There’s more to vision than just looking at stuff. The gift of sight is a complex marvel of mysteries and incredible feats., from colors only certain people can see to color nobody can see, the remarkable adaptations of the deaf to the dreams of the colorblind. These are just some of the things that make the window of the soul worth gazing into.

10Blue-Eyed Chinese

A Chinese boy with sky-blue eyes can allegedly see and write in pitch darkness. According to Nong Yousui’s teachers and the reporters who tested him, he can complete a questionnaire in the dark, and when examined by a flashlight, his eyes flare a luminous green. At night, a cat’s eyes reflect light in the same way. This made some believe that Nong was born with an incredible mutation: acute night vision never before seen in humans.

If he truly has feline eyes, the flash effect should show up on video—which it doesn’t. Also, scientists dismiss the very idea. Any mutation of this caliber doesn’t happen overnight. Though Nong’s uncanny ability is plausible if his eyes have extra light receptors, the whole thing could also be fake. Either way, given his race, the blue eyes remain mesmerizing—something scientists believe could be a form of albinism.

9Seeing Stars

Whether you’re seeing stars, flashes, experiencing visual disturbances from migraines, or a light show after rubbing the eyelids, it’s all caused by the same thing: pressure or stimulation of the retina.

The eyeball is filled with a thick gelatinous fluid that keeps the eye round. Sometimes this gel can press against the retina and its center responsible for creating pictures in the brain. It can happen when the eyes are rubbed vigorously, a powerful sneeze shakes the retina or stimulates the optic nerve, or even when a person stands up too fast. The latter occurs when dropping blood pressure and the oxygen-deprived brain affects the sight parts of the eye. Any message from the retina gets interpreted by the brain as light, whether there is actual light involved or not.

8The Gender Difference

Men and women look at things differently. Together, both will see the same movie, but men will be more sensitive to smaller details and movement. Women will be more aware of different color hues and how they change.

During a conversation, the sexes also focus differently. Men are more likely to watch the other person’s lips while they’re talking and will be more easily distracted by movement behind the speaker. When women listen to someone talk, they tend to alternate their gaze between their companion’s eyes and body. Other people, rather than movement, are more likely to divide their visual attention.

7The Speed Of Color

Never mind the secret life of bees. Their eyesight is far more intriguing. The tiny insects can detect color three to four times faster than people do. At first glance, it appears to be a wasted ability. Most objects carry a permanent hue and this type of vision also expends a lot of energy. Yet, bees have it.

The little honey makers have evolved their eyesight around finding flowers, which means being able to identify certain colors with accuracy. While petals and blooms don’t exactly change their own shades every second, something else can. Researchers think this skill helps bees when they are confronted with flickering light. A speedy flight through a bush could cause colors to shift rapidly due to changing light and shadows. In such a case, fast color vision will allow bees to track each abrupt change in shade.

6Deaf Vision

Individuals born deaf tend to have peripheral vision that is more sensitive to movement and light. The explanation could be a brain adaptation. Whenever a person looks at something, two pathways in the brain process the information. One assesses the object’s position and motion while the other is all about recognition. During motion-tracking experiments, the first pathway showed enhanced activity in the deaf and most likely is the reason why peripheral sight is stronger in them.

Another experiment suggests the deaf can also use their sense of touch to develop visual acuity. Two study groups received a flash near the corner of the eye. During this, the hearing participants received two beeps, and the deaf got two puffs of air to the face. Both reported the same hallucination of seeing two flashes. In deaf cats, the hearing part of their brain also appears to sharpen their peripheral vision.

5Why We See In 3-D

Three-dimensional vision helps with depth perception. Each eye views an object from a slightly different angle. Called binocular disparity, it helps the brain to gauge depth. It’s vital but not the only way to view the world in 3-D.

The parallax phenomenon is the difference in speed at which things move as you pass them. It’s most notable while driving: nearby trees will shoot past, while a radio tower in the distance moves at a snail’s pace. Other ways to calculate an object’s range include their size, being able to see more detail in closer objects, parallel lines that appear to converge, and the way items stand in relation to each other.

