Children are quite the type of human being. Full of energy and with virtually no inhibitions, their antics seem never-ending and make even the most physically fit adults exhausted. Many have even described their behavior as being the same as drunken people. Many grow up, however, and take on their chosen responsibilities, making a name for themselves in society positively or, at times, negatively. In doing so, they do away with such silly antics, instead throwing themselves into the complex world filled with so many variables that potential conflict and incident is inevitable.

However, it is not the time for me to go further on that tangent. Instead, allow me to introduce you to one odd part of my childhood. Again, as children, we seem to take a small thing and turn it into something amazing in our eyes. If you are able to convince your schoolmates to join you, soon a whole bunch of you are doing one crazy little thing, and it will take the teachers a little while to discourage your actions. If they are successful, you stop doing the activity, and you sort of forget about it until you take the time to reflect and your mind wanders to it. For this particular activity, it has been almost fifteen years since I had thought about, and I was pretty certain no one else had done it. However, we as humans surprise each other with having similar experiences, no matter how silly. So while many may read what is next and wonder about my mental health, others may find out you were not the only one.

When one closes their eyes, weird things seem to happen. Some are obvious: for instance, if one tries to lightly close their eyes on a sunny day, they may see the light shining through their eyelids, giving a pink-red field of color. Sometimes it affects your rods and cones when you open your eyes again, and you find your surroundings to have become more yellow or red for a short amount of time as if seeing the world through a filter. Of course, this is not entirely unnatural; there are many evenings that one will go out in the cloudy twilight and their surroundings seem red due to the rays from the hidden sunset. This is beautiful to experience, as it is usually paired with crepuscular rays, providing an overall surreal atmosphere.

In this case, however, as a child in early grade school, I would be one to close my eyes and apply a little pressure to them. In doing so, my “vision” would be introduced to an array of black and white squares. These would fly around in front of me, at times becoming warped and wavy, other times accented with various colors, mainly reds, greens, and violets. Sometimes the little square patterns would change to various jagged shapes, taking the forms of animals or other objects. It was a sight to behold, and I told my classmates about it, convincing them to give it a try. Soon it became a recurring thing at lunch for about a month, while waiting for afternoon recess. We would finish our lunch, someone would call out, “Time for the Cube Show!” and we would all begin, describing what each of us saw as we did it. Sometimes for me, if someone were to describe a certain color or movement, it was likely that same image or event would occur in my show. Truthfully, I do not recall if the teachers stopped us from doing it after a while, or if it just fell out of style like an old fad, but it certainly stopped as fast as it started.

Every time it came to mind afterwards, I was pretty convinced that there was no one else that had done such a thing, and so kept it to myself. Recently, however, I decided to give a go and went to search it. Lo and behold, I found out that a lot of people were interested in it, and it even has a name in science: phosphene, from the Greek phos (light) and phainein (to show). [As I have an interest in chemistry, I noticed its similarity to phosphines, a family of molecules with the chemical formula R₃P. I will explain what that means in due time.] Showing myself how uncultured I can be, I discovered that not only has it been known to humanity since ancient days, it is also what people refer to as “seeing stars.” A class of entoptic phenomena, which include such things as floaters—those little squiggly line things that show up in your vision when looking at a bright monochromic field—they are caused by both mechanical and electrical stimulation of the eye.

This surprised me, but also helped me understand a sincere truth I have about humanity. While our small differences cause us to be vastly different from one another, overall we can find ourselves to be very much the same in our inner selves. One could even speculate, then, that while those remembered in history books seem more sophisticated, closer inspection into their lives might reveal that they were not unlike any of the rest of us in today’s society. The only difference here is that we have vastly different technologies and connections than in the past, but the overall hopes, successes, toils and dreams still exist in their own modern forms. Thus, it has probably been said throughout history that we should try to focus on our similarities and differences in conjunction towards obtaining peace, and it, unfortunately, may not be the last time it will be called for in our world. But for a moment, with our eyes closed, we all experience the same sensation, and we can find ourselves at least a little closer to such a goal for humankind.

In fact, one does not even need to push on their eyes to experience it, and only need to close their eyes, though it works better in a darker environment. I found that to be useful, since pushing on your eyes for even a short time can become quite painful, and it can take your eyes awhile to return to normal vision afterwards. Thus, one could simply enjoy this by focusing on what shows up when they go to bed at night, with no worries of messing up their eyes…

Yes, that last paragraph does mean I have tried it again recently. Who can blame my curiosity?

We’ll see…

Further reading:

Grüsser, O. & Hagner, M. "On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision." Doc. Ophthalmol. 74.1 (1990): 57-85. Web.