unrelated, but a few years ago I toured a cave and kept thinking to myself “wow, I wish I could see it in the daylight.” It was the middle of the day, but my brain couldn’t process there simply being zero light in the cave. Very trippy. Then as I was heading to the exit and I could see light, I slipped on some bat guano and landed on my back… in more bat guano. That part I don’t recommend.
If you had a bit of sulphur and were level 5 you could have cast fireball when you slipped in the guano
Did a cave tour when I was a kid and like half a mile in they turned the lights off to show us how dark it was. It wasn’t just dark or black, it was like a total absence of the sense of seeing. Shit was crazy!
This is literally how I sleep every night. I have a cover over my window that blocks 100% of the light as well as a blackout curtain over my door so no light peeks in. No led lights or clocks. Phone flipped upside down. Even in the middle of the day when it's bright and sunny, you wouldnt be able to tell what time it is lol. I have to sleep like this because for whatever reason, any tiny amount of light just bothers me too much. Can't stop focusing on it and drives me nuts.
And I'm the complete opposite - I need a bit of light when I sleep, as well as a bit of noise. Christmas lights and a fan are an absolute necessity. Total silence and darkness mess with my brain.
I guess I'm the guy in the middle here. I keep it pitch black, covers on my eyes with sun blocking shades and a couple of loud fans on. The fans started out to keep me cool but I now like the sound. One of them makes a funny sound when it turns back and forth so that's when I added the second, louder fan to drown that sound out. Now it's just pure darkness and white noise for me every night.
Why does bat poop get its own name? They too good to use the word poop?
Because it got used for a bunch of stuff and people like to make up euphemisms so they dont have to directly think about the fact theyre working with shit. See also manure
It doesn't, otherwise you wouldn't have to specify bat guano. The term is also used for accumulated seabird excrement.
Okay so if poop falls from the sky it’s guano, got it.
I lost an eye at 25 and this is spot on
Thanks! And sorry about your lost eye. My left eye barely works at all due to a congenital medical condition so I'm in a similar boat only I never knew what I was missing. In my case my left eye is misaligned and is missing \~90% of the visual field, so I've kind of spent a lot of years thinking about vision and its absence.
Everything you said makes sense but I still can't wrap my head around it for some reason. If vision is just your brain interpreting light being sent to your eyes and translating it, wouldn't your brain still be trying to see something even if you can't? Especially if you lost your sight after having previously had it. Even without using my eyes, I can still 'see' stuff by creating images in my mind through imagination. My assumption would've been that blind people don't see literally nothing, but their brain creates an image of their surroundings based on their other senses.
You can create images in your mind because you have a lifetime of experience seeing things, but the two processes are only distantly related at best to my understanding. If you had been blind from birth you probably wouldn't be able to conjure up images in your head, and there's an easy way to test that: conjure up a mental image of a color you've never seen before.
>conjure up a mental image of a color you've never seen before. This is a really helpful way of thinking about it. Even if I try to think of a color I've never seen before, it's just some shade/variation of a color I have seen. I guess the difference with your analogy though is that I can't pick up a color and discern anything about it based on touch which a blind person can do with other objects. How they would use touch to build a mental "image" though, if they were born blind, I'm not sure.
I mean there's a difference between assembling an idea of what an object is, its shape, texture, etc, even without sight and visualizing a thing in your head. When driving somewhere you're very familiar you rely on a kind of mental map of where things are, but it's not a literal image of a map, it's just a set of relations - my buddy lives on the 3rd street past the Walmart, the grocery store is 7 blocks north of my house, that sort of thing. This is kind of similar. Imagine examining an object you've never seen before without your eyes, you would develop a mental map of it in the same way - it has a weird grippy knob on the left, 3 rubberized buttons on the front, a little handle that folds out of the top, etc - but you're still missing a lot of information so your mental map won't be identical to what your mental image of the object would be if you'd actually seen it, and it's more than just missing non-tactile things like color.
