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pg. 2 Seeing at Lightspeed A Speculation On Our Latent Powers of Vision

Nocturnal Vision: Shifting From Cones to Rods
First, a little backtracking. For me, it started when one of my friends noticed that I can practically see in the dark. Somehow, this fact had escaped me until he started showing up at my house with a flashlight. From my viewpoint, I was simply setting an atmosphere of relaxation by keeping the lights dim after dark. If I want a reading light or a work light, I turn those on as needed, but otherwise, the lights at my house are quite low at night. To me, it's restful. My friends like the atmosphere... and bring flashlights!

Here's how I uncovered the likely reason for this nocturnal vision. As a visual artist, I have unusually strong eyes but I put a lot of strain on them and was looking for some exercises. Somewhere, I read that stereograms could not only reduce computer eye strain, but could also improve your vision. So I bought a book of stereograms, Beyond 3D, from the Magic Eye series. Stereograms have been around since 1838, when it was discovered that prisms and mirrors could be used to create the illusion of a 3D image from a pair of 2D pictures. These required a viewer called a stereoscope. Computers have now made it possible to remove the viewer from this process, by mathematically producing dot patterns that are repeated slightly out of convergence, so that the brain is "tricked" into seeing in 3D.

Computers aren't alone in crafting this trickery.The eyes are a very specialized delivery system for the brain because the eyes are the only organs of our body that are exposed outgrowths of the brain. A retina is literally brain tissue.


Giant prisms rainbow-frost the café tables at Plaza of the Americas

Activating HyperVision: Seeing in 3D
To be able to see a stereogram in 3D, you don't need any special glasses but you do have to learn how to focus your eyes differently. This focus is essentially a "soft gaze." This altered focus came easily to me, probably because of the trick that artists often use to see their work differently - I always thought of it as "squinting" the eyes. What this really does, though, is to shift the focus from a more straight-on, detail-gathering gaze to a periphery-oriented gaze, which delivers a broader perspective.

This different perspective is the result of having two kinds of light-sensitive cells in the retina: cones and rods. Cones are the ones we use all the time, the detail-examining, sharp-focus cells. But the fact is that there are far, far more rods than cones in the retina: 22 times more rods. This implies that we may not be engaging as much of our vision as we could be. And that's why stereograms could be useful to us - they give us a way to practice expanding our vision.

Stereograms supposedly require a balanced integration of both the rods and the cones, which is why they are said to be good exercises for the eye as well as stress relievers. I'd like to speculate, though, that the reason stereograms strengthen and soothe the eyes is because we are using cells that don't get used much, the rods - and this takes the pressure off the over-used cones.

A session of staring at stereograms produces a distinct sensation that defies description. First of all, it is calming. One reason for this byproduct is that it takes patience to be able to see the dimensionality of a stereogram, so you have to take your time, keeping your attention soft and steady. Once the stereogram's 3D effect clicks into focus, the action of sustaining that focus seems to elicit a form of attention that feels like an intuition-summoner. This calming, intuitive effect has a strong similarity to meditation.

If shifting our vision from cones to rods can actualize the inner vision that we call "intuition" --then we are evoking a higher form of perception.

Formula for Learning to See at Lightspeed
Rods are also profoundly more sensitive to light than cones. A rod cell is about 100 times more sensitive to a single photon of light than cones. Getting back to photons: a photon is a particle that carries electromagnetic radiation. Examples of electromagnetic radiation includes not only ordinary wavelengths of visible light, but also light of other wavelengths, like gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light and infrared light. Rod cells are 100 times more capable of sensitivity to photons than cones. Photons, however, have zero mass, which means that it travels at the speed of light. This implies something profound.

Pause and soak in this thought:
If we learn how to see with our rods rather than our cones, we are capable of "seeing" something that has no mass, and that moves at the speed of light.

I'm speculating that we may change the way we receive information, we may increase the breadth of the information received, and to put it more directly, we may even be able to see what we once thought was invisible, if we try to develop the vision of our retina's rod cells. There may be some perks of perception that we are missing, simply because we have become totally dependent on our cones as a result of our reliance on the unceasing presence of artificial lighting.

To develop that capability, what can we do?

Lower the lights
At night, except for reading, use only very low watt lights (like 20 or 40 watts). According to the scientists of the department of physiological science at UCLA, "Light can kill the photoreceptors of the eye, not only very bright direct sunlight, but more moderate illumination if the light is present continuously." I've noticed that people want any room they're in to be fully illuminated, even if their activity in that room is minimal. And, most people have high watt bulbs in every light fixture in the house.

Slow Down
One characteristic of rods is that they have a slower response to light; this is why it takes a few moments for our eyes to adjust to the dark, so that we can faintly see. Take your time, and you can see more.

Increase Vitamin A
We can also make sure we get enough vitamin A, which is critically important to rod cells. Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of night blindness. Since there are so many more rods than cones in the eye, it isn't much of a conceptual leap to speculate that poor night vision may be a precursor to an imminent deterioration of vision.

Look at Stereograms
And, to develop vision with the rods, get a book of stereograms. There's a link to my favorite one, right HERE.

Becoming the Rainbow
One more exciting discovery that will soon be introduced into commercial products is the result of studies of photonics in nature. Powerful microscopes are now revealing how matter is shaped by photons in order to produce the shimmering colors like those of butterfly wings, opals and peacock feathers. These naturally-occurring iridescent colors have no pigments at all, and are simply the result of the interplay of light and the material structure at submicronic levels. A physicist at Exeter University, Pete Vukusic, has been working with the makeup and hair company, L'Oréal, to develop cosmetics based on photonic structures in nature. No pigments need be involved, only a minute arrangement of photons will give us a shimmer and glow as the light plays, bursting through our hair like scintillating slivers of an animated rainbow. I take this is a good sign: we're learning how to become a rainbow.

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