Fog

This morning, on the drive to work, there was a dense layer of fog for a short part of the drive. I usually dislike driving in fog, but I welcomed it this morning. I'm really tired of the drive and it added some variety. It hurt my eyes a bit, which got me thinking.

What is it about fog that hurts my eyes? I'm pretty sure it's my brains. Brains are pretty good at spotting shapes. In fact, they're so good at it that they start to spot things that aren't actually there at all. Spotting things that aren't there is known as apparently known as pareidolia (from the greek for amiss image, if the wiki can be trusted). I was spotting all sorts of dangerous things that weren't there.

Then I started unspotting the real ones. Apparently, when my brain got tired of spotting dangerous things that weren't there it over-corrected and started turning real things into things that shouldn't be there and that didn't even make sense. Then back, which seems to come in waves.

I think it's the waves that hurt my eyes. It's at least partially psycho semantic I suspect, but also partially not. I'm reasonably sure that as my brain spots and un-spots things that do and don't exist that the focal depth of my eyes keeps rapidly changing. I think that's going to produce an achy feeling no matter what.

random links: help vampires, inno setup