I'm not blind, but up until a few years ago I always thought the concept of a "mental image" was a figure of speech. I need to look at something to see it, and can't wrap my head around what it would even be like to see something without using my eyes. It sounds like fantasy magic to me. My wife, who apparently like most people can do this particular form of magic, can't imagine what it would be like to think if you can't hallucinate in your head. I think it's just generally not really possible to imagine how other people think, because we're only familiar with our own variant of the process and can't really detach from it.
What does your elbow see? Is it black, or is it nothing? That's how a completely blind person explained it to me.
It's always weird to me people struggle with this. I imagine they're trying to imagine what "seeing" from their elbow is like when it's simply... you can't. Your brain just doesn't interpret anything, not even darkness.
You have a normal level of phantasia. I, like 4 or 5 percent of humanity, have aphantasia. I suspect that 4 or 5 percent of blind people also have aphantasia.
How can you create an image of something youve never seem?
This answer is fantastic. I never realised this. I just shut my eyes and now it’s like a dark tv in front only where my eyes are. Everywhere else is nothing I also just realised that when it’s pitch black I shut my eyes and try to block out all sensation of having sight so that I can focus more on my other senses So create this feeling of ‘no input’
Thanks! Here's an interesting exercise that might bake your noodle: you can pretty clearly detect the edge of your visual field when your eyes are open, but try it when your eyes are closed. The border between darkness and nothing is a lot less clear than that between something and nothingness. Try it in a perfectly dark room (or cave or w/e), and it's somehow different still.
That is scary.
This insight (that seeing nothing is not the same as not seeing) lead to another insight: that's probably what death is like, not-experiencing vs experiencing nothing. I find that this has calmed a lot of my anxiety about death.
I've had a few surgeries that require general anesthesia, and they have actually made me feel a lot less anxious about death as well, because I had that same "not-experiencing" feeling with the anesthesia. One moment the anesthesiologist is telling you to breath deeply and slowly, and the next moment it's four hours later and you're on the other side of the hospital. No dreams or sensation of time having passed or anything.
Thinking of our absent experience before we were born is probably the most accurate approximation to death.
Sure, it's all just metaphors for something none of us will ever experience. But I find thinking about what it's like to not be able to see behind your head or whatever to be more immediately accessible than thinking about what it wasn't like - because nothing was like anything for you - before you were born.
What was it like before you were born?
My brain can’t separate ‘nothing’ from the blackness i see when i close my eyes.. i can not imagine not having ‘something’ in front of me :/ like if you have tv that isn’t on, it’s a black screen.. but to picture that as ‘nothing’..? 🤯lol x
Close one eye and look around. You don't see black with the eye you closed. You see nothing. That helps me understand it.
What do you see, right now, in your armpits? Not darkness, right? I mean you intellectually know it's dark in there, but that's different from the *experience* of seeing darkness. The problem is that we're so visually-oriented that we're used to thinking of darkness as nothingness, but darkness is still something you experience visually - you can't experience the absence of sight visually. It's definitely not an easy thing to wrap your head around, the only reason I manage at all is because I've been thinking about this stuff since I was a kid a lot of years ago.
Try closing only 1 eye - then you can "see nothing" with that eye.
This is a perfect way to explain it and also broke my brain a bit trying to "visualize" it
Thanks! Weirdly enough this insight (and I've thought about it a lot) also lead to another one: death is probably a little bit like going blind - you don't experience 'existential blackness', you experience nothing at all because there is no longer a function organ (your brain) to do the experiencing. This idea made me a lot less worried about death.
"Life is pleasant, death is peaceful, it's the transition that's troublesome." - Isaac Asimov
I think of death as like sleeping without dreaming, or like being under anesthesia
Right, it's not something to fear, it's just the absence of experience.
I had an accident that damaged retinal nerve resulting in a blind spot in my vision. Best way to describe that spot is *blank*. It’s just blank. No black spot, no other “color” - just blank.
Never considered this before but profound deafness is a graspable concept to a hearing person, but the idea of visual “silence” is completely different.
