Your peripheral vision works better than the center of your vision in low light, that's why you can sort of see things in the edge of your field of view but not when you directly look at them
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Above and beyond that, scientists say the rods of the eye are sensitive enough to detect individual photons.
I can't confirm that myself, but it seems about right to me.
Yeah, we did a lab on this in college. Rods are sensitive enough to be triggered by <10 photons, cones take around 100x more to fire.
When I was a child we lived in a house in the countryside, so nights were very dark and very quiet. I'd wander around the house in the dark quite often and noticed that as well as peripheral vision, the acoustic of the room gave me information, I could sort of hear the sound of my footsteps change if I was walking towards a closed door rather than an open one. Similarly the air moved differently going from one room to another. None of these senses had enough information to navigate alone, but all added to the model of where I was and what was around me. Of course this was in a place I knew well. When walking outside, I could 'hear' the echo of the hedges and walls beside me which kept me in the middle of the path. At the time this didn't seem unusual. It goes to show that we use all our senses all the time, one helps the other to fill in the gaps.
I'm much older now, the eyesight and hearing are both failing, but it was fun while it lasted.
yep! I get this. when all the senses are working in unison, I can tell a lot more about my surroundings
it's very likely you are still seeing stuff. Total darkness is incredibly difficult to achive, there will always be a little bit of light leaking in somewhere. The cells in the middle of your retina are less sensitive to changes in brightness but can see colour very well, while the edge of your vision is more light sensitive but can mostly just see black and white. This has the effect that when it is very dark, vision is reduced to the edges of your field of view, hence if you look away slightly it is easier to see things.
One time on a red eye flight with my eyes closed behind a sleep mask, I swore I was getting that dark blue rainy grainy projection of my surroundings like Daredevil. I could see the seat in front of me, my wall, my window, and the aircraft walls ahead of me visible aboce the seats. There was even the passing of the ground outside the window. That's where I figured out it was a false image, not some super radiation sense. After toying with a few minutes, I looked out the window to find the ground moved at a fraction of the imaginary speed. However, I do beleive it was a generally accurate recreation of my surroundings.
When you deprive yourself of a sense, your other senses can ramp up their sensitivity to compensate. Or your brain has less bandwidth than all 5 can provide at once. Either way, your perception is not as rigid as it may seem. You can remember a lot about locations in a familiar place and faint cues can clue you in. It doesn't mean it's accurate, though
Yes, but not just in the dark.
Yeah, we have more senses than vision that help us understand where things are. Also memory.
In the dark, we're probably moving slowly and staying highly attuned to all non-visual input...but it's always there to help us.
I can sense it's dark, but I've never been able to see it in the dark.
Do you mean just sensing things that are really there, or also,,, other things?
Only things that are really there
Maybe you're picking up on how sound is bouncing off the object, kind of like a really weak form of echolocation, and your brain doesn't know how else to present that information other than to give you a visual.
This is exactly what I assumed it was in my case. Sometimes I'll walk around in the dark, clicking my tongue, just to see how well I can navigate this way. Sometimes I get really, really bored.
It's nice to have validation that I am not alone in my childlike weirdness sometimes. You are my kind of people.