4The Forbidden Colors

There are colors humans can’t see. This isn’t colorblindness but something that happens to everybody. Called “forbidden colors,” they are two-toned hues that can’t be seen by the naked eye because they cancel out each other’s frequencies. These mischievous elves are red-green and yellow-blue.

The same retina cells that activate when we see something red also deactivates in the presence of green. This dampening of cell activity registers as green in the brain. They both can’t happen at the same time and thus cannot be perceived together as a single hue. The same thing happens with yellow and blue.

Researchers are divided into two camps. There are those who believe forbidden colors can be produced and seen by humans during certain image experiments. But others argue the results are yet-unnamed intermediate shades of the known colors but not the true forbidden colors.

3The Gray Realm

Researchers have possibly uncovered why the world appears gray to depression sufferers. A study involving patients with major depression found that, compared to healthy individuals, their retinas were less responsive—in a dramatic way—to especially black-and-white contrasts. This was true even for the participants who were taking antidepressants. Researchers believe the link between depression and vision could be the substance dopamine.

Healthy contrast vision depends on certain cells within the retina. Called amacrine cells, they connect the brain cells in the retina with each other. Pulling double duty, dopamine is needed for these cells to work properly as well as making a person feel driven and focused. When the chemical is lacking, it can cause cheerlessness and possibly blunt the effectiveness of the amacrine cells. This could be why everything look like an old photograph to sufferers during times of depression.

2Dreamscape Of The Color-Blind

Individuals with colorblindness can dream in color. Just how much depends on when the person turned colorblind.

When somebody is born seeing the world in shades of black, white, and gray, that will be the environment of their dreamscape. Should they become colorblind later, their colorful past can spill over into dreams. Anyone with other forms of colorblindness, such as the common inability to distinguish between reds and greens, will dream in their own range of the rainbow. For instance, they will dream of a green Santa Claus instead of a red one because that is also their waking reality.

It is also extremely uncommon for those with normal vision to dream in black and white. Difficulty remembering colorful dreams could be because during sleep, the dreamer is more occupied with doing something or reaching a destination than focusing on their dreamscape’s hues.

1The Rainbow Women

Some women can see more color than the rest of population—not just an extra shade here or there but in technicolor most of us can’t even comprehend. Called tetrachromats, they see vivid colors where others merely perceive monotone shades. It’s a literal rainbow world, and it seems to be an exclusive female one.

Everyone has three kinds of cone cells in their eyes and each reads a different light bandwidth. They combine frequencies to recognize individual colors. An extra cone adds hundreds of combinations and a huge extra set of colors. It’s estimated that about 12 percent of women might have an extra cone, but not all of them are tetrachromats. The true ones are rare, and they don’t always have it easy. Because this genetic condition remains widely unknown, they are seldom believed whenever they attempt to share their magical sight.

The biology of the human is well-studied. But the organ’s abilities continue to surprise even the experts. Adults can no longer see their entire reality and there are kids who dive with dolphin-like vision. Humans can also see the invisible or get tricked by their own eyes to miss something visible right in front of them.

See Also: 10 Animals With Incredible Eyes

10 Creative Individuals See The World Differently

Creativity is defined as the ability to see possibilities. A more technical term is “openness to experience.” This openness is what allows creative people to mine more information and ideas from an object, or idea, than the average individual.

In 2017, scientists wanted to know if something else drove creativity. Clearly this trait was both emotional and mental, and could even be taught. But to find out whether creativity had roots in something physical, they snared a bunch of volunteers and made them look at colors. More specifically, the participants had to look at a green patch to the left and a red patch to the right—at the same time.

Interestingly, those who were not really creative would switch their attention between the colors or experience a brief visual blend. People with more openness saw the blend more often and for a longer period of time. This strongly indicated that creative individuals literally see the world differently, in a physical sense that is separate from their emotional and mental artistic juices. Another test also confirmed that they see more details that other people screen out even when they are looking right at something.

