Flashbacks to Childhood...

[queenvelvet]

So my son comes in the other night and he's like... "Look mom... I can see colors in my eyes!!" and he's like all talking in circles about the colors and Kim is looking at me like WTF is he talking about and the INSTANT he walked in talking about that I KNEW. I knew because I rememeber the exact moment I discovered as a child that if you closed

Comments

[melanieb_tx]

I always wondered about this also, and after reading your question I decided to do a little research.

I found out quite a lot though it took me a bit to come up with the right search terms. If you want to do independent research the terms you will want to use are 'phosphene' or 'entoptic phenomenon'. For a decent summation of what causes I will refer you here: http://www.answers.com/topic/phosphene and direct you to the third entry down from Wikipedia. This is the easiest summation of what causes it of the approximately 200 pages I searched.

Hope this doesn't remove any of the mystery of it.

Here's another comment on it in case you need some backup to encourage your son not to press on their eyes:

From: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/15846

The patterns produced by pressure on the eyeballs do indeed originate in the retina, but they are not solely due to pressure. In fact, increased intraocular pressure to this degree causes retinal ischemia (decreased blood flow to the retinal neurons). Ischemic neurons, deprived of oxygen and glucose, and building up CO2 and metabolic wastes, are apt to fire off spontaneously, because they lose ATP power to their Na/K exchangers, and, hence, depolarize. This is why the patterns take a moment to appear once the pressure is on, and do not disappear immediately once the pressure is off.

There's a good deal of image processing done in the retina. Information representing moving angled lines and spots, circles, color/shapes, and angles subtending various arcs already is partially encoded by the time it leaves the retina, long before it gets to the thalamus or visual cortex. When neurons responsible for such encoding become ischemic and "fire" (depolarize), the primitive patterns that the retina can encode become manifest as visual phenomena.

Hypnagogic vision is extremely rare and is probably an epileptiform phenomenon. It only happens when you're drifting off to sleep and is associated with things like sleep paralysis and narcolepsy.

It's bad for your eyes to put pressure on them this way, by the way. Dangerous outcomes include lens and retinal detachment, other retinal injuries, corneal abrasion or other corneal damage, and cardiac arrhythmias and syncope owing to vagal overdrive. Bottom line: you shouldn't do this.

So there you go.

~melanie

[queenvelvet]

Wow... I don't know who you are, but I like you already.. I love smart people who like to ask questions and even more, who like to find the answers... How did you find me? And are you going to add me as a friend... I'm adding your intelligent ass right now.... :)

Thanks for that comment. That made my day!

[melanieb_tx]

I had already added you as a friend, that's how I found out you'd even posted this thread.

I'm sure I found you through either eringurrl, nekopaws, or theemeraldqueen.

I've always been drawn to inltelligent people also.

Sometimes I'm just driven to find out the answers, and when I don't find one that satisfies I keep digging. Glad I could help with finding some answers.

Most of my life and who I am can be found on my 360 page at http://360.yahoo.com/tsaustinmgirl though some of my earlier entries in my blog may be more useful. My most recent stuff has been, well, kinda dirty.

~melanie