For years I have always known that peripheral vision is more sensitive than focused vision in uncovering the world around us. I remember the special warfare training in the military and how we trained the teams to not focus directly on something to become more aware of their surroundings. They never went into the actual science of this though and later in school this was reinforced by anatomy. Many of my peers these days are familiar with the learning state where we focus and expand our awareness to become more open to the learning. I thought I would take a few minutes to explain why we are able to see things out of the corner of our eyes that we can not see when we focus directly on them.
Let us start with the eye itself. Obviously the eye consists of different types of cells and these cells will provide a specific function. The body itself consists of cells that receive information from the outside. These cells are comonly referred to as receptor cells. These receptor cells receive information and convert it into electrical and chemical signals to send along the way to the neuro-network. You will also see these cells referred to as transducers which is common in engineering terms. The receptor cells are located in the retina of the eye itself.
- Anatomy of the Eye
As you look at the diagram above of the eye you notice the Fovea area which is also referred to as our focus area or point. This area is used as our center of attention and consists of cone receptor cells. As we move outward from the Fovea our Retina starts to include another receptor cell called the rods. So basically there are two different receptor cells in our Retina the Cones and Rods. You might ask why this is important so let me explain in more detail.
Consider that we need a certain level to see anything. For an example we measure light in a level of degrees. It might take 5 levels for us to see anything and if the level is under that 5 it is just a void.
We have 130 million cells in our retina and of these 4 million are cones and 126 million are rods. Connecting the receptor cells is a bipolar cell that connects them with our retinal ganglia which connects to the 1 million optic nerve fibers. Doing the math you see that 130 million does not really relate to 1 million very well. There are also less bipolar cells than there are receptor and optic nerve fibers. To make this even more important is how these are spread out. The cones all have their own optic nerve fibers when needed. The ratio for cones to bipolar to optic nerve fibers is 3-2-3 which means that we get a clearer picture. Now lets take an example of the rods that share everything in the thousands to hundreds of thousands. Just as an example we can have 10,000 rods sharing 4 bipolar cells which share one optic nerve fiber.
What this explains is that the slightest level now seen through the peripheral vision will be increased because more recepter cells are seeing it and combining the information on one optic nerve fiber. This is why we can see movement and light better from the corners of our eyes but cannot see it when looking directly at it.
When we are putting outselves into the learning state we are telling our bodies to activate and use more of our senses to pay more attention to the world around us instead of focusing on just that one thing. My question for you is this then. Can we see auras better without focusing on them because our rods can pick up the lower frequency and intensify it through the process making it more visible? Is that shadow that we see moving at times because our rods can increase our visual acutity allowing us to see something that might not be there with regular focus?
Maybe this is just something cool to know as well and now that you understand the anatomy of our visual process maybe you can come up with your own interpretations as well.
Mystically yours
Michael Holt, Ph.D.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 3:37 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
