Seeing red

‘Seeing red’ is a phrase often used to refer to, to encapsulate the difficulty of explaining why we have any kind of subjective experience at all, be it ever so simple, like seeing a patch of red somewhere, or be it ever so complicated, like seeing a buzzard stoop on a rabbit on the edge of a field. A phrase perhaps derived from, certainly encouraged by the short book at reference 1.

So in this post I report on a seeing red experience, early this Friday morning.

When lying in the bed in our hotel room here in Bognor Regis my head is perhaps 12 feet from the wall mounted television, mounted across the room from me, above me and to the left. Bottom right on the television is a small red light, perhaps two or three millimetres in diameter. A light which seems to be on all the time, probably indicating that the power supply is connected.

It is more or less dark, although it is starting to get light. I am short sighted, with the right eye better than the left eye, but I have not put my spectacles on, short range or long range. Then after some preliminaries, I cover the left eye and look at the red light with my right eye.

Given that I cannot bring the light to a sharp focus without spectacles, one might think that one would see a small red disc where the light was, brightest in the middle and fading towards the perimeter. However, this is not the case.

What I see is a very clear pattern of bright red lines and dots, sometimes stable for some seconds, sometimes flickering, jumping about. The nearest thing I can think of is what you get from satellite photographs of the outskirts of big cities at night. Next  nearest, the images you get of stained tissue down a microscope, images of networks of blood vessels, nerves or whatever.

The image is clear enough that one thinks that one could draw it – the only catch being, that in order to do this, one would need keep flipping between the red light in the dark and the drawing in the light. Flipping which might well disturb that which one was attempting to capture. Not attempted.

Sometimes the image is dominated by two or three more or less horizontal lines, a little ragged, quite close together.

Sometimes there are pale, geometric patches of red colour, supplementing the bright red lines and dots. Patches which only seem to last for a second or so.

The image, generally roughly circular, is a bit smaller than the tip of the little finger, held at arm’s length.

The image can be reduced to two or three more or less horizontal lines by nearly shutting the eye. Open the eye wide and the pattern gets bigger and more circular, although the two or thee lines usually remain in the middle, sometimes elaborating as the eye opens. Move the eyebrows around and the pattern, while more or less stable, does move around a bit.

The image rotates with the head. Tip the head to the left and the image rotates anti-clockwise. to the right and the image rotates clockwise. So more an artefact of the eye than the television.

The image can be occluded, eclipsed by moving a finger across it. With the image itself not changing while this is going on. Occasionally something in the eye itself does the occluding, floating across the image, unasked.

Doing the same thing with the left eye, I get the same sort of pattern, rather larger and rather less sharply defined.

One certainly needs to be conscious, in the everyday sense of the word to do this. But the activity might also be so absorbing that one is not self-conscious. That said, most of the interest lies in the eye part of all this and I imagine that what I have been seeing could be explained in a reasonably straight forward way by someone who knew how our eyes work, that is to say both the eyes and the pathways from them up into and across the brain – although perhaps most of what is happening here is in the eyes, on the retinas, rather than in the brain.

I associate to the way particles of smoke move around when suitably illuminated under a microscope, as was done when I did physics at school. One is looking at things at a scale at which the randomness of it all can be seen; it has not all been smoothed out.

Reference 1: Seeing red - a study in consciousness – Humphrey – 2006.