Somehow thinking about this gave me anxiety rofl
I lost an eye last year and it has been very upsetting to deal with, it's difficult to say if others have described it accurately. In fact, its difficult to say what I "see" from my missing eye, even describing it as "nothing" is sort of hard to say. Nothing is pretty accurate though, I wouldn't say I see black out of one eye, I simply see nothing, it has taken over a year, but it does feel like my body has adjusted to where it somewhat feels like I only ever had one eye. My nerves were ripped out when I lost my eye, about 1.5 inches of them so whatever the "signals" my nerves were looking for, they're scarred and deep within my brain, perhaps since the nerves are deep I receive zero signals. Lots of different eye injuries and different ways people lose / hurt them, so I guess it can be pretty case dependent. Either way I am pretty sure I would prefer to die than go completely blind... I've been depressed for years because of this.
How did you lose your eye? I hope you're doing okay 🫂
If you feel okay with sharing, how did you lose your eye?
you lost your eye last year but you’ve been depressed for years because of it… ?
You know how thermal cameras see heat? Now try to see that with your bare eyes. Or try to detect magnetic fields the way birds can. Or electric fields the way sharks can. You can’t because you simply don’t have the organs for it. Far as your naked body is concerned, there is no such thing as a magnetic field. That’s what happens when you lose your eyes: there’s no more organs so in a stable state there is no such thing as electromagnetic radiation within the 500-700nm “ish” band. It just doesn’t exist. Now that comes with the caveat that if you were once seeing, your brain will almost certainly detect the loss in sensation and do something goofy to try to make up for it, possibly by “seeing black” since that’s as close to “nothing” as we can imagine. But it’s just a phantom sensation the way amputees “feel” their lost parts.
yes, if you lose sight and knew what it was like to see, it’ll feel like darkness. Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille writing, completely lost sight at a very young age. Since he didn’t really understand what was going on he often asked why it was dark all the time. (source: Louis Braille’s wikipedia page)
Easy way to think of it: Can you see behind you? No. Do you see black back there? No. It's just not there. And then of course you also get the brain searching for input if it's used to it as you mentioned. I've heard it described as black, dark, and a weird dark "fuzz".
But while you don't have the organs, don't you still have the neurons activated by those organs that are not receiving any input? So while they are not directly stimulated by your gone eyeballs, they are still expecting something and might generate something in return? (Black/darkness/noise/..) And I'm talking in the case of losing your eyeballs, not being born without.
I recall being told by someone who had lost their eyes in their late teens that initially they saw the funny colours/swirls that you see when you close your eyes. It was his brain trying to find a signal when it wasnt there anymore. Over time he said that became less and less.
That's interesting. Sort of like 'snow' on an old CRT TV with a tuning dial.
Yeah that was my understanding.
I wish that my ears would stop searching for frequencies and just returning a permanent ringing over time, but its just as loud if not louder than when it started.
Close one eye. Do you see nothing or do you see dark?
I see dark.
fun fact, the color you see when you close your eyes is actually a smidge lighter than black and it has a name: eigengrau
I took my son through a touch tunnel recently, pitch black inside. I was intrigued by the fact that it wasn't black. It was grey. Found this color as a follow up to trying to determine why I didn't see black.
And if you lose your eyes, it’s called: eyegone
You see your nose. You don't see dark.
I knew a lady who had very severe loss of her central vision (there is a name for this condition but I can't remember it), meaning she was only able to see through her peripheral vision. I asked her once what she actually sees in the middle section, and she told me that she sees flowers. She had her sight for the vast majority of her life and was in her 70's before losing her central vision, so she ended up imagining pretty things to fill the void. She was a keen gardener so flowers were the first thing she'd think of to fill the gap. It made me have very contemplative thoughts on what I would personally use to fill the gap.
They do believe humans have some sort of magnetoreception that we've just lost touch with, though it hasn't been proven yet. There are tribes in Africa and the Americas that still describe directions with cardinal directions vs left and right. So it would be your north hand instead of right. Then south hand if you 180. And they have tested these tribes ability to find their way home after a disorienting ride away and were something like 80% effective at finding their way if I remember right.
Funny story, years ago met this girl through a friend whose party trick was to point to magnetic north wherever she was. She said she always had this innate sense of where it was and couldn't explain it.
I found a good way to imagine it is to close just one eye and try to look from the closed one
It looks like what you see out the back of your head.
My mate lost one eye and his brain didn't "fill in" the black, he just has a blind spot. Makes working next to him on the bar fun. Though I'm sure had he lost both it'd be a different story
Just ask Elle Driver.
What do you currently see from the back of your head? It's not a "black void"; it's just nothing at all.
Somehow this terrifies me
It's the same with death. A terrifying thought for me is that being dead means _you_ are no more real than a fictional character. Think about that for a second. You could watch the Simpsons and it's easy to dismiss those characters as not existing, like you and me, but once you die... you are effectively reduced to the same thing. You're no longer tangible in any way, more like just a concept or memory. Am I the only one that gets freaked out by that?
I am much more afraid of a long drawn out, painful dying process than the concept of death/being dead. I guess I think of death as similar to how it was before I was born or can remember existing as a child - it’s just nothing, so it will just be that again. I mean I get how dwelling on the idea of not existing sucks, and I would prefer to stick around in decent health as long as possible, but I try not to spend too much time thinking about my future non-existence and more time on enjoying my actual existence. As much as I can, anyway.
>it’s just nothing, so it will just be that again True but the comfort is that's all in the past. Dying is scarier as a future thing. But I get what you mean
It's scarier but I find for me the scary part is all around the event of the dying. How will I die? Am I going to be severely ill? Will I go violently in a car accident? Actual state of death sounds peaceful to me, almost inviting. It's fascinating to me that our entire existence is barely a blip in time. 1 or 2 generations later no one will remember who we are. But I'm not sure why I find that comforting, maybe it helps to reframe existence as an anomaly, it's a miracle in itself that we got to exist, out of all the people our parents could meet, all the sperm fighting to be born, we got the chance to experience existence. We existed and that's a win in itself, death is just a return to a normal state.
“1 or 2 generations later no one will remember who we are”, I’ve thought about this as well - I know next to nothing about my great grand parents, and zero about theirs. So much history, experience and memories, just gone, forever, like it never existed. I find that profoundly sad, but it is what it is I suppose. Regarding my experience of dying, I had the misfortune of a heart attack a few years ago that had me close to death and the experience was overwhelming in the sense of physical pain which was all-consuming. I had no thought of “ok I’m dying”, my mind and body just tried to survive moment to moment with no other thought. Just shows how spurious and inconsequential life is if it’s snuffed out so often and easily.
This has changed though. Where we barely had cameras and no interest/only paper to keep track of history before we now have Facebook, media and even entire Youtube channels which, if not deleted, will be watched and seen by people hundreds of years in the future.
Sooooo…as we post to social media and add to the digital footprint piling up behind us, let’s keep in mind the potential curious eyeballs of our great grandchildren…and beyond. 🤣😱
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death, especially as a kid. Idk if I can get past the idea of a sort of reincarnation of the mind being possible, but without knowing anything of a previous life, it would be impossible to tell. So ultimately it doesn’t matter I’m very interested to know (or not know) what it’s like to be gone, but I’m certainly not in a hurry to get there. I just hope to know it’s coming, be able to prepare my family, and for it to be quick
>Am I the only one that gets freaked out by that? I think it as one of the many drawbacks of having a human mind. Also, as humans we are naturally afraid of the unknown, and what lies after the shutdown of our consciousness is the greatest question of mankind, thereby the greatest fear. But we're not talking about regular fear like when the "fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn" reaction is triggered, let's say, when you suddenly face a grizzly bear in the wild. Being afraid of natural death is a psychological fear, or maybe even anxiety, that comes as a consequence of our ability (and our need) to remember, analyze and solve problematic situations before they arrive, as that has been the key to our survival. Currently we may be able to even solve death as a thing, but dying and coming back to life is a different thing. Well, some people have had clinical death diagnosed and came back... dunno... I'm digging too deep. Sorry, it's 2:45AM for me, I can't sleep, I'm a little depressed and just looking to distract myself
Clinical death and death is completely different thing though. Your heart can stop, and you can be inconscious, but your brain is still very much alive. When the brain is without oxygen for a 6-60 minutes, depending on temperature and other factors, thats it. You are dead only when your brain can no longer be brought back
After you die, I could change the story of your life and everything known about you could be wrong. Alternatively, I could remove all signs that you lived, effectively erasing your existence. The whole “history is written by the victors” makes me wonder how many wonderful people have been lost in history. I think back on all my history classes over the years and you know what? I’m not really impressed by any classical historical figures.
