Improve Your Night Vision—Instantly
By the Sensei
By the Sensei
Our cities and towns in the west are exceedingly well lit. Perhaps too well lit; light pollution pours from the atmosphere and blots out the celestial beauty of the night sky. Lights burn in every house, every building; neon signs and adverts blaze out their unnatural urban colors; streetlights shine on virtually every urban road, street, and patch of path. As a result, we rarely have to think about darkness.
But there may be harsher times when we have to. During a natural disaster, electricity supplies are exceedingly vulnerable to attack. In war, an EMP weapon can also take out electrical items on a wide scale. And power cuts of some type or another are regular occurrences in most cities. If these things happen, you will quickly find that the “bright lights” of the city make way for something resembling a black urban jungle. Even if external lighting is functioning, you may even find yourself in a crisis situation trapped in a building or complex, where lights are out, and you have very little illumination to go by.
But there may be harsher times when we have to. During a natural disaster, electricity supplies are exceedingly vulnerable to attack. In war, an EMP weapon can also take out electrical items on a wide scale. And power cuts of some type or another are regular occurrences in most cities. If these things happen, you will quickly find that the “bright lights” of the city make way for something resembling a black urban jungle. Even if external lighting is functioning, you may even find yourself in a crisis situation trapped in a building or complex, where lights are out, and you have very little illumination to go by.
Survival in the urban darkness
To find ways of training for this possibility, we need to look back in time; when men and women had no electrical light, and had to make do with the light from the moon and stars at night—sometimes not even that!
To start with, here are a few general tips for those of you who want to develop superior night vision.
1. Eye health. Firstly, look after your eyes during the day. Keep the muscles and tissues of the eye healthy. The best way to do this is to ensure that you get to focus on many different distances through the course of your waking life. The muscles of the eye focus by pulling the lens into different shapes, depending upon the distance of the object you are looking at. Fixing your vision at one distance—such as a computer screen, or book—for hours on end makes the tissues lazy and lax. Instead, try to look out of a window; scan the horizon, picking out different items near and far; on occasion, study objects close up, such as your hand or a pen. Look for the smallest particles you can, like microscopic scratches or grains of dust.
2. Nutrition. The eye reacts extremely quickly to changes in light, but the changeover from day vision to true night vision takes about ten to thirty minutes because it requires the creation of rhodopsin, also known as “visual purple”. Rhodopsin is the pigment found in the photoreceptor cells which enable night-vision. The production of visual purple requires lots of Vitamin A, which a healthy retina contains in huge amounts. The lack of Vitamin A causes night blindness. For superior night vision, use a nutritional supplement high in Vitamin A, or preferably include foods rich in vitamin A in your diet. Foods rich in Vitamin A include liver, kale, butter and spinach. Carrots are amazingly high in the vitamin. When the Royal Air Force began using radar against the Luftwaffe during night flights in WWII, they tried to cover up the new technology through propaganda—they spread the myth that their hit rate had gone up dramatically because their pilots had all been eating carrots!
3. Adaptation. The eye’s capacity to produce the vital pigment rhodopsin works on the use-it-or-lose-it principle, just like all human abilities. The more you train your eyes to produce rhodopsin, the better they become at it. Unfortunately, this is something most urbanites never do, because it involves spending periods in the dark. This is difficult, because most human beings instinctively dislike the dark and crave light; even moving through an empty hall to go to the bathroom, most people turn the light on, even though they don’t need it. This may be partly due to our hard-wired fear of nocturnal predators. People living in the country often have much less light outside at night, and as a result, their night vision is far superior to any urbanites. The only time most urbanites ever experience dim light is when they chose to sleep. If this is you, try to reverse this attitude. If you can spend some time—even ten minutes at first—trying to see things in the dark, your eyes will eventually adapt, learning to produce higher levels of rhodopsin, more quickly than before.
