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Weird Human sensory Phenomonen.

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tcmtech

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I started a odd topic in the light bar thread and thought I would bring it out into the ****-Chat area and get some more feedback and input on it.
So here is a copy of what Scadewain and I have covered so far.
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My family took vacations all of my life and we have been in caves many times. Every cave tour they shut off all the lights to show people how dark it is. And as far back as I can remember when the lights were off I sware I could still see faint blurry shadows of everyone within several feet of me.
I was in a cave last summer and I still had that same experiance. I could make out were everyone within about ten feet of me was. It was not a clear view but I know I could pick out a path to walk between them. They look like cloudy or foggy blurs to me but still I know where they were.

Has anyone else found they have that same visual sense? I have heard of people that had cateract surgury claiming they can see rough shapes in total dark too.
 
From Skeadwains Post:
tcm what you're experiencing is more than likely psychological not real. Even if human eyesite extends slightly into the near IR you'd never be able to see body heat, body heat is far infrared, no way you're seeing that. What you're experiencing is probably just the optical processing portion of your brain going into shock from the sudden loss of light. In that kind of situation the loss of light is so absolute there is no way to compare it if you haven't been in that kind of a situation, it's darker than even your eyelids closed at night. The brain is seeing 'shadows' of what it remembers seeing just before the lights went out. I've experienced this before, if you want to destroy the sensation in an instant all you have to do is right after they turn the lights out shake your head left to right up and down and maybe spin around a few times really fast and have the people move around so their locations are different. You won't notice a thing =) The brain in sensory deprivation situations reacts VERY strangely.
 
I have aproched that odd vision curiousity as scientificaly as I can. I am aware of the phyoplogical aspects of sudden sensory deprivation. However I have done many self tests to see if it was my imagination or not.

I have had this wierd visual oddity all my life. When I was young being in total dark scared the crap out of me! There were to many unexplainable things I could visualy percieve but only when my eyes were open.
I always had to have a small light in my room to make the static fuzz (ghosts) go away. I do not believe in ghosts.

I have done these tests many times too. I heat my house with a hot water boiler that is in a room attached to my shop.
I do this experiment late at night when there is no moon and its cloudy too.
Its as dark as it can get.
In pitch dark conditions in the winter is best and what I visualy precieve is a very fine static fuzz when my eyelides are closed. But when they are open it deminishes. On a hot summer night it is the reverse. When my eyes are open has more static fuzz than when they are closed.

However I precieve the warm objects not so much as light but as a heavier or more consentrated part of this random static. Straight on looking I do not actualy see anything, but its more at a slight angel away from my fontal focus and more towards my periferal that is where I percieve these contrasts the greatest.
I have to constantly be moving my eyes around randomly to actualy hone in on an object.
I have on many occasions had the boiler room doors open to the outside at very cold temperatures. When there is a good heat difference between the inside inviroment and the hot boiler I have shut off all lights in my place and still been able to make out the boilers primary shape, front door and stack. Even after much moving around. (the boiler is flat black in color an dirty too)

my non contact IR thermometer says the temps to be around 180 F on the boiler sides and around 325 F on the front door and stack.
The door and stack seem to have the greatest percieved static fuzz density also.

I have also taken my IR thermometer and pointed at what I thought was a warm object (after moving around) Then turned on a small flashlight and found I could point right at the item with good repeatable accuracy.

Plus When my shop has been cold for some time I have done that test in there as well. When the big air compressor has run for a while I can see the outline of where the compressor head is when it is hot from about 15 feet away.

I have done this experiment once when I parked my snow blower in the shop late one night too. I turned everyting off waited several minutes in the dark and walked from the front to the back of my shop,(walked right into the back wall :eek:) moved and looked around for any sign of percievable light and walked back.
I bumped into several objects that were at the ambiant temp but still the snow blower engine had a enough observable static fuzz for me to find it and reach out and touch the top of the engine first try, even after walking away and back over fourty feet and around a few large objects that I bumped into.

Yea I know its strange but I sware I can still see the difference in tempuratures if there is enough contrast.
It does not work reliably every time, but still a large enough amount of times in my life I have felt I had repeatable proof enough to conferm it.

I dont think I am nuts but thats not really for me to deside!
 
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From Skeadwains Post:
I've had similar problems with being in the dark tcmtech. I understand exactly what you're talking about. What you're describing would require a WELL thought out set of test conditions to quantify it, NOT done by you, and you wouldn't even be allowed to know the purpose of any of the test conditions. The sensitivities involved are so low that the psychological impact of knowing that a test is even occuring is enough to blow the results through the noise floor and invalidate a real study.

Personally, it's something that helps me get to sleep at night, careful concentration can turn that random static into structured geometric patterns just by concentrating on it, at least for me. I 'play' with the patterns that I try to visualize and create from the random static. I usually fade off to sleep at that point. It could very well be a near IR sensitivity, but it's so subjective and sensitive it's not practically usable.
 
I understand that completely.
I know some is thought based but still I have read about a few scientific test studies done years ago that did conclude that some people may very well have limited IR sensing ability but it was not proven to be 100% accurate. It was only a small scale test I think, and not a large enough population group was used to make it fully valid.

But like you said I am not using highly controled tests.
I am Just going by lifetime experiances that seemed a little more perculiar than what rational belief would dictate.

