A couple buddies and I were talking about visual system phenomena (the correct term) which is basically the entoptic occurances you experience pretty much all the time—a lot of it is more noticeable outside though. So I Wikipedia'd some stuff on it, and a lot of it's interestingly spooky.
First, let's have a quick observation. [If possible] look at any white wall in the room you're in. Do you see static around, moving dots basically jolting around? That's called visual snow. You see it on large mono-tonal surfaces, like walls for example. Funny enough, it's more noticeable on your sight if you do illegal hallucinogenic drugs. :| I've definitely seen this a lot, but obviously you get used to it. Take a look at the example below:
Now the one's most evident seems to be this:
If you go outside right now and look at the sky (if it's nice and bright), you should see these things popping off your field of view. Floaters are "deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility" and they're often transparent. Here's a floater sufferer's depiction of NON-transparent floaters:
Try moving your eyeball far left back to the computer monitor, if you see any sign of shadow-like shapes, you probably have them. It's not neccessarily a disease, it's about as common to people as going to the bathroom. But, there's a possibility of it being a pain in the ass for ordinary vision. Here's one sufferer's progression of floaters:
The last one is frequently known as cobweb floaters. Scary as hell, if you ask me. Having them wave around your retina trying to study your history notes on the Vietnam war would be terrible but a lot of people actually get used to it and sometimes don't even know it's there.
This "yellow-blue-cross-blend" is called Haidinger's brush. I don't think I've experienced this, but it doesn't seem to be very difficult to handle. See the below image, can you spot the brush? It's in the middle.
Here's one that almost everybody has, called Afterimage. Basically when you look at one spectrum of colors for a duration, and then look somewhere else the colors of the image you previously saw are inverted. Try this observation, if you'd like.
Look at the green below and focus on it without blinking for 20 seconds. Then move your eyes to the right on the white space:
You should then see a pink circle on the right. The light green is inverted to a pinker-red.
I actually learned this in my high school art course. This phenomena happens a lot during winter, when you look at snow for a long time then go in and see a pink residue of it for a while.
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Now that you've seen quite a bit of visionary science, how do you feel about it? Have you ever been the 'victim' of it? Is your case severe? Do you have any friends/family with it? Does this strike you as wierd? Will you be more protective of your eyeballs now? Do you know any other phenomena like the above, or any tests of optic occurances? If so post your experiences.
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