9 The Blind Have More Nightmares

Can the blind see in their dreams? Yes, but only when they lost their sight was later in life. Interestingly, people who are born blind also have nightmares but experience them as emotions, sounds, and sensations, rather than anything visual.

A recent study roped in volunteers in three groups to learn more about dreams. The first was born blind, the second turned blind and the final group had normal vision. Anxiety can trigger nightmares, but none of the participants had more jitters than the rest. Despite this, there was a major difference. The majority of nightmares showed up when the sight-impaired went to sleep.

The blind-from-birth group had the most (around 25 percent of their dreams), while those who became blind underwent a curious decline. The longer they were blind, the fewer visuals appeared in their nightmares. However, the rate at which they had unpleasant dreams remained more frequent than the volunteers who could see.

The study supported the theory that nightmares are linked to waking experiences. After all, when a person must navigate society in total darkness, they live with a higher awareness of threats and feelings of vulnerability.

8 Babies Notice Everything

Infants see reality in its entirety while adults no longer do. Grownups literally lose the ability to notice all the details in their visual field, but there is a good reason for that. Seeing every line, crack and hair will result in sensory overload. Babies need to see everything because their world is new and their brains are still figuring out what is important and what to ignore.

In 2016, Japanese scientists showed babies photos of snails. A previous study had confirmed that infants stare for longer at new things and the snail-wielding scientists relied on that fact to determine whether children can see differences no longer obvious to adults. The photographs looked similar to the adult volunteers but the researchers knew which ones held subtle differences—and the rugrats found them.

This was most obvious with those aged between three and four months old. However, the freaky supervision seems to disappear between the ages of five and eight months. By then, the newborn brain has realized that some things can be shelved and other details, like Mom’s face, are more important.

7 Children Who See Like Dolphins

The Moken is a nomadic sea-people and lives along the coastlines of Thailand, and the Andaman Sea. Adults hunt with spears but the kids dive for food and it was the youngsters’ ability to effortlessly find sea cucumbers and clams that provoked curiosity. More specifically, scientists noticed that Moken children navigated underwater without squinting their eyes.

The researchers roped in European children on holiday and Moken volunteers. Several tests later and it became obvious that the local kids could see with clarity under the sea while everything appeared blurry to the Europeans. Remarkably, the Moken divers taught the holidaymakers how to do it but when asked, the visiting kids could not explain the actual process. They just “saw better.”

This called for physical analysis. In a mysterious twist, the sea-nomads could change the shape of their eye lens and make the pupil smaller. This eliminated the fuzziness other people normally encounter underwater. This ability has only been found in dolphins and seals. How they do it, or why they lose this incredible ability in adulthood, remains unknown.

6 The Woman Who Sees 100 Million Colors

The human eye is adept at telling shades apart, allowing the average person to distinguish between 1 million colors. Even color-blind individuals notice around 100,000 different tints. The extreme end of the scale was found in 2007 when neuroscientists encountered a woman capable of seeing 100 million colors.

The unnamed doctor from the United Kingdom was a “tetrachromat.” She was born with an extra cone cell in her eye, which prompted the super-vision. People with this additional fourth cone are so scarce that it took researchers 25 years to track down and confirm she was a genuine tetrachromat. Their existence has been suspected since the 1980s and her color tally was mathematically calculated.

A few more women were later identified, but nobody knows how many tetrachromats are out there or why it seems to be an all-female trait. Why do these women, an estimated 12 percent of the population, not come forward? Scientists suspect that most true tetrachromats never use their extra cone and thus do not realize how special they are. One explanation is that the world’s color use is geared towards “normal” vision, which might deactivate this ability.

5 Motion-Induced Blindness

The human eye is like a camera with a slow shutter. As a result, moving objects sometimes trail streaks across our vision. The brain’s attempt to protect us from annoying streamers led to something called motion-induced blindness. For the most part, this phenomenon erases the lines. But it also causes stationary objects behind the moving ones to vanish. One minute the fire hydrant is there but as a car passes at night (here the brain wipes the tail light streamers), the hydrant is gone.

