Sight Observations for Class

        While performing one of the many household tasks that I have to complete each day to keep my home running smoothly, I see out of the corner of my eye, my son about to go after the ball that rolled away from him and he’s about to hit his head in the process. So I drop what I’m doing and reach out my arm and snatch him back before he makes contact with the shelf. Though, on my drive home from work at 4 am down and around the windy back roads that lead me home, I miss the deer lurking in the brush. It had its head down so my high beams don’t catch the reflection of its eye that I usually see that allows me to miss them, and instead I get this one. So in one case, my eyes helped me tremendously to help my son avoid an accident, but in another instance, my eyes didn’t help me avoid the deer that had to cross my path.

        

        The advantage of the human visual system is that it allows us to see the world around us. I don’t need much more supporting evidence than to say, sunrise over a vineyard in Italy’s Tuscan countryside or sunset on the Hawaiian Islands. Without human visual ability the capability to see those things or someone’s smiling face or your child grow up right before you, would not be possible and how much more of an advantage do you want. Our ability to detect color and shapes and capture the vivid depth of beauty that lies around us at every turn (whether we choose to see it or not is not the point) is advantage enough to our ability to see. Because we can take electromagnetic energy and turn it into neural energy that is our perception, our understanding, our interpretation, our basic thought process for collecting and deciphering information that we then use to navigate through life. Our ability to determine between hue, saturation, and brightness allow us to determine colors which can be the difference between seeing a bright day or a gray day, a bright warning sign or a passing by like there was no warning sign at all, or seeing directional signs telling you where you are or getting lost in a wooded forest. 

        

        The obvious disadvantage would be our visual systems ability to be tricked. Much as in many species, camouflage is a sly attribute. Funneling of information as the photoreceptors are moved away from the retina can also cause some information to get missed in our visual perceptions. Not that the stimuli weren’t there but because we are trying to take in so much information all at once, bits and pieces of a scene may not make it into our recallable visual field. Dark and light adaptation can have minor to severe impacts on our visual system as well. Depending on the intensity of the dark to light or light to dark situation a person is exposed to. A temporary blinding effect does occur at the initial time of switching and can lead to a bump on the head cause u forget just how close that door is in the pitch black. While sight is a very important attribute to have so that we can see all the beauty that Mother Nature and life has to offer it definitely has its disadvantages as well. As with all things, there is good and there is bad and we must be able to adjust and take each with the other to be able to maximize our abilities in life.