How is it possible to see light?

[complacentnation]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any studies or theories of why it is possible to see light and color with ones eyes closed?

Even in complete darkness on DMT I can see pure color, color that is more vibrant than color I see in everyday life. How can it be possible? What portion of the brain could be responsible for this?

With that said, why are some of my trips to hyperspace dark and fractalized? Is there something I can do to prevent dark trips or is it all apart of the journey?

 

[Jarl Von Hoother]

well turn on the light

the lighting effect might have something to do with activating synaptic regions in the hippocampus and occipal lobe aeras of the brain.

as for the more darker experiences I would suggest to have a nice little candle glowing. Otherwise your mind has a tendancey to drift off suddenly as our eyes are natrually attracted to light.

hope that helps.

 

[GoodApollo]

I don't know much but I know this; you don't actually see with your eyes, at least not in the sense you might assume. The world you see around you is a model built by your brain based on information sent from your eyes. A kind of virtual reality based on this sensory input.

When you are tripping, information is being received that is not sent by the eyes, but by other parts of the brain. For example, when input from the ears is received by the part of the brain that deals with visual information the result is synesthesia where your actually see the sound, a classic symptom of psychedelic drugs.

So with this in mind it isn't difficult to imagine that the brain is capable of creating images with no input from the eyes at all. I'm not so well informed on the names or functions of all the parts of the brain so you may have to wait for a more intelligent nexian than I for that answer.

I hope this goes some of the way towards explaining what you want to know.

 

[complacentnation]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess everyone is on different paths. I have never been on a path for commercial success and have always found spirit in creativity. I became interested in DMT from a natural psychedelic experience during many years of atheism. Not that that experience made me anything more than a spiritually interested agnostic, lol, but I thought there must be an explanation for why we have mystical experiences in the brain. During that natural experience I felt as if I was about to bust through the fabric of the universe and then felt a deep purge and then went into a sort of psychedelic shock for the rest of the night. I really felt ashamed of the experience as someone who was not spiritual, actually I was anti spiritual.

After years of researching this topic and trying to find a logical explanation, har har har, it led me to psychedelics and DMT in particular. And like so many of you know, it only creates more questions. But, someone has to know, at least, by now, in our modern world, why we can experience color with our eyes closed? That is one of the most basic fundamentals of high doses of pretty much any psychedelic. And then maybe why that reaction plays into the audio distortion, the wweeeeoooooh, weeeeoooooh sound along with the high pitch drone. Then we have to figure out everything else. It is so frustrating not having basic physiological answers to this stuff. SHIT LOADS of scientists should be studying the effects of this stuff. God damn you right wing America.

Give me theories and answers, people.

 

[daedaloops]

I'm not so well informed on the parts of the brain either, but I just wanted to point out something. Often when people are astonished at the things that psychedelics can do, they tend to forget that we are doing something just as astonishing every night when we sleep. Dreams are a full sensory experience without any input from the body, and anyone who's had a very stable lucid dream knows that the dreamworld is precisely as accurate as this world. It's just that most of the time we're not lucid so it feels like a blur and we forget it easily. But when you're fully lucid you can carefully look and touch the different surface textures in the dream and they feel so completely real and authentic, and it's all essentially just a virtual reality constructed by your brain. So if the brain already has the power to create a reality that is just as real as this one, it's not so far fetched that it can do alot other stuff too..

Also , dreams are often kinda boring in the way that they seem to be imitating this everyday reality, who knows why maybe as a sort of mechanism to rehash all your daily activities to get practice on them.. but dreams can get really psychedelic too, especially if you go lucid and try to focus on imagining abstract things.. Only your imagination is the limit. And I think the thing about psychedelics is that they tend to bring out stuff from the deepest corners of your imagination that you didn't even know was possible to be imagined by a human being. But it is indeed quite amazing what the brain can do, or who knows what it is that's really doing it but something is doing it and it's damn cool if you ask me..

 

[complacentnation]

I mean that is definitely a valid point. Obviously, we only use so much of our brain. Which is why I want to know what the actual chemical interactions are. I believe in science, which is what frustrates me that this topic is not given serious consideration by the scientific community.

I have fucked up dreams but the places I go on DMT are places I just would not and could not imagine. It feels almost like electronic information. I want science to take a stab at it. I want them to find a logical scientific conclusion to these questions. If they cannot come up with one then maybe the theories of panspermia are correct. One of Francis Cricks theories was that DNA could not have evolved on Earth. That there is something to intelligent design but not of the fundamentalist christian sort, obviously.

For a long time I thought this theory to be absolutely bonkers. But, when I get a nice hyperspace trip with DMT, it is a very feasible theory? And why is this not being studied?? We should be spending billions of dollars on studying this chemical, just like we did with the Large Hadron Collider, but probably consciousness, for whatever reason, is much more complex. It is something we have but something we are unable to measure.

Which makes me believe,somewhat, that we have been on an incorrect trajectory. We seek technological advances, we want to explore space... and it might actually be possible for us to travel to other galaxies... with only our minds?

But, I am talking baby steps here. Someone out there should know of why we can SEE color with our eyes CLOSED? I am not even talking about what those colors are involved with, the intricate, indescribable places....

 

[Parshvik Chintan]

Obviously, we only use so much of our brain.

uhh.. not really

also, laughingcat had a lecture that is semi-related... its on how your brain interprets data from DMT as opposed to sensory data that you might enjoy

 

[VIII]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any studies or theories of why it is possible to see light and color with ones eyes closed?

Even in complete darkness on DMT I can see pure color, color that is more vibrant than color I see in everyday life. How can it be possible? What portion of the brain could be responsible for this?

