And then you have the bright spots that appear in front of your eyes ("seeing stars") when your body suddenly strains really hard. Maybe you sneezed, or pulled an intense, full-body Valsalva maneuver trying to squeeze out a dissident turd, or just rubbed your eyeball.
Both phenomena are completely normal, yet the explanations are weirder than you think.
It Happens Because ...
First of all, "eye floaters" are not a) just lint and shit that fell into your eye or b) unusually upstart sperm that got really really lost.
Your eyes are mostly made up of a jelly called vitreous fluid, and this gel undergoes many changes as you age. As it slowly shrinks, it loses its smoothness and starts to look stringy. The vitreous can also become more liquid, and this allows for tiny fibers in your eye to come together and form (relatively) large clumps. These get big enough to become visible and freak us out, but they eventually sink down and settle at the bottom of your eyes where you can't see them. So technically, they're your little buddies for life.
Dundanim/Photos.com
Everyone you love will die, leaving ocular degeneration your only friend.
As for the bright dots that flash and move in front of your eyes, they're called phosphenes, and they're caused when cells in your retina are messed with (by rubbing your eyes or having a large person slap you in the dark), causing them to misfire. Strangely, scientists have found that they can also stimulate phosphenes by running electricity across the visual cortex part of your brain. Try it on a friend!
836 Comments