Researchers have studied vision more thoroughly than the other senses. Because people need sight to perform most daily activities, the sense of sight has evolved to be highly sophisticated. Vision, however, would not exist without the presence of light.
Light is electromagnetic radiation that travels in the form of waves. Light is emitted from the sun, stars, fire, crystals and light bulbs. Most other objects just reflect light.
People experience light as having three features: colour, brightness, and saturation. These three types of experiences come from three corresponding characteristics of light waves:
•The colour or hue of light depends on its wavelength, the distance between the peaks of its waves.
•The brightness of light is related to intensity or the amount of light an object emits or reflects. Brightness depends on light wave amplitude, the height of light waves. Brightness is also somewhat influenced by wavelength. Yellow light tends to look brighter than reds or blues.
•Saturation or colourfulness depends on light complexity, the range of wavelengths in light. The colour of a single wavelength is pure spectral colour. Such lights are called fully saturated. Outside a laboratory, light is rarely pure or of a single wavelength. Light is usually a mixture of several different wavelengths. The greater number of spectral colours, in a light the lower the saturation. Light of mixed wavelengths looks duller or paler than pure light.
Wavelength ——> Colour
Amplitude ——> Brightness
Complexity ——> Saturation
Rainbows and Lights
White light: Completely unsaturated. It is a mixture of all wavelengths of light.
The visible spectrum: Includes the colours of the rainbow, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Ultraviolet light: The kind of light that causes sunburns. It has a wavelength somewhat shorter than the violet light at the end of the visible spectrum.
Infrared radiation: Has a wavelength somewhat longer than the red light at the other end of the visible spectrum.
Anatomical and physiological differences between the central and peripheral visual systems are well documented. Recent findings have suggested that vision in the periphery is not just a scaled version of foveal vision, but rather is relatively poor at representing spatial and temporal phase and other visual features. A motion stimulus (the “curveball illusion”) in which the shift from foveal to peripheral viewing results in a dramatic spatial/temporal discontinuity.
To elucidate how the differences between foveal and peripheral vision affect super-threshold vision, a series of complex visual displays that contain opposing sources of motion information can be used. Such as the peripheral escalator illusion, peripheral acceleration and deceleration illusions, rotating reversals illusion, and disappearing squares illusion) these create dramatically different perceptions when viewed foveally versus peripherally.
This leads us to hypothesize “feature blur” in the periphery (i.e., the peripheral visual system combines features that the foveal visual system can separate). Feature blur is of general importance because humans are frequently bringing the information in the periphery to the fovea and vice versa.
Peripheral vision, sometimes it is a very handy thing. We all have peripheral vision, but this type of vision is much cruder than the main type of vision that we use every day. Our peripheral vision also has a strange side to it.
I am talking about seeing things, as they say, out of the corner of your eye. That is an frequent term, but I think that it states the case quite eloquently. Some people have better peripheral vision than others. What I mean by that is that they have a larger field of view peripherally.
I suspect that most of us have seen something, using our peripheral vision, which has startled us, only to find out that there was nothing there. There are many cases on record where people have seen people and objects using this type of vision, only to find out that they weren't really there. Even spirits have been reported, that were seen "out of the corner of the eye". So what is going on here?
1. We were wrong.
2. There was something there, but it was not what we thought it was.
3. There was something there, but it disappeared before we could really get a good look at it.
4. There is another plane of existence that we can only get tiny glances of for very short periods of time, if conditions are perfect.
5. There are other beings among us that are hidden somehow, but can come into view for a split second if glanced correctly.
6. Ghosts, or spirits exist and can become visible under the right circumstances, when you use your peripheral vision.
7. Mental Illness.
Be honest with yourself, haven't you ever thought that you saw someone, only to turn around and there was no one there? I admit this has happened to me a few times in my life and to many other people that I know.
Does our peripheral vision have an unknown quality that our normal vision doesn't have? It doesn't seem so, but how do you test for unknown qualities? When you really don't know what you are looking for, it is very difficult to test for it.
Can we think that we see something this way and be wrong? Absolutely, things like lighting, and reflections can cause us to think we see any number of things. Then there is the way our vision fills in the missing gaps in what we see. We might see one thing and our brain fills in some pieces that are not there, making us think that we saw something else. To see this in action, just look at the full moon. The man in the moon, is our brain filling in the missing pieces?.
When we talk of something being there, but disappearing before we can get a normal look at it, it could be just as simple as being a mouse. If you were in a dark room and a mouse scampered across your peripheral field of view and you never got any other look at it, what would you think you saw? Who knows?
I am not saying that I do not believe in other planes of existence, but there are some that do not. For argument sake, lets say that they do exist. Could it be that our peripheral vision might be able to pick this up under certain limited circumstances? This is one of those questions that really can't be fully answered yet. Since we have more rods in our eyes than cones, this might contribute to us having some visual powers that we are not yet fully aware of.
Now then spirits or ghosts. I think that we have all heard the term, "I have seen something out of the corner of my eye" used more in this field than any other. There are many people that believe in ghosts, spirits, visions and such. Here is a thought for you, could a person want to see something so badly, that its image might form in his or her peripheral vision for a split second?
There are times when it is hard to tell if something was a true memory or a dream that we had. Why couldn't this also be true for things that we really don't get a good look at? The other option is that people actually see these things using their peripheral vision, because in some cases, their ordinary vision can't detect them for some reason.
Then there is mental illness. There is no denying that some poor souls do see things that are not there. The mental hospitals all have patients like this in them. I guess that I don't have to expound on this. There is one thing that I would like to mention here and that is if a person was really seeing something that others were not, they might be put into a mental hospital and we would never know.
Under certain circumstances, your peripheral vision can play tricks on you. One of the things that can happen is that it will make you think that something is moving when it is not.
There are a few illusions that demonstrate this, those with Epilepsy and other similar conditions may need to avoid some of these:
These are just fun to look at (although they can hurt your eyes after a while). Keep in mind that these are NOT animated. The movement that you see is simply your peripheral vision playing tricks on you.
Rotating snakes
Rollers
Vibrations and pinprick white lights
Spinning
There are practical uses for illusions like this. If it’s possible to create such an illusion with such a relatively simple picture, then what can be done when someone is actively trying to deceive, teach, or illustrate something much more important and compelling?
If a national flag were designed in such fashion, then it would quickly become the most fascinating flag on Earth.
What are you seeing here???
Levitation???
So believing what you see is not always the best policy, which you could just well be convincing yourself that something is real when it is not. Then there are the grand illusions that some are convinced we are being subjected to without our consent and knowledge….
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