Seeing in the DARK

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EDIT:Thanks for all your info so far

Do any other aspergers people have night vision?

My doctor has recently made me aware that I probably have Aspergers, and have been making lists of things that might be unusual for most people to do. Do any other Aspergers people have the ability to sense things in the dark say at about 1/2 mile to a mile away while driving? It's happened to me far too often, it would be 3 am in the morning and i would be speeding back from somewhere down a straight-ish road, and for some unknown reason i have an image of a person in my brain, so i automatically slow down, then 1/2 mile further along the road, there is a person i could not see beforehand, i always thought i just had really good eyesight or something, but then i saw stuff on TV about blind people who could sense movement but could not see things in the usual way. This was put down to an extra set of nerves running from the eye to the brain, (total of 4).

They also had stuff about stroke victims who could sense reality on one side but not on the other.

I guess you could say there are THREE forms of blindness,

fully blind,
consciously blind (but can detect movement),
or blind to reality (can see things that everyone else can see, but not react to them in the normal way)

Would just like to know if others experienced this, or at least to let those that haven't mentioned it know that they are not alone

forgive me while i disappear into the twilight zone.

Added Later:

Most people who have this power probably wont have come across it, because most people don't drive much at night anyway.

and to clarify:

I cannot "see" distant people until i am much much nearer to them, i.e. I sub-consciously "detect" them much sooner than i can consciously "see" them. Either i am detecting their movement, or somehow i can detect that the road ahead is not the way i know it to be.

Maybe my mind is comparing what it knows of the view ahead with what it is detecting (or subconsciously seeing), and then passing that info in a primative form to my conscious mind. Also came in handy for when police officers up ahead were pointing a speed gun my way. Wish it was a real gun sometimes!

Last edited by c4r5 on 17 Aug 2007, 9:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.

umm.. I can see things at very far distances.. Dunno if that counts for anything

I can see in the dark quite well. And sometimes I "see" better in the dark when I'm walking around if I close my eyes.

I can see very well in the dark.

I do not see well in the dark,semi-nightblind.May have something do with having "stigmatism in both eyes and poor eyesight in general.The worst is driving in the dark,I can negotiate pretty well in the dark in my apartment by closing my eyes and "seeing" the room.(Odd,but it does help to close my eyes).

I see well in the dark. Sometimes better than I do in light(I am very sensitive to it). I dunno if it is an extra sense but I can feel people from a distance. But this is usually outside not in the car as I have yet to aquire a license.

I don't see well in the dark. Actually I'm not a fan of the dark because I can't see in it that well.

Sometimes I find I get very disoriented in the dark. Not sure why but I become unsteady on my feet.

can't see well at all in the dark. And become somewhat colorblind very early on.

This is known as blind-sight. It's when people are cortically blind, meaning that they have no awareness of sight because their occipital cortex is damaged, but other, lower-level visual-processing areas of their brain are still intact. So, although they cannot consciously "see" anything, they can still navigate unerringly through a room filled with obstacles because their brains are processing what they are seeing at a sub-conscious level. It's not because they have extra nerves, it's because the only damaged part of their visual system is the occipital lobe.



You could be referring either to neglect or hemianopsia (blindness in one half of visual field). I'm going to guess that you are referring to neglect, which most often occurs when the stroke/brain damage occurs in the right hemisphere. What happens is that the person does not attend to information coming from one side of the body (the left side, in the case of a right hemisphere stroke), including sight, hearing, touch, etc. They may deny that their left arm even belongs to them, may run into doors on the left hand side, and will only read the right hand side of a piece of paper (not realizing that what they are reading makes no sense). Through therapy however, people can often be taught to pay attention to that neglected side.

Possibly a problem with your vestibular system, which processes information about the position of your body in space, and is mainly handled by the semi-circular canals in the inner ear. My guess is that without visual information providing feedback to your brain about where you are, you get unsteady because your inner ear is not doing its job.

Interesting. I know the inner ear can affect balance. This issue is at it's worst when it is between light and dark...dusk, I would say. I don't have an infection though, to my knowledge. But I have no sense of where I am going in the dark and end up having to keep stopping.

Same here, but I have lots of ear problems-in fact I'm lucky if I can find my way around at times in the light without falling over something, lol.

I tend to walk around my flat/appartment in the dark I actually do it every night. If I want a drink I get up and walk to the kitchen and I don't even turn the lights on and a couple of years ago I went camping and there were woods everywhere and I walked in the woods without a torch at night and knew my way around.

Ya, i dont like driving at night much, but i can see fine if im walking around, i love walking in the woods at night, heh.

I'm also like this. I could go outside in the middle of a moonless night during a blackout and count blades of grass.