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When we close our eyes are we "seeing" dark or do our eyes shutdown?
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RE: When we close our eyes are we "seeing" dark or do our eyes shutdown?
(December 7, 2017 at 6:01 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Your eyes are not resting in the sense of being shut down when you close your eye lids.  That’s why it is more difficult to sleep in a bright room even when you close your eyelids because some light still reach your eyes through your eyelids, and your eyes still register them.  That’s also why manufacturers of sleeping masks do a brisk business.   Sleeping masks further cut down the light reaching your eyes.

However, It takes metabolism to enable the eye to actually register light.  Each photon that reaches the retina triggers a photochemical reaction in the retina cell that leads to a nerve impulse being generated and sent to the brain.   Your body then need to supply of oxygen and neutrients to the retinal cell to reset its chemistry so It go back to ground state and be ready to register the next photon.  So it does take energy and neitrient to actually see.

I don’t know whether the rate at which the eyes refresh its photosensitive chemistry changes dramatically depending on how much light it actually registered.  

I saw some reports that blind people who suffered severed optical nerve between the eyes and the brain, but who retained functional eyeballs, still experience difficulty sleeping in bright light even though they can neither see images nor sense ambient brightness at all. This suggests the eye trigger something when it register light even when it doesn’t send any visual signal to the brain.

So It maybe that metablic requirements of the eye goes down substantially when there is no light to register.  This may trigger some rest response in the brain as well.  This probably require a real vision scientist to answer.

"The sun miracle @ Fatima" lel.
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RE: When we close our eyes are we "seeing" dark or do our eyes shutdown? - by LastPoet - December 9, 2017 at 6:10 am

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