What Would Happen If You Were Stuck In The Dark Forever?
This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you were trapped in unending darkness?
It's easy to take light for granted. We wake up every morning and it greets us through the windows. We come home from work and summon it with the flick of a switch. The dull glow of one last glance at your phone bathes us, even as we try to fall asleep.
Lights signal progress, opportunity. We are drawn to bright lights and big cities, even as they drown out the light from much, much larger celestial bodies burning and exploding far, far away.
So many of us concern ourselves with an excess of light in our lives, but what about the opposite? What might happen if you were to plunge yourself into total, unending darkness and never leave? We spoke with Dr. Karl Citek, an optometrist and professor of Optometry at Pacific University, to shed some light on this dark hypothetical.
Initially, everything is fine. Your mind might be racing, struggling to pick up on the slightest bit of sensory information. There might be bumps you may or may not have heard, or brushes against your skin you may or may not have felt. But that's all in your mind. It takes a little while for your eyes to physically adjust
Your eyes rely on two overlapping systems for visual perception. As you might already know, within your retina sit a number of rods and cones. Our current understanding of our eye is that these rods and cones work in tandem to create a composite image that we all know and love as our vision. The cones are there to help us see color and detail, this is known as our photopic vision. The rods are responsible for our sensitivity to light, which we call our scotopic vision. An easy way to think about this is that our photopic vision works well in in the daytime, and our scotopic vision becomes useful only when it gets dark out. A day vision and a night vision, if you will.
As such, when the lights go out, your photopic vision is the first to fully adjust. Though "fully adjust" is a bit of a misnomer. After about 7 to 12 minutes, your photopic vision is maxed out in terms of the amount of color and detail you could possibly see in complete and utter darkness. Your scotopic vision takes a little longer, fully maxing out its sensitivity in around 45 minutes to an hour. Even now, although your eyes are fully cranked, without any light, you can't see anything.
This might seem disorienting at first, since you're always used to seeing something, but the real terror will only manifest itself hours, maybe even days later. Your body relies on light to determine when it should release melatonin, and thus when you should go to sleep. "There is evidence that our eyes contain certain photoreceptors that mediate this process but do not contribute to visual image perception," says Citek. "Very much like the pixels in a digital camera that 'read' light level and adjust the aperture and shutter speed but do not contribute to the final picture itself."
Without light, your brain doesn't know when, if at all, to release that sweet, sweet melatonin. So, somewhat counterintuitively, sitting in the dark will eventually leave you sleep deprived. You'll just be sitting there, staring into absolute darkness, wishing you could fall asleep but cannot.
There's no telling what sort of mental toll this will take on you, but physiologically speaking, your eyes are fine. They might be cranked to maximum sensitivity, but they aren't straining or degrading. They are just sitting in your head, trying to take in the light that doesn't exist.
In fact, if you were to be suddenly thrust back into the light, things would go back to normal in a matter of moments. Granted, your eyes are still set to Maximum Sensitivity, so any abrupt changes in light might feel harsh. "In all cases, when you turn on a light, it will initially seem very bright," says Dr. Citek. "But light adaptation should take only a few seconds in a normal person, regardless of the brightness of the light." No doubt you've experienced it to a lesser degree before. After a few seconds, it would be like nothing ever happend at all.
Darkness thrusts you into a incomprehensible sea of fear and isolation. It's easy to see things that aren't there, believe things that seemed impossible moments before. You might believe your eyes are straining so hard that you'll never see again.
But take comfort in the fact that no matter how dark it gets, no matter how interminable it may seem, eventually the light will return. And your eyes will be there to see it. At least, until the light fades again.