This striking illusion is not a sign that our vision suffers from a serious glitch. As a species, humans evolved to notice moving things. Predators and prey had to be seen in order to survive and neither stood still. For this reason, scientists believe that motion-induced blindness helps to see whatever is moving with clarity, rubbing out the streaks that interfere with perception while also blotting out the things that do not move—nor matter—at that moment.

4 The Surprise Discovery Of BARM

When researchers in Germany tested a group of volunteers, they pretty much expected the results to confirm an old suspicion. The study aimed to conclusively prove the link between blinking and tOKN. The latter is an automatic reflex and a well-known feature of the eye. Supposedly, it resets the eye muscles when a person gazes at a rotating object. This prevents the muscles from twisting past their limits.

The 2016 study stumbled upon something unexpected—a completely unknown eye movement was resetting the muscles. Since it happened automatically with each blink, the feature was called blink-associated resetting movement (BARM). The link with tOKN was confirmed but that was also how BARM turned up.

As the volunteers gazed at rotating stuff, tOKN frequently occurred but the movement lacked efficiency. The muscles eventually twisted to the maximum limit of between three and eight degrees of rotation. At that point, BARM suddenly kicked in and completely untwisted the eye’s muscles.

3 There Are People Who See Calendars

We all see calendars. One just needs to look at the wall and there it is. A roughly square-shaped paper filled with blocks and dates. But a small percentage of the population—around 1 percent—can see an almanac in their mind’s eye. Where the rest of humanity must look at an outside source these individuals see a vivid grid without assistance. In fact, they can see the dates and days far into the future.

This ability is called “calendar synaesthesia.” To listen to people describe how they experience this ability is spell-binding. One woman saw the months stretch before her in a V-shaped formation. Another’s calendar appeared as a large ring and no matter the time of year, December was always passing through her body.

Both women cemented scientific conviction that the phenomenon was not just seeing an imaginary image. In 2016, both went against the scientists’ best attempts to ruin anything that could be a mental image. If they really were seeing the calendars, their ability would survive. Not only did the pair come through with flying colors but their tests provided the first direct evidence that calendar synaesthesia is not rooted in the mind, but in the brain. Just like other synaesthetes, who can taste words or hear colors, their brains stimulated several sensory and neurological pathways to produce a tangible outcome—in this case seeing a real calendar.

2 We See Infrared Light

Open any science textbook and it will tell you that humans cannot see certain wavelengths. These include radio waves, X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light. As it turns out, the books are outdated. In 2014, it became clear that people can detect infrared light.

Scientists were alerted to the fact after several of their colleagues reported seeing green flashes while working with infrared lasers. These look nothing like the lasers in action movies or pointers in boardrooms. Infrared lasers are supposed to be invisible.

In order to unravel the surprising possibility of seeing things in the invisible spectrum, an international team descended upon the eye cells of mice and humans. During the tests that followed, they zapped different parts with pulses of infrared light. The results showed something incredible. The human retina detects this wavelength when hit with a particularly strong dose of infrared energy. The concentrated light particles lengthen the retina’s visual spectrum and this allows the human eye to temporarily see into the invisible range.

1 The Eye Sees Patterns The Brain Cannot Detect

At first blush, one would think that the eyeball can never be better than the brain. After all, eyes exist only to see while gray matter has many abilities. However, our blinkers beat the brain in one way and it surprised even the experts.

Enter ghost images. These pictures are encoded as random patterns in other images. Only computers had the ability to pick up on their presence—or so everyone thought. In 2018, the complicated calculations required to identify the ghost images turned up in the human eye. Where the brain fails to see these individual patterns, the eye detects them, gathers the information and sums everything up.

This might not sound so incredible until you realize the complicated nature of ghost images. Making one is similar to taking a photograph in reverse. A laser then hits and “reads” multiple spots on the surface to reconstruct the image. Similarly, the eye registers the light points bouncing off a ghost image and use them to pull a picture together.