Oh, it's a lazy day and we have a lot of housekeeping to do.
But - [chuckle] but - first -
Badneighbor(?) writes: "I swear one of his pupils is larger than the other!"
Oh really, Badneighbor? You swear? Like poopypants fartlips swear? Well I do!
I have a condition called anisocoria. Can you say anisocoria?
Kitt..en balls.
Yeah, that's right! In a normal brain, the dilation of your pupils is coordinated, so when one gets smaller, the other one gets smaller too.
In my brain, because of genetics, one of my pupils is like, "Whatevs! I do what I want!"
You know why I know all that cool scientific lingo? It's because I studied neuroscience, and specifically the relationship between the eye and the brain.
I even published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience!
Publishing that article really helped my career in absolutely no way at all except that I get to tell you this crap right now!
This episode basically cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars!
The guy that I studied under, Dr. Mark Baer, also had an eye condition, called nystagmus. Can you say "nystagmus?"
Kitty balls.
That's right! It's when someone's eyes move back and forth really really rapidly. Those little movements are called saccades, can you say "kitten balls?"
Saccades?
You wanna know something cool? There's actually two different motor systems that control your eyes. One makes your eyes jump around a bunch with those little movements called saccades.
To see this in action, pick any point on the wall in front of you and try to move your eyes smoothly from one side to the other. You can't! Your eyes jump!
Our eyes are constantly jumping around, and each one of those jumps takes up to a tenth of a second.
And the reason that we don't get dizzy is because during that tenth of a second, we go blind, and our brain freezes on the last thing that we saw.
But- [chuckle] but - if you follow a moving object, your eyes can track it smoothly, no problem!
You wanna know something else cool? Our eyes are kind of built backwards.
In the back of your eye, the photoreceptors that react to light are actually behind a whole bunch of blood vessels and nerve fibers.
Light has to travel through all that crap before we see it, and you know what? Because our blood vessels are sitting on top of our photoreceptors, you can actually see them!
Take a piece of paper, poke a tiny little hole in it, and put it up to one of your eyes.
Now I'm gonna show you a white screen, and while I do, just jiggle the paper just a tiny, tiny little bit.
You're basically shining a tiny little flashlight into your eye, and you'll see the shadows that your blood vessels cast.
It'll look kinda like this:
Here's another one that you probably know, but I'm gonna try to add a twist.
Because the eye is kind of built inside-out, there's a place on the back of each one of your eyes where all the wires go out.
It's called your blind spot, because in that part of your visual field, you can't really see anything.
To test this out, close your left eye, and now look at the dot marked "L"
Move your head towards or away from the screen until the dot marked "R" disappears.
Once you get that to work, here's the cool part: our brain fills in that space with what's around it!
Try the same thing on this screen. See how your brain fills in the pattern?
Or how about this one?
Anyhoo, yeah, BadNeighbor, my pupils are different sizes. Can you say...
Last week, the photographer Bill Wadman asked you to tell someone that you love them, and then to take a photograph the moment that they reacted.
Although they were all awesome, three in particular caught Bill's eye.
One, because "the knowing smile says it all"
the second because "it looks like a hard man caught by the unexpected."
But the winner this week was ChrisJDarcy, because "it was that slight and perhaps slightly embarrassed hint of a smile that she just couldn't keep in."
Chris, we'll be contacting you about that poster that you just won.
And now, this week's assignment from Bill Wadman:
Nice job on last week's mission. This week's assignment? