Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Blinded By the Light

So today at our daily staff meeting Bob decided to make us go blind in one eye by locking us in a dark room for ten minutes and then walking outside in a lit hallway while covering one eye. In AP psychology class my teacher did a similar experiment in which you would cover one eye, stare at a non-moving object, and then push on your other eye to create a blind effect. He said that while you are doing this your one covered eye is adapting to such low light levels, and due to retinal disparity, the brain suspects that your other eye is situated in a dark room as well. Also, pushing on the side of your eye stimulates rods as opposed to cones who are activated during night. I would expect adaptation to play a role in this experiment as well as we were locked in that room for ten minutes to allow our eyes to adapt to the darkness and kept one eye in the dark at all times. My first theory on this is that our brain was so used to seeing the darkness and contrast with a lighted room that habituation set in and when we took our hands off of our one eye, our brain automatically shifted sight from one eye to the other because it was so used to it. My second theory would be that opponent process theory helps to explain such a quick shift from dark to light in our eyes. If one eye was so used to looking at low levels of light, then it would automatically shift to seeing bright light and vice versa as soon as we stopped staring at darkness. Other than that our day was pretty much standard. Took pictures with the fundus, had some Java's, used IDL, etc.

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