Inner Vision
What do you see when you close your eyes? Colors? Complex patterns? Do you see anything at all? I can hear the old vaudevillian joke response in my head: “I can’t see anything, my eyes are shut!” But that is not true. We can see colors and patterns when our eyes our shut, both at night and in the day time. I have seen colors when my eyes are shut for as long as I can remember. If I rub my eyes, the light show of colors gets more intense. Curious about this phenomenon, I began to research it. This light show of color we see in these instances is the result of a “phosphene,” which is created by an internal light coming from inside the eye. The scientific definition of a phosphene is: “a luminous image produced by mechanical stimulation of the retina, as by pressure applied to the eyeball by the finger when the lid is ...