When you close your eyes, what do you "see"?

[bender5]

Often times I ponder this question, because I hear some off the wall things when people explain the way their brains work.

I'd take a guess at saying 98% of the State of New Jersey is totally retarded(satirically speaking of course) . There's quite a few people that are damn smart, but hardly any of them come from "Jersey" families.

With that being said none of them have any intelligence or creativity, so they just don't know how to truly take an attempt at describing the way they think.

When I was a little kid I used to see colors and patterns when I would push on my eyelids when they were closed before I would be able to fall asleep. These days people tell me they see those patterns when they're on Acid and I get confused, because when I close my eyes now I can see full vivid detail of anything I'm attempting to picture.

Forget about it if I'm actually under the influence of something that forces closed and open eye "visuals", I'm not going to try to explain that.

I'm just wondering the average Critical Thinker here, probably a lot like myself, constantly analyzing not only the way that people act, but the way they react, how they perceive, life, reality, whatever you want to call it, but it's all about brain function, and I'm trying to do as much studying of myself and the brain as I can, because I'm fascinated by the way that my mind forces my horribly broken down body to do the incredible things I manage to pull of.

[Tarrik]

Well, i see black if i just close them. Whatever i think of, i can usually then see a picture forming of that. If i was to push on my eye lids, i also see patterns, colors, all sorts of weird ****. Don't know if that was the answer you really wanted or not. Lol.

[Izzy]

I could have sworn CT has had this discussion before. There isn't really much critical thinking to do. It should be rather obvious that you are "seeing" the back of your eyelids. There is no way for your brain to turn your eyes off so it has to physically cover them to get them to stop taking in information.

[Patashu]

It's worth noting that some people have better abilities to create and focus on mental imagery than others, and that this has nothing to do with how smart or dumb they are. For instance, I can't do it at all but I've asked some friends who are artists about it and they report that they're great at building and keeping at someone in their head.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

tl;dr if you think people who can't picture **** are dumb you think I'm dumb

[V-Ormix]

dude its like... black o.O

[who_cares973]

i can picture pretty much anything vividly when my eyes are closed. i can even picture the giant ass mountain where a huge portion of my dreams take place in detail 8 )

[Zageron]

I find it very, VERY, difficult to picture anything with my eyes shut. They need to be open before I can visualize anything. So walking to and from class is great because I'll have like 40 fantasies or ideas by the time I sit down. :D

[sakura080789]

i can picture pretty much anything vividly when my eyes are closed. i can even picture the giant ass mountain where a huge portion of my dreams take place in detail 8 )

im kinda like that too if i want to see it i can

[bender5]

The kind of artistry detail is what fascinates me, because it's exactly how I am.

I am able to picture the most insanely vivid details, but I never had the ability to fully translate them into art, because I can't perfect anything.

Some people can't though, and I'm not trying to imply direct intelligence to being able to have a photographic mind, but it seems to be that the creative can do it more than the people that aren't creative. However, some of my good artist friends can only draw well if they've drawn it a million times in a row, rather than being really good at drawing something new on the spot.

I don't ever think that people that aren't creative are dumb, I just think that they probably lack a depth of personality that I seem to posses that many out there don't.

The only thing that makes me consider someone to be a "dumb" person is when they are close minded to not accepting things as fact, then disprove, rather than disprove until you can find fact. It's a difficult concept to explain, but if you understand what I mean it makes a lot of sense. That and people that are delusional, anyone that lives under false pretenses and inaccurate propaganda really tend to come off as unintelligent.

Many people are much more "intelligent" by the book in many fields than me, but in terms of the ability to think, I'd say my brain, and the creative mind alike operates on a higher level given my ability to calculate and focus the way I can.

[Cavernio]

Well, it seems your thread isn't really about the topic you posted.

I have a terrible 'mind's eye'. I can imagine for sure, but anything too detailed only lasts a split second. I've had an in-depth conversation about with one of my friends, and it was a surprise to me to find that I could simply imagine a color and see it (without imagining, say, a room of that color), but that that was really, really hard for him to do. Whereas, after knowing him for so long, I know he visualizes waaaay more than I do, and can imagine visual detail much more than I can. However, I don't think that this is really so much to do with him being more intelligent than me. My 'mind's ear' I think is really very good. I can make up music in my head easily- I can hear an orchestra, and when I've listened to a lot of electronica recently, I can even imagine timbres that I may never have actually heard before, but like you, I can't put it to paper or a software program easily, and so it stays there. Some people can imagine tastes and smells, but I can't really. If I try really hard for a long time, I can get a glimpse of what an orange smells like, but its pretty hard. I *know* that I'd be able to recognize orange when I smelled it, and it's almost there to smell, but I wouldn't call it imagining it.
Scientific studies actually show that on tasks requiring visualization, men as a group are better than women, and that for many of these tasks, even training doesn't always take away the sex difference. Comparing me and my male friend, we certainly fit that criteria.

