what causes “double vision” when I’m intoxicated. And why does it help when I shut (wink) an eye
In: Biology
One reason could be that alcohol interferes with your ability to move your eyeballs naturally. That’s why police officers will have you follow their finger with your eyes during a sobriety test — once intoxicated, your eye movement is no longer fluid when tracking an object. Your brain does a lot of work to coordinate each of your eyes to produce a singular image. Hold your finger in front of your face, and focus on it. Now move it closer to your head so you kind of go cross-eyed. Everything in the background is now double vision, kind of like when you’re drunk. Alcohol can make it more difficult for your eyeballs to sync up and for the brain to merge these two images, so the result is double or blurry vision. Closing one eye solves this problem since your brain no longer has to coordinate two eyes to make one image.
Alcohol also slows the pace of communication between neurotransmitters in the brain. The delay in communication between the brain and the eyes means that they are not able to function effectively which weakens the eye muscle coordination. This is what causes distorted or double vision.
When you close one eye, you are no longer recieving 2 different messages from 2 different eyes. 1 eye can’t see twice.
Alcohol is a ‘depressant’ which means it slows everything down. The brain processes a lot of important information, so when alcohol is consumed, the processing of the information slows down. This means that the sensory information your eyes receive and the communication between the brain slows down. This results in blurred vision.
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