I've drafted the eighth and final chapter of my book in progress (working title Perplexities of Consciousness). Chapters 4 and 7 are not yet in circulatable form. Like the other chapters, this chapter is written to be comprehensible in isolation. As usual, I welcome feedback, either by email or as comments on this post. Unlike the other seven chapters, this chapter is not based on a previously published article.
Here's an abstract:
This chapter raises a number of questions, not adequately addressed by any researcher to date, about what we see when our eyes are closed. In the historical literature, the question most frequently discussed was what we see when our eyes are closed in the dark (and so entirely or almost entirely deprived of light). In 1819, Purkinje, who was the first to write extensively about this, says he sees "wandering cloudy stripes" that shrink slowly toward the center of the field. Other later authors also say such stripes are commonly seen, but they differ about their characteristics. In 1897, for example, Scripture describes them as spreading violet rings. After Scripture, the cloudy stripes disappear from psychologists' reports. Other psychologists describe the darkened visual field as typically -- not just idiosyncratically, for themselves -- very nearly black (e.g., Fechner), mostly neutral gray (e.g., Hering), or bursting with color and shape (e.g., Ladd). I loaned beepers to five subjects and collected their reports about randomly sampled moments of experience with their eyes closed. Their reports were highly variable, and one subject denied ever having any visual experience at all (not even of blackness or grayness) in any of his samples. I also briefly discuss a few other issues: whether we can see through our eyelids, whether the closed-eye visual field is "cyclopean", whether the field is flat or has depth or distance, and whether we can control it directly by acts of will. The resolution of such questions, I suggest, will not be straightforward.
Thanks very much, by the way, to all the people who wrote about their eyes closed visual experience in response to my queries about it in earlier posts.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
When Your Eyes Are Closed, What Do You See?
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 1:37 PM
Labels: eyes closed, sense experience, stream of experience
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4 comments:
I decided to google 'seeing through closed eyelids' and was shocked when I saw how many different experiences were being had. There did however seem to be 1 trend, being that most people found they had this experience when in a particularly relaxed state and many when attempting astral projection. My experience is somewhat different to this, I remember as a young child being convinced that I could see the reflection of my pupil on my eyelid if i looked a certain way with my eyes closed and applied slight pressure to my eye with my fingertip and I have always seen black images like collidascope ink splodges with either a redish or yellowish background when my eyes are closed; recently however (the last year or so) I have been having trouble falling asleep, my doctor says it is due to the inordinate amount of stress in my life and the grief I am currently suffering; this may be the case and the fact that I suffer from temperal mandibular joint disfunction would certainly further suggest that I am far from a relaxed state when going to bed.
When I close my eyes in the dark I see absolutely no difference between having them open and closed to the extent that i press my eyelids with my fingers to check that they are actually closed. I had wondered if it was an extreme case of retention of vision, but frankly am confused by the whole thing, my doctor and family think it is in my imagination. I found your article interesting to say the least and am going to buy your book, so cheers for spreading some light on the subject and making me feel less wierd.
Thanks for the kind words, Fiona! As you say, I don't think you there's any need to be alarmed by your experience. Normal people report all sorts of different things!
Ok, I have wondered what other people see when it is dark and their eyes are closed for some time. It has always interested me ... wondering if anyone has written about this experience. I see a dark, almost black field with some gray or lighter than black area. I also see often what I distinguish as a black circle, void of anything but black.
It seems similar to what one other person posted. However, I can percieve some degree of depth as well as can definitly know that what I am focused on in the dark is viewed by one opf my eyes or the other. Usually, the images are from my dominate left eye. I can at will switch the view to my right eye. The very dark black images are basically the same.
In my mind I am pretty sure that what I am viewing is not my imagaination but is really caused by stimulus to my eye from its surface in the are of normal vision.
Likewise, if I look at the sky and attempt to focus not on any object, but adjust the focus to close, I see things floating on the eye surface, rods dots with a visable outline but transparent. Again, I was able to distinguish which eye was see the images and also percieve depth that I could adjust my focus to bring a fuzzy image at a diffent distance into focus. These images could be best described as what one would see through a microscope.
I did discuss this with my optician several years ago and he confirmed that what I described sound like I was viewing matter floating either on the surface or inside my eye.
I later had a similar experience where I would see black specks. They were explained to me by an eye doctor as floating matter that had detached from the back of my eye and was floating around. They were distrating at first but have since disappeared or no longer a distraction.
When I started researching this question on Google, most of the references were about imagination of what people viewed. I wanted to have confimation and a discussion of what other people experienced similar to me. I knew it wasn't just specific to me. At least I thought I was not that "special".
Thanks,
Doug
Sometimes I see black and white or sepia photos of people from the past, groups of people I don't know. The other night I saw black globules moving (like a lava lamp) on a lavender background with a bright light like a bright moon in the background. Sometimes I see purple. I look forward to closing my eyes for sleep and wondering what will I see.
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