With that said, why are some of my trips to hyperspace dark and fractalized? Is there something I can do to prevent dark trips or is it all apart of the journey?

Very intriguing topic indeed. As far as seeings light and color while eyes are closed you can look into phosphenes as well as dreaming which has been mentioned.

A phosphene is a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. The word phosphene comes from the Greek words phos (light) and phainein (to show). Phosphenes are flashes of light, often associated with optic neuritis, induced by movement or sound.
Phosphenes can be directly induced by mechanical, electrical, or magnetic stimulation of the retina or visual cortex as well as by random firing of cells in the visual system. Phosphenes have also been reported by meditators (commonly called nimitta); people who go for long periods without visual stimulation (also known as the prisoner's cinema); or those who are using psychedelic drugs.

The workings of the brain are still very much a question mark (more-so for me than some others I'm sure), but new research is being done every day to answer some of the questions. I read an article recently on fruit fly larvae who with very minimal light are able to use their brain to create an image well enough to recognize and move towards their own species of larvae wiggling its head. I think this ties in well with the idea daedaloops mentioned that our brains are essentially hallucinating our reality every waking (and sleeping) moment.

An excerpt from the article:

Consciousness and perception have long been understood as being interlinked. But our perceptions may be related less to our sense of sight than was previously understood.

A new study by researchers at the University of Virginia shows that vision may be less important to our ability to see than is the brain’s ability to process the individual points of light we encounter into more complex images. Their study of the fruit fly’s visual system was recently published in the online journal Nature Communications.

In their study, they found the fruit fly larvae, with their very simple eye structure that consists solely of 24 total photoreceptors, provides just enough input to allow the animal’s brain, relatively large by contrast, to assemble the visual or light input into individual images. The human eye has more than 125 million photoreceptors. The results of this study may lead to important advances in the understanding of human consciousness in the future.

“It blows open how we think about vision,” said Barry Condron, a neurobiologist in U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences, who oversaw the study. “This tells us that visual input may not be as important to sight as the brain working behind it. In this case, the brain apparently is able to compensate for the minimal visual input.”

As for avoiding dark trips, I have personally noticed them more prevalent for me when I am in a bad headspace. Long day, not well rested, feeling rushed, thinking too fast (in a certain way unnatural for me), and similar states of mind. I also find less enjoyable experiences as well as blackouts occur if I journey too often, especially later on in back-to-back sessions. I do find many "dark" trips useful and end up attaching some sort of positive meaning or recognizing a behavior of mind as a result, but I also have experienced just flat out unpleasant journeys.

I agree that experiences such as this need much more research, but rest assured it is being done and after a bit of a hiatus the (psychedelic) research is coming back in strong.

 

[complacentnation]

Thank you for that,

Ultimately, it's not that we use 10 percent of our brains, merely that we only understand about 10 percent of how it functions.

Is most interesting. Though it still does not answer any of my questions, it is definitely information that I did not know, so thanks.

 

[corpus callosum]

Selective 5-HT2A agonist hallucinogens: A review of pharmacological interaction and corollary perceptual effects

In laymans terms, the part of the brain which subserves vision is linked with multiple other areas which can function autonomously/aberrantly and generate mental imagery in the absence of eyes working.Vision, or more accurately 'visuals', have a physical and mental dimension to them and the various bits of the brain required to produce them are interlinked in such a way that stuff like DMT can cause them to function in a less 'synchronous' fashion as in the open-eye state, producing derangements such as CEVs.

 

[bradlacky]

everyone can see without there eyes. when i write the word red ball then you see a red ball. so what sees that ball? not the eyes, right? other than that ive found you can see light with your eyes closed, espesaly if you press hard against them

 

[Mr.Peabody]

An important thing to note is that color is just a way our brain makes sense of light. The brain itself attached the color "red" to a particular wavelength of light, along with the rest of the colors. It isn't that the light itself intrinsically has color, rather color is just a tag our brain puts on a specific light wave. Light waves are exactly the same thing as radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, gamma rays, etc.. They are all electromagnetic waves, and the only thing that distinguishes one from another is the wavelength and by default the energy associated.

So, like others have said, it is possible to see light and color with our eyes closed because anything we ever see is just raw data converted into reality by our brains anyway.

I do often wonder if we can see things that are already there, but most of the time we are unable to perceive them. Maybe our brains tune into a quantum level that is unknown. Maybe our brains are tuned into some type of cosmic energy grid, much like a radio signal. The difference being, the brain itself is the sensory organ, instead of the eyes.

Someone earlier said (maybe the OP) that psychedelics raise more questions than they answer. To me, this is a very good sign. Talk to any scientist, such as an astronomer, and they will say the same exact thing about their field of study.

 

[Parshvik Chintan]

The difference being, the brain itself is the sensory organ, instead of the eyes.

you mean like a third eye of sorts?

 

[VIII]

The difference being, the brain itself is the sensory organ, instead of the eyes.

you mean like a third eye of sorts?

Brings to mind the "mind's eye" as well and our ability to visualize from thought.

When reading a book and thinking light is required for sight I would expect to see only the words on the page I am reading and the scene surrounding me in the background. However, at the same time my mind removing my attention from the paper pages in front of me and is visualizing the scenes of the book and immersing me more into that world.

 

[Mr.Peabody]

The difference being, the brain itself is the sensory organ, instead of the eyes.

you mean like a third eye of sorts?

That's exactly what I meant!

VIII,
That's a very good connection. Now that you say that, it reminds me of a feeling I often get when tripping. It's kind of like being in between seeing and thinking. It's as if my brain has bridged the gap between sight and the mind's eye, and often I kind of fluctuate between the two.