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SIGHT
Receptors
in our eyes are sensitive to light and this is how they gather
information about the world. Vision is considered to be our
dominant sense because out of all the receptors we have in
our bodies, 70% are found in our eyes.
How
or what might cause our sense of sight to malfunction?
Our
eyes may be fooled because of environmental factors like darkness,
fog and pollution, or we may be tricked by an illusion, or
it could be because of our own faulty equipment - maybe a
combination of all three.
Different
people have different eye sight and our eye sight changes
as we get older and even throughout the day. If our glasses
are broken, we may not be able to see properly. Also, depending
upon the amount of sleep we've had, or the vitamins and minerals
our body is lacking, our vision may be impaired. Medicine,
like cough syrup, can also effect our vision. So can many
drugs and chemicals that are in foods or in our environment.
Hallucinations are also common; this is when we see things
that aren't really there - like in dreams or when everything
appears distorted and fuzzy. The time just before falling
asleep and as we are waking up are especially vulnerable times
for hallucinations. They've even been given special names
- hypnogogic and hypnopompic. They are natural explanations
that may help account for the experiences involved in alien
abduction phenomena and other paranormal experiences. For
instance, have you ever woken up in the morning but instead
of getting up, you lay in bed for a little while longer only
to realize that when you get up again it's an hour or two
later. It may only feel like a few minutes because you didn't
realize that you drifted off to sleep again. This may account
for a common phenomenon reported in alien abduction cases
called lost time. These periods of partial wakefulness are
also prone to unusual visions and hallucinations - where our
real surroundings and our imagination may meld together in
all sorts of fanciful ways. When these and many other factors
are all experienced together, an alien abduction story may
seem very plausible and real for the person involved.
There
are also many things in the world that might resemble other
objects we are familiar with or that appear to be magical.
People look at clouds and see all sorts of common objects
like Mickey Mouse and teapots. This may be what is behind
the many occurrences of people seeing faces on buildings and
tortilla chips - it helps to explain the face on Mars and
the man in the moon!
The
way our brains analyze the information received through the
senses can affect the observations we make. We see patterns
where there are none and sometimes when we look at objects
we don't recognize, our brain will fill in the gaps with similar
objects from our memory banks so that what we're seeing looks
more familiar to us and we can make a guess as to what it
might be. The more gaps we fill in, the more likely we are
of making a mistake but it's nothing that closer inspection
won't fix!
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