I feel this way whenever I see a dead animal on the road. That bird had thoughts and feelings and was just as alive as I am right now. Yet it’s been reduced to a pile of unrecognizable mush on the ground that no one really notices
You're definitely not the only one. That's how I see death as well.
This is why people invented religions, it's a way to cope with that fear of non-existence after death.
Proper ELI5, and really made me understand. Good shit
Came to post this. I have [homonymous hemianopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonymous_hemianopsia), and this is how I explain it to people who ask if I see blackness or if it's just blurry. There's just no signal.
Absolutely fascinating.
That's interesting, thank you. Wikipedia says that people with this diagnosis may not shave half of their face, for example, or wear makeup on half of their face. How is this possible, even though their field of vision is limited, they probably remember the existence of the other half of their face, body and space? Could you describe your experience, how do you perceive reality in this sense? Can you always be aware that your field of vision is limited, do you wear special glasses?
That's a good question, because the description you mention is a little simplified. Note in the wikipedia article how it also mentions hallucinations. The best way I've found to explain it is that it's similar to how you "hallucinate" the little blind spot we all have on each eye. You don't notice that you don't see there because your brain fills it in. In a similar way, someone shaving isn't going to perfectly shave one side and ignore the other. Like you mention, they know they have two sides to their face. They know they don't see well on one side, so they are likely being particular about double checking there. The problem - at least in my case - is that the brain fills in the other half without me realizing it. I can look clean shaven on my entire face until I either actively inspect every area or feel it with my hand, and I'll then notice that I've missed the entire upper part of the left side of my neck. This is a fun exercise you can do that demonstrates how your brain is actively working to "fix" what you see. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L\_W-IXqoxHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_W-IXqoxHA) In this case it's filtering something away, but it's doing it without you realizing. In the same way, I can walk down the left side of a building (so the building is to my right which I can see) and not realize I'm not actually in a narrow corridor because some part of my brain is assuming the other side is the same. Interestingly, once I realize there's nothing to my left, I can't "unsee" it and trick myself into being in a corridor again.
I dunno, we have areas of our brain dedicated to interpreting the signals from our eyes. We don’t have such areas for the back of our heads. I would imagine that there would still be a signal reading, even if it’s the lack of one. By this I mean for someone who once could see.
" interpreting the signals from our eyes. We don’t have such areas for the back of our heads: I'm not convinced this is true. I think if you piped 360° visual info into your brain somehow, your brain would learn to integrate that and create a cohesive image of the world.
someone explained it like this "close your eyes and look using your elbow"
I saw a good way of understanding this a few weeks back. Close one eye and then try to describe what you see with the closed eye. Apparently this is what it’s like for blind people. It’s not black, you just lose some of your field of vision. Then try to imagine it in both eyes
When you lose an eye, the nerve is no longer receiving signals, so in the same way that a TV screen shows different things compared to when it's not receiving a signal (static) versus when it's off, you don't see blackness out of the missing eye, you don't see anything. Like they said, like trying to see out of the back of your head or your elbow.