It may be sort of like that litmus test paper that some people can always taste and some ocasionaly do and still others never do.

I have read that some primate species seem to show some possible IR senitivity as well. So maybe some of us "lesser evolved" humans could actualy have a little of it too? :D
Human senses are still being explored and odd things about them are facts but still very hard to pin down!

I do know my niece says she can hear the tone from my signal generator when I feed it to a small speaker all the way up to around 25 Khz!
(I get to about 18khz)
And being able to hear subsonic frequencies is a fact too.
My brother, my neice, and I all hear whats reffered to as Taous noise.
Its a sort of subsonic rumble, drone, ossilation, or thumping sound that cant be heard by everyone.

Named after Taous New Mexico were it was scientificaly studied and found to not to be just peoples imaginations!

Therefore It seems plausable that light sensitivity could very well go outside of whats considerd the normal sensitivity range as well.

It would be interesting to hear if anyone else has noticed or are aware that they have this phenomenon with them. :)
 
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Not that I have noticed. Then again I have never tired. I can't think of too many places that offer total 100% darkness. I was in a cave once when I was little. They shut the lights off for a moment, but i don't recall what I was able to see. Most dark rooms in your home, even closets, have small amounts of light that get in. I guess I will have to have the wife shut me in my ISO/storage container with something warm....... on second though.... she might decide thats a good place to leave me......:rolleyes:
 
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tcmtech I can hear 18khz from my TV easily, I perceive it as more a tightening behind my ears when the signal is present that 'normal' hearing, but if I'm aware I need to be listening for it I can tell the difference between presence or absence of the tone when it switches. No volume perception though. I can't test this on a PC because output from a PC above about 15khz is going to have enough distortion in it from anti-aliasing that I might be hearing harmonics. I'm pretty sure I can develop an experiment to test your vision theory though. It would require having a digital camera and a large enough room that could be guaranteed to be blacked out and a few heat sources to test with. (temp controlled soldering iron?)
This kind of goes along with the astro photography thread I started a bit ago. I know how to cook images scientifically =) They need to be raw images though, jpeg artifacts ruin the data
 
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Like I said, I just thought that this was just weird enough to be worth asking around about. I cant say for sure what it is but I know it seems a bit unlikely that I am just that jood at remembering where things are. Exspecialy in the dark.
Plus I also recall this odd phenomenon from as far back as I can remember. It was not until my adult years that I started to asociate it with plausable connections to heat sources.
If your serious about trying to replicate this yourself I think that doing what I do and trying it on a cloudy moonless night in a room with no lights and closed or blocked windows and door should get you as dark as you can get. It does take me a few minutes for it to start to become something I am visualy aware of too.
I do know there are odd static fuzz spots that move with my vision. The ones I am looking for are the stationary ones in respect to what my eyes would be looking at. Thats how I seem to be able to sense stuff. Its not a direct view but rather a indirect view that allows me to see the warm objects. It takes a little practice to be able to do it but still I sometimes can!

Perhaps having some sort of heat sources like a row of several large resistors that another person could turn one on at random would help quantify the over all accuracy.
If you did that and say you were able to correctly pick out 7 right out of ten trys for which one was hot from say 3 feet away. I would consider that a more than plausable result that in fact some people can in fact percieve heat this way.
 
I would suspect its nothing more phenomenal than light retention on the rods of your eyes. Like when you turn off a light, you still see a glow for some few seconds. In fact, if I stare at a bulb for a time before turning it off, not only do I see a usually blusih glow, but then a black shape appears in the presence of very dim light. Or if you stare at a color swatch for 30 seconds or so, then look away at a white wall, or sheet of paper, you'll see the contrasting color. This is an artists trick to determine complementry colors in painting.

It might be the same as how the eye percieves an LED blinking at high frequency. We see it as a steady glow, although we know the LED is actually being turned on and off.
 
Allvol, what tcm is describing persists, it's not a simple static after image.
 
Like I am saying I just dont know what it is. Rod image retention would capture the same shape of the last bright image seen. And I am very familiar with that effect. I do alot of metal fabrication and am constanstly using welders and plasma cutters that produce a bright flash that can cause a persistant after image for a few minutes.

That odd static fuzz I see does not stay with me at a fixed relation to any last image I had seen like rod image retention does. It tends to be very similar in shape to what the object is and stays stationary to where that physical location is despite my own movements of my eyes or body. Reguardless of where I am actualy looking. As long as its within my primary field of view I can usualy detect it. What I detect comes from just off center of my focus point not directly in front of it. It is sort of more of a periferal image sense than a direct visual focus.
The image is not at all clear. Its a rather ghostly faint static fuzz that is stationary or fixed to a specific point or object location.

It was that stationary persistance that scared me so much when I was a kid.:(

Also I have noticed this effect when its very dark out and I look at a vehical that recently ran. The front has that static fuzz around the engine and exaust system. I became most aware of it years ago with the farm machinery. If it was very dark out the engines and exaust stacks always had the static fuzz effect around them while they were still hot.

Yea its weird! Wish everyone could "see" what I am talking about! :D
And it still creeps me out once in a while too! :eek:

Thats why I am trying to explain it the best I can, so if others try look for what I am seeing they will have some idea of what to be looking for.
 
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