How come if I close exactly one eye I see nothing..Not black, but if I close both I see black and not “Nothing”?
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Your brain interprets the images from both eyes together. You can’t see a combination of both “black” and “something” so the blackness gets ignored. Similarly if you put your hand in front of one eye– if you focus on the blocked eye, it appears that you can see through your hand because your brain is mixing the two images together.
However, if you close both your eyes, you’re literally just seeing black because a negligible amount of light gets through your eyelids. It’s very similar to trying to see in the dark. It’s not that there’s nothing there, just too little light for your brain to make a meaningful image.
Everything we see is what your brain “decides” to see. Your nose is between your eyes and it’s in your field of vision. But your brain “edits” it out because that information is not needed. The same thing happens when you close only one eye. The blackness in your other eye is “edited” out because your brain has evolved to process what it needs rather than what it actually sees.
It’s also cool to think that fully blind people don’t see black, they “see” what you do when you close only one eye but out of both. Their brain only uses their other senses.
excuse me, are you saying you can’t see *at all* if you close one of your eyes? That can’t be normal.
It seems to me that, when I close my right eye and direct both eyes to the left, I can see both what is to my left, and the inside of my right eyelid at the same time. The right eyelid is just mostly transparent.
That doesn’t describe what I see: I can shift which eye is currently dominant, even when one eye is closed. And when my open eye is dominant, sure, I see “nothing” out of the other, but if my closed eye is dominant, I see… black*, with the image from my open eye “behind” it, just as expected.
* Well, not usually 100% black, especially if I’m paying attention to things like “which eye is dominant,” but kind of a dark grey with visual snow
What does nothing look like?
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