why do people see double when they are drunk?
In: Biology
If you have 2 working eyes, you are always seeing double, in a way. Hold a fingertip up in front of your face, and look straight at it, focusing on it. While you’re doing that, notice how the more distant background seems to split into doubles. Now, look at some far-off object in the distance, and notice how your finger seems to have doubled!
Your brain is good at merging the 2 images from your 2 eyes, into one unified visual impression, and it partly achieves this by carefully managing your eyes’ rotation so that whatever you’re looking at, is perfectly centered in each eye. When you’re drunk, that ability is diminished. Double vision will probably happen whenever your eyes are not both pointing straight at the same spot.
If you’re getting disoriented by it, the easiest thing is to just shut one eye and try to focus on it with the other.
[Here’s another](https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-Frankfurter/) version of the same trick.
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