Of course, it works really well most of the time. We see colors, textures, print, cats, people, silver moonlight on the river, smiles, and that expression from your beloved.

But sometimes vision gets more complicated than we’d like. This is our topic for this week–When you see things, what’s going on (and how concerned should you be)?

These three Challenges really happened to me, so I am, naturally, very curious about what you’ll discover!

1. When I went for a run a while ago, I scampered around a blind corner and smashed my forehead into a stop sign. The impact didn’t hurt much, but it dropped me flat on my back onto the sidewalk. I got up quickly and resumed running. Nothing was hurt, BUT this is what my visual field looked like:

There was a relatively large C-shaped fuzzy spot just to the left of my visual center. I fell on my back, so my eyes were untouched by the accident. The good news is that this fuzziness went away on its own after about 1 hour. Challenge: WHAT is this visual disruption called? Should I worry about it?

2. Unrelated to Challenge #1, I noticed recently that whenever I look up into a clear blue sky (or at a blank white wall) I see lots of small circles and a few “threads” kind of wandering around. They’re not big enough to obscure anything, and I don’t notice them during the ordinary course of the date… but they’re kind of odd. Again, WHAT are these things called? Should I worry about them?

3. Unrelated to #1 or #2: Even though I have lots of experience seeing the world, I also noticed that when I close my eyes for a second and then look downward rapidly without opening my eyes, I see a fairly large circle appear and then disappear in a couple of seconds. I’m surprised I’ve never noticed this before, but I have no idea what this visual effect is called or what causes it! Can you tell me? (And let us know if you see this circle appearing when you look down with closed eyes.)

Let us know what you figure out… let’s SEE if you can answer my Challenges!

As always, let us know what you discover–and just as importantly, HOW you found out what you did.

Search on!