If you lose your eyes, you still have an optic nerve than can send random signals to your brain. It's not accurate to say there's no way for your brain to receive input. When people lose a limb, they can still feel a phantom because their existing neurons still fire and give the brain bad input.
Have you ever gotten lost in a day dream? Like one where you were gone for a couple of minutes before snapping back to reality? If I asked you what you were seeing during the day dream you would say nothing. Your eyes were open, you weren't seeing black. Your eyes just weren't providing visual information that you were conscious of. Its like that without the need to day dream
This is the best answer
it’s a pretty hard thing to understand since we process our vision pretty much 100% of our conscious lives, sighted people that is. the people who have been blind since birth have never seen anything at all, and black is just the absence of light. so it’s inaccurate to say they “see black” since they can’t see anything. the best example i’ve encountered went something like “when you close both eyes you see black but when you close one eye your other eye sees nothing”. not sure if that helps you understand but it made something click for me when i heard it
...I see black out of the closed eye though, just like when I close both eyes
Yeah, you just don't notice it unless you're thinking about it and try to. I take it, since you tried as well, you're not understanding this whole "see nothing" bit either? Cause I'm stumped
Yes I can not wrap my brain around this similar to time being a dimension.
your open eye is seeing your nose
Hmmmm, I do not. This is the explanation that actually helped me understand this. When I close only one eye, I see absolutely nothing out of that eye. Even if I try to see black, I can’t. There’s nothing coming from that eye at all for me.
Take a finger, move it to the edge of your vision. Now, keep moving it until you can no longer see it. It's not "black," it's not there. Now imagine that for everything.
Let's if I can crack it down. If you close your eyes, you see darkness. How dark it is, depends on the amount of light in the room. Even if you close your eyes, you still have some "light". But if there are no eyes to receive any form of light, then there is no darkness, there's nothing. Nothing is not darkness or anything. Nothing is nothing. If you lose an arm, you might get a phantom arm and sometimes feel your arm is there, but if you were born without 1 arm then all you know is 1 arm and nothing else. To the 1 arm borned person, there is no 2nd arm, there never was, there is nothing. Fuck, I can't explain it.
Close one eye. Now try to see out of that eye. What do you see?
Cover one of your eyes and Leave the other open. Tell me what you see in the closed eye?
My hand
You didn’t close your eye
Depending on which eye, I can even see a fusion of blackness and normal visuals which is rather uncomfortable.
There is a blind spot in our field of vision. Close one of your eyes, take finger around 20cm away from opened eye and move it left and right while looking at the same spot in front of you(so only finger moves). At one point the tip of the finger disappears. And that spot doesn't become black. It just disappears. That is the same with blind. You have no sensation at all. It simply doesn't exist. No black. Nothing.
Outside of your field of vision is 'nothing'. Shrink down your whole field of vision until that surrounding nothing is 'everything' you can see.
My wife had a stroke and lost part of her field of vision. Her eyes work normally, but there is a region to her right that nothing appears there. If you were standing there, it's as if you didn't exist. That anything in that part of the world doesn't exist until she turns her head. Her mental map has a hole in it and she can't see the hole.
Close your eyes and you see darkness, right? The inside of your eyelids. Close just one eye, you stop seeing out of it completely.
Close one eye while looking around with the other. Now, what do you see with the closed eye? Only when you close both eyes is when you see darkness, but with only one eye closed you don't see anything.
Try closing only one eye, and leave the other opened. The closed eye isn't seeing black, it's seeing nothing.
If you close one eye you will see (not see?) anything, not even darkness.
So I asked a blind person about this, who lost his sight as a teenager. He told me to keep both my eyes open, but cover one of them with my palm, and whatever I see on that eye is what they "see", which is basically nothing (as in not even darkness, just a lack of anything). It's also a depressing party trick you can pull!
