When you rub your eyes alot...

[Kim]

Yea guys seeing rings?

It means you're gonna die, bye.

[ÆNIMA]

Also if your hand's bigger than your face, make sure someone who's heard of that is around before actually attempting it...it's risky if you mess up your own judgement.

[pv=nrt]

there is actually a term for the light shape and colors you see form rubbing your eyes like that. I forgot what it is called but i read some article about it like 4 years ago.

[Cake]

I only rub my eyes because I cant see, it doesnt really feel good, actually it hurts sometimes

[Troll King]

Originally posted by Cake
I only rub my eyes because I cant see, it doesnt really feel good, actually it hurts sometimes

Try letting go of your mouse first.

[Cake]

Nah i have an eye infection but thanks for the advice i think it would work for you too

[za gophar]

today i was protecting myself against seasonal anxiety disorder cause it was really sunny so i was like sunbathing and stuff and i closed my eyes and i saw red. i think that was the blood in my eyelids that gave the red color. that was pretty nifty. but yeah i read that u can get seasonal axiety from lack of exposure to the sun and i think its happened to me before so yeah.

[ÆNIMA]

You can get a lot of things from lack of sun exposure...sun's always a good thing within reasonable limits.

Since bloody doesn't run freely through all your skin (the reason for veins and arteries) I doubt it was the blood, but since the eyelids are so small, maybe there are just lots and lots of capillaries...bah what do i know.

[pv=nrt]

it was the sunlight. Put a flashlight up to your fingertips and if it is bright enough you will see a yellow-reddish color very similar to the red you noticed when sunbathing

[syzygy]

new color: yellow-reddish...not orange, mind u

[Sleepy Weasel]

The vitreous (clear, gel-like substance that fills the insde of the eye) sometimes pull on the retina. This may cause you to see flashing lights, even though there aren't any such lights present. This is the same thing that occurs when you get hit in the eye and "see stars" or when you rub your eye.

There are also floaters, small opacities that float about in the vitreous. If you look at a bright, uniform surface, floaters cast shadows on the back of the eye, producing little dark spots that dart about immediately in front of you. Because of gravity, they settle to the bottom of the vitreous chamber out of sight.

There is also an aspect to vision that has to do with stabilized images. The eye is constantly moving with saccades and eye tremors, which is good because if an image is stablized on the retina (i.e. by putting it on a contact lens so it moves as your eye moves) the image will fade out and disappear. This is why you don't normally see Purkinje's Tree (the veins in your eyes that lie between your lens and the retina), but if you just wake up after being in the dark and shine a flashlight laterally across the eye, you can see them. (I think I remember that correctly).

[ÆNIMA]

A lot of that didn't make sense. How could a gelatinous substance make you see lights? Also, people see stars when they're hit in any other part of the head.

What are the veins for that are inbetween the retina and lens? I would just assume that the lens is connected at the edge and by no other means. And if there are veins in that space...they wouldn't be infront of the pupil, so why would they be visible in the first place?

I'm basically asking...where'd you hear this? Or what's a more credible source?

[Sleepy Weasel]

Because the photocepters within the retina are most likely being artifically activated when the vitreous pulls on the retina is my theory. The retina gets pulled on, somehow the receptors get activated and send the message, we're seeing light, and you see light. As for being hit in other parts of the head, I imagine it's because the sudden violent movement of the head causes the vitreous to pull on the retina. It's also worth mentioning that there are also phossphenes which are visual sensations, resembling small, glowing spots, that appear from direct stimulation of the visual cortex. Phosphenes are what you see when you take hallucagenic drugs and also can arise during migraines. I don't think this is what is happening here, but I figured I'd mention it since I don't really know that answer.

The veins (I probably should have called them blood vessels) supply blood to the eye (specifically the cells of th eretina besides the photoreceptors (which are nourished by a different blood supply). Are you familiar with how the eye is setup because your next sentence is confusing to me, so I'm going to ignore it and just keep explaining. The retina is actually the innermost of the eye's three layers, and light must pass through a network of neural elements before reaching the photoreceptors at the back, which are responsible for converting light energy into neural signals. The retinal circulatory system (which nourishes the cells of the retina) lies in front of the retina and in between the path of the light and the photorecepters.

Since these blood vessels lie in the path of the light, they cast shadows on your retina, but since they move along with your eye, their shadows are stailized retinal images and are invisible to you. You can temporarily destabilize them by moving a beam of light back and forth across the vessels, which causes their shadow on the retina to move slightly.

Close your eyes and look straight ahead, place a penlight against the corner of your eye (the far corner) and rock it back and forth and after a few seconds you should be able to see them.

Info about floaters, phosphenes, and blood vessels from Sekuler and Blake, "Perception" Info about the other stuff I don't remember seeing specifically in any of the perception classes I've taken, so I took that from an online medical site about eye damage, but the rest of the information on the site checked out and it looked credible and makes sense to me.