fieldbears:

the-tabularium:

nikniknikin:

blackbearmagic:

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 it’s been twelve years since it happened

it’s 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, it’s 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 “there’s a hand there”

Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”

Brain is like “nice”

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 ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.

As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out – we’re 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 you’re 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 I’m not – I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t 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 “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input

aevios:

bread-into-toast:

gigi-tastic:

perpetualseahorse:

turless:

Hey so fun fact, my dad is good friends the woman who currently has this job and she told him that Trump’s admin is trying to force her out. They started advertising the job before they actually told her they were transferring her so she’d have to reapply.

Her name is Catherine (Cassie) Conley, and she’s a badass MIT grad that works as NASA’s planetary protection officer, which sounds super cool (though she says not as cool as the galactic administrator). The job is basically the only one in xenobiology (space life) and it’s her life’s work. She’s been doing this job for over 10 years and now Trump wants her out.

I’m beyond pissed that this keeps going around. I know it sounds like a joke job, but it’s a legitimate career that’s being taken away from literally one of the most intelligent women in the country by this asscactus of a presidency.

If ya’ll could signal boost this that’d be much appreciated. They need to know that this kind of bullshit isn’t acceptable

I was actually reading about this job in an NPR article and it sounds REALLY important. the job basically means you make sure we don’t contaminate any planets and anything we bring back like rocks or soil, etc doesn’t do the same here.

You can read the article here, but TLDR her job is about not contaminating the results when we study possible life on other worlds.

[id= “NASA is hiring someone to protect Earth from aliens” /end ID]