Why can you see things better in the dark by looking away from what you want to see?
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The center of your vision is almost completely made of cone photoreceptors (light sensing cells). Cones can be tightly packed to give high resolution, can fire repeatedly, and allow for color vision. Then downside is that they require a lot of light to fire so they don’t work well or at all in the dark.
Further away from the center of your vision is made of rod photoreceptors. Rods are extremely sensitive to light. So sensitive that they are overwhelmed and do not provide useful data in bright environments. They only have one “color” but the brain interprets it as black and white. They have lower resolution and take a while to recover after firing. In dimly lit environments like nighttime outside, your rods around the center of your vision are most sensitive to light so you can “see” better at night when not looking directly at things.
The center of your eye is more susceptible to color than brightness. By looking away from a subject, you expose it to the party of the eye that’s more oriented to capturing light, instead of detail and color.
This works this way because of how peripheral vision evolved, where seeing movement is more important for survival than color or detail. Those luxuries are reserved for the centermost point of your vision.
Your retina does not have a homogenous layout of light sensitive cells. Some respond to black and white and some respond to colour. Those that respond to black and white are found more in the periphery of the eye, where an object would land if it’s in your peripheral vision. At night, light is made up of black and white.
Edit: spelling.
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