I do hope I get to experience seeing infrared light in a safe way someday. Unsure how. I’d love to experience seeing an extreme red not normally visible in everyday life. Red is beautiful - it’s one of my two biggest ingredients in my DIY color therapy I like to use. Blue for energy, red for relaxation.
I’m still curious as to why I have the reaction that I do to shortwave blue light. Adrenaline is one thing because blue light IS a kind of stimulant…but the feeling that it’s being massaged or squeezed out of the glands in time to a light pulsing…That is curious.
I doubted myself a bit lately and thought perhaps I was just bored and needed something meaningful to do…then I tried a blue light session after abstaining for a bit because I’d built up a high tolerance.
Holy shit. It felt euphoric. Like having my adrenal glands foamrolled. My heart rate went up to 100bpm from my normal 70-80 range so I clearly didn’t just imagine the adrenaline.
Probably a more accurate description would be hypo-red as it would be a lower wavelength than what normal people would consider to be “red”.
There is a way but it’s not pleasant. Check out the infrared vision project that was done by science for the masses (r.i.p.) a while back. They used a special sensor that basically was a conductive string that you literally laid into your eyes so that it swashed around with your eyeball under the eyelids. The idea here is that this sensor would measure optic nerve responses to photons and take the subjective brain part out of it.
Well that form of testing doesn’t stop you from seeing anything, but it removes the possibility that your eyes are seeing something but your brain isn’t registering anything. That was the critical aspect of the testing because the idea was to lower the visual spectrum for the eye and nobody knew if the brain could interpret these new types of signals or not so they needed a way to test of the eye was actually responding to this new wavelength regardless of what they were “seeing” with their minds.
So you will be able to see a dull red from an IR LED but make no mistake you aren’t seeing the IR it’s emitting just the outside frequency of that particular light.
I had to develop a stage washing array which was around 600 high powered IR LED’s that would wash an entire stage to render cameras useless if an attendee tried to record the talk.
Some of them would emit a dull reddish hue. When you would pull it up on camera it would look like a damn explosion of oversaturation. I think what we see is the slacker particles
I really would just like to experience seeing 850nm light. Not hugely interested in whether my eyes see something my brain doesn’t process. I’d just love to experience what Not described, MINUS the headaches.
While it’s true that the IR LEDs in CCTV cameras are pretty red, nothing beats the calibrated LCD panel with RGB backlight that my workstation laptop from 2010 had displaying the RHEL 5 splash screen.
Now that’s as red as it gets! Gosh, I miss that thick and heavy laptop.
I’m not upset about this because it’s provided some interesting perspective. I felt so silly documenting my experiences even in a private Google Drive file, and it took a lot of courage to share this. Not’s post showed me it’s really not that rare or weird to react strongly to colors.
I DO want to know the mechanism behind my blue light experiences though. I’ve genuinely really considered that I might be imagining things, but it happens when I’m not remotely expecting it or thinking about it.
Also, I’m not sure why anyone would bother making up such a bizarrely specific scenario for attention. If I wanted to get attention or annoy people I could do that by shouting ‘penis’ in a library. It would be a LOT more effective.
There are reasons that some mental institution and prison walls are pink… Makes you calmer.
There’s a reason Target has red everything… Makes you more likely to make quick decisions without thinking and puts you in a more aggressive mood… Red light district anyone?
Wait, I always thought that synesthesia happened to some people while sober and never considered anything else. But I’ve never tried any of that stuff and have no interest in doing so.