As to what your thread appeared it would be about, when we close our eyes, we see our eyelids only if there's light being shone through them. We generally don't see things without light. THAT being said, when you close your eyes and push on them and you see colors, you are actually seeing those colors as much so as if they were there, because your neurons which fire when they see light also happen to fire when they're physically pressed. But we can also 'see' things even if our eyes aren't seeing them, because there's a whole pathway from our eyes to our cortex, and if anything along that visual pathway gets stimulated, we'll see that too. So like when you hit the back of your head and you see a flash of light, that's because your visual cortex was hit and your neurons were compressed and they responded. Its our brain that sees and smells and hears, not our ears eyes and nose, which is why some people who lose these senses can get them back if we give them some sort of other input that can get the brain via another sense, like touch for instance.

More about you see colors when you push on your eyes, I think a lot of people don't get that our neurons don't just sit there and do nothing when nothing is stimulating them, they will fire at a steady, slow pace usually. And it is the change of pace that they activate is what gives our brain information. Knowing this, it makes sense why sometimes you can just look at a wall and see moving blobs of color. We also know that a neuron which is constantly being stimulated will actually become less stimulated from that same stimulation as time goes on, which can affect our perception. Like if you play FFR for a long time and then look at a wall and it looks like stuffs moving...if you note it, you should see the opposite movement of the arrows. Its like the system involved in telling us something's moving, because we're so used to seeing movement, now has changed its threshold of input of 'no movement' being the norm to 'arrows moving up' being the norm.

As far as your comments on intelligence and creativity...there's a lot to intelligence. I've often wondered how important our senses are to giving us intelligence. Obviously they're necessary, because they're the only input we have-the only type of information we get. But beyond that, there's how we break it up and how we understand it, and there's multiple senses and how they can work together. Like our sense of time doesn't come from 1 sense alone, but from all of them taken into abstraction. I would say that abstraction is much closer to intelligence than creativity, and that your ability to visualize doesn't make you intelligent, unless you're simply using that as an example of how you feel your mind works.
I've often wondered how many mathematicians are blind, seeing as so much of it geometry.

[OracleWolf]

I find it very, VERY, difficult to picture anything with my eyes shut. This. When I close my eyes and try to visualize something I usually wind up falling asleep! My usual method of focusing/picturing something involves walking counter-clockwise in a circle, it was very hard for me to stay still for long periods of time when I was writing papers in school.

Also, when I close my eyes, I see dots, zig-zags, and squiggly circles. They're usually green or purple, but sometimes are yellow, especially if I've been looking at a light source immediately beforehand.

[Rubin0]

I see the Matrix. No kidding. When I saw the Matrix movie for the first time, I totally got what they were trying to portray with those green numbers. Obviously is isn't as detailed as in the movie, but I see black and green things floating around just like that.

[Emo_Saur_]

Whenever I close my eyes, the ," yellow" I see seems to portray letters, number, figures. They usually fade away fairly quick to be honest. What figures I do see, they usually take my brain in a totally different train of thought, and spawn other figures that vaguely make out little or nothing.

[TheSaxRunner05]

I have a hard time mentally picturing anything, making it very difficult for me to describe things I have seen in detail.

[carlin]

After watching Mushishi I started doing something from one of the episodes. When I want to calm down I close my eyes and then imagine that I can close a second pair of eye lids on top of that so that everything is even more completely dark. After that it feels amazing because if you can actually get yourself in the right mindset it feels like you're floating. Definitely a pretty cool experience every time.

Other than that, I can imagine pretty much anything I want with my eyes closed. It's never really hyper detailed like I would like it to be, but it's still useful.

When I read, something else pretty cool and weird happens. I've never been able to understand it, but as I read, the scenes come alive in my mind and I can see what is going on in the story as I read it. What I don't get about it is that my mind un-focuses from the book and it's like a movie in my head with my eyes subconsciously being like a narrator reading the page. Sometimes I'll come back to reality and realize what I was doing. Does this happen to anyone else?

[UnkownMan]

I see black. Maybe you all need to get off the drugs.

[5.points]

When I read, something else pretty cool and weird happens. I've never been able to understand it, but as I read, the scenes come alive in my mind and I can see what is going on in the story as I read it. What I don't get about it is that my mind un-focuses from the book and it's like a movie in my head with my eyes subconsciously being like a narrator reading the page. Sometimes I'll come back to reality and realize what I was doing. Does this happen to anyone else?

Yes, only when reading something interesting though.

Without thinking of anything or trying to visualize anything when I close my eyes, it's always a blank void that fades from white to pitch black. Sometimes if I'm staring at something illuminated it will burn the shape of whatever I was looking at that will fade from bright white into blue and then colors such as red, purple and orange the longer I keep my eyes shut.

I've also noticed that other unfamiliar shapes appear with dark faded colors that start to look like familiar object as they dissipate. Hopefully that answers the question...