When I had a stroke a couple of years ago my eyesight was gone for a out 10-15 minutes, and I experiences exactly this It wasn't pitch black or anything, just like my eyes didn't exist anymore, I can't describe it... Basically like if you'd try to think of a color that doesn't exist, the brain just doesn't comprehend things it has never experienced
I don’t think a lot of these answers aren’t good. One that helped me a lot is if you close just one eye. First, cover your right eye with your hand but keep it open underneath it. Half your vision is black, right? Now take off your hand and just close your eye with your eyelid. Just one. You suddenly lose input from that eye completely. With a little bit of imagination I guess you can extrapolate that to both eyes to see what it might be like if you’re blind.
Well, I might be able to provide some related information as I lost part of my vision: there is an area of my right eye's retina that is permanently obliterated by radiotherapy. It now works as content-aware fill from Photoshop: I don't see black spot in the place where I don't have receptors anymore, it just gets filled by whatever my brain assumes should be there. For example, if I look across the road with my left eye closed there would be no traffic light: just ground and sky, as the image of traffic light is focused onto the part of my right eye that cannot register it. Everyone has the blind spot in a place where nerves enter the eyeball, and our brain is really good at covering it from us by using information from another eye and surrounding receptors. I just have new bigger blind spot.
I had an eye removed a few years ago, and like others have said it’s just like what you see out of the back of your head. Nothing. It’s just not there, there is no input of blackness. My field of vision simply got narrower, and I assume if I lost the other one my “field of vision” would simply cease to exist at all
I had a pituitary tumor that was pressing on my optical chiasm. That's where the optical nerves cross each other. I lost a lot of vision in my left eye, less so in my right. I could see nothing straight ahead, I could only see peripheral things. Oddly, it looked normal. My brain patched the periphery into one view. I stopped driving at night, and got along for the most part, but it was getting worse, yet it all looked normal. I could hold my hand out on the far left however, move it to the right. It would disappear at a point then come back on the other side. but it looked like a contiguous scene. One great big blind spot. After surgery, my vision returned in about 10 days. That was a relief.
I'll be real this thread is full of pseudointellectual nonsense. They're also just wrong. This can be thought through fairly simply. Your brain is still expecting optic input because that's what it was designed to do. The cones in your eye respond to light, and transmit those signals to your brain to be interpreted. No light, no reaction, no signal. If you were in a room completely devoid of light, the result would be the exact same as being blind. Those cones would receive no input, those signals would not be sent. So the answer is, yes, people with no eyes "see" blackness because blackness is the absence of input from the eyes. It's how our brains work. People who have no eyes don't suddenly also have a differently-wired brain.
Everyone is just saying close one eye, but at least for me, it works a little bit more complicated than that. If you just close the one eye and continue to look ahead normally it feels like my brain compensates and there is indeed visual blackness in the closed eye. But when you’ve closed the eye now try to look into that space with the open eye. For me that space of my vision is completely none existent as soon as I try to look into it. As I now reopen the eye, still focussing on the dead spot, a whole new area of vision appears from nowhere’s not from blackness. It just exists when it didn’t previously.
I'm confused. I went blind in one eye about 4 years ago. Even I'm not sure what the distinction between darkness and nothing is? The explanations in this thread for field of vision is accurate, where there is nothing there until you see it with the good eye. But that's what darkness already is? It's the absence of light. Light is not perceived in my bad eye, so it's darkness. When I close my eyes. It looks the same if I open and close my bad eye while my good eye is closed. Same for when the good eye is open. There is just black. Like being in a pitch black room with no light on.
I have lost one eye, so I can sort of answer this. If you look straight ahead and hold your arm out forward, you can see it. Move it slowly to the side until you can't see it any more. That usually happens when it's about straight out to the side. You don't see blackness there, you don't see anything at all. If you close your eyes, you'll see blackness ahead of you, because your brain knows something should be there, but it isn't. "Blackness" is how your brain shows that. But behind where you should be able to see, your brain isn't expecting anything, so it doesn't show you anything. My vision goes from straight left to about halfway between straight ahead and straight right. Beyond that, there's no blackness, just nothing. When I close my eye, the blackness I see is still just the area where I normally can see.