no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and itâs been twelve years since it happened
itâs such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, itâs there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like âthereâs a hand thereâ
Eyes are like âyup sure thing brain I can totally see itâ
Brain is like âniceâ
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like âoh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out thereâ. and he saw likeâŠlow light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that âcave blindnessâ! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out - weâre such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where youâre hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know Iâm not - Iâm in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasnât moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music âbeing played loudly from somewhereâ, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brainâs ipod on *fucking shuffle* if itâs not getting any input
