3. Adaptation. The eye’s capacity to produce the vital pigment rhodopsin works on the use-it-or-lose-it principle, just like all human abilities. The more you train your eyes to produce rhodopsin, the better they become at it. Unfortunately, this is something most urbanites never do, because it involves spending periods in the dark. This is difficult, because most human beings instinctively dislike the dark and crave light; even moving through an empty hall to go to the bathroom, most people turn the light on, even though they don’t need it. This may be partly due to our hard-wired fear of nocturnal predators. People living in the country often have much less light outside at night, and as a result, their night vision is far superior to any urbanites. The only time most urbanites ever experience dim light is when they chose to sleep. If this is you, try to reverse this attitude. If you can spend some time—even ten minutes at first—trying to see things in the dark, your eyes will eventually adapt, learning to produce higher levels of rhodopsin, more quickly than before.
4. Avoid “bleaching”. When you are using your night vision, protect it. Rhodopsin, the pigment which allows us to see at night, is super-sensitive to most types of bright light. Once it is present and functioning in the eye, if the eyes are exposed to bright light, the rhodopsin immediately becomes “bleached” and useless. If this happens, the eye requires another ten to thirty minutes to manufacture more rhodopsin. In other words, it takes that time for your night vision to fully return and you will be vulnerable. So when operating at night or in the dark, avoid bright lights, even briefly, unless you really need to look at something urgently. Torches are often a bad idea too—all they do is prevent rhodopsin from being developed in the first place, as well as making you a target to other figures lurking in the darkness. Interestingly, rhodopsin is much, much less sensitive to light on the red side of the spectrum. It does not cause the pigment to “bleach”. This is why, during covert operations, individuals often use red lights for functional purposes (map-reading, etc). The red wavelength allows them to see without reducing their rhodopsin levels and destroying their night vision.
Okay. That’s the preliminaries out of the way. But in the title of this article I promised you an instant way of improving your night-vision. Here it is. Here’s a useful piece of knowledge, known to very few city-dwellers today, on how to instantly improve your night vision.
The secret lies in the biology of the human eye. The retina is the skin around the back of the eye that registers light falling on it. This is how images are perceived. Everybody knows that. What fewer people know is that the retina mostly consist of two types of receptor cells; cones and rods. The cones are full of pigment which is really good at registering colored light—a bit like color photographic film. The rods work better at processing rhodopsin (the night-vision pigment), and therefore the rods are what you need for night-time vision.
The important fact to remember is that these cells are not distributed evenly in the human eye. The cones, which see colors and different lights very accurately, are based in the fovea—the center of the retina. This is why if we want to read something, or examine a picture, we look straight at it. However the rods—which can see better in the dark—are located around the fovea. Not in the center, but to the sides.
There’s a big take-home technique in this, Urban Warriors. If humans wish to maximize their sight at night, they need to use a trick that’s sometimes called “averted vision”. Next time you want to pick something out in the dark, don’t look straight at the area you want to know about. Look forty-five degrees to the side (right or left, whichever is most comfortable). When you do this, you will be able to see objects in the dark more clearly, because the rods are in a better position to pick up the object. This is called “peripheral pickup”.
Try this for yourself whenever possible, and you’ll see that it works straight away. It’s useful to practice the technique however, because—at least at first—the brain is not very used to processing “peripheral pickup”. This is because we have literally trained the brain not to use the rods but the cone cells, through daily life. At night, when vision is dim and we want to be aware of an area—perhaps when we hear a noise—we instinctively look straight at that area. We do this because it’s how we naturally operate during daylight—when we want to utilize the cone cells of the eyes—so we condition ourselves to it through our lifetimes. Looking straight at an object in the dark is fine for nocturnally-geared predators like big cats, because they have a tapetum lucidum (Latin for “bright carpet”), a reflective layer in their eyes which allows them to see straight ahead when they look at prey in the dark. (It is this reflective layer which makes the eyes of cats and dogs seem to shine in the dark when caught in a beam of light.) But humans do not have this layer.
