Not really feeling like posting anything about my Young Adults group today. We are transitioning to a new unit and mostly just talked about what was coming up but nothing really blog worthy. This means I can show off my geek with some random fun facts. I love that widget at the bottom of my blog.

I think the one I’ve been thinking about the most lately is the way our eyes work. We have cone and rod receptors in our eye. Basically the cones pickup three colors (red, green and blue) and the brain combines them into all the colors we can see. The rods are much more sensitive to light but are pretty much grey scale. The center of your eye is almost entirely cones so we can focus and see the best detail in what we are looking at. The periphery of the eye has more rods because it is important to see motion but not so much detail in what is going on around you. Imagine being out hunting. You want to have detail and depth perception to pick out the animal you are trying to kill but you want to see things coming at you like a bear but the motion is much more important that the detail otherwise the brain gets information overload. For those ADD people out there imagine if everything in your field of vision was in sharp detail. You would never get anything done.

Now this is why I’ve been thinking about this. It turns out that since the rods are much better at low light work and movement you shouldn’t try and look directly at things in the dark. You should try to look above, below, or beside what you are trying to see when the light is low. I take my dog potty in the woods at night. He is large and black so he tends to disappear into the shadows. If I try and look at him I will lose him every time, but if I look a couple feet above him I can track him quite well without my flashlight.

Try it out. Seriously you can see all kinds of movement in the dark so long as you aren’t actually looking right at it. The hard part is training yourself to look at things differently than you do all day long.

I’m betting there is a sermon illustration in that.

This has been a random fun fact by Nick the Geek

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