This peripheral “pickup” is probably the source of the legend of “gremlins” which started in World War II. Pilots flying at night would catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of their eye (possibly a bird, a reflection, or even a cloud), but when they looked the flash had gone. This was because their peripheral rod cells had picked up something that the cone cells of their central eye had not, but the result in practice seemed like they caught a glimpse of something that disappeared when they looked straight at it. The pilots explained this phenomena (half-jokingly) with the myth of the “gremlins”—devious little monsters who played outside the plane, only to disappear when you looked straight at them.
A human can never develop the incredible, natural night vision of a big cat or a timberwolf. But we can still develop good levels of night vision without having to rely on technology. Most urbanites have virtually no night vision—it’s a completely redundant ability, lying dormant within them. Useless and atrophied, like the appendix. Don’t be like this. Every skill you can acquire in life, every natural ability that you unlock might give you the edge!
Next time you find yourself in the dark—keep it that way.
The secret lies in the biology of the human eye. The retina is the skin around the back of the eye that registers light falling on it. This is how images are perceived. Everybody knows that. What fewer people know is that the retina mostly consist of two types of receptor cells; cones and rods. The cones are full of pigment which is really good at registering colored light—a bit like color photographic film. The rods work better at processing rhodopsin (the night-vision pigment), and therefore the rods are what you need for night-time vision.
The important fact to remember is that these cells are not distributed evenly in the human eye. The cones, which see colors and different lights very accurately, are based in the fovea—the center of the retina. This is why if we want to read something, or examine a picture, we look straight at it. However the rods—which can see better in the dark—are located around the fovea. Not in the center, but to the sides.
There’s a big take-home technique in this, Urban Warriors. If humans wish to maximize their sight at night, they need to use a trick that’s sometimes called “averted vision”. Next time you want to pick something out in the dark, don’t look straight at the area you want to know about. Look forty-five degrees to the side (right or left, whichever is most comfortable). When you do this, you will be able to see objects in the dark more clearly, because the rods are in a better position to pick up the object. This is called “peripheral pickup”.
Try this for yourself whenever possible, and you’ll see that it works straight away. It’s useful to practice the technique however, because—at least at first—the brain is not very used to processing “peripheral pickup”. This is because we have literally trained the brain not to use the rods but the cone cells, through daily life. At night, when vision is dim and we want to be aware of an area—perhaps when we hear a noise—we instinctively look straight at that area. We do this because it’s how we naturally operate during daylight—when we want to utilize the cone cells of the eyes—so we condition ourselves to it through our lifetimes. Looking straight at an object in the dark is fine for nocturnally-geared predators like big cats, because they have a tapetum lucidum (Latin for “bright carpet”), a reflective layer in their eyes which allows them to see straight ahead when they look at prey in the dark. (It is this reflective layer which makes the eyes of cats and dogs seem to shine in the dark when caught in a beam of light.) But humans do not have this layer.
This peripheral “pickup” is probably the source of the legend of “gremlins” which started in World War II. Pilots flying at night would catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of their eye (possibly a bird, a reflection, or even a cloud), but when they looked the flash had gone. This was because their peripheral rod cells had picked up something that the cone cells of their central eye had not, but the result in practice seemed like they caught a glimpse of something that disappeared when they looked straight at it. The pilots explained this phenomena (half-jokingly) with the myth of the “gremlins”—devious little monsters who played outside the plane, only to disappear when you looked straight at them.
A human can never develop the incredible, natural night vision of a big cat or a timberwolf. But we can still develop good levels of night vision without having to rely on technology. Most urbanites have virtually no night vision—it’s a completely redundant ability, lying dormant within them. Useless and atrophied, like the appendix. Don’t be like this. Every skill you can acquire in life, every natural ability that you unlock might give you the edge!
Next time you find yourself in the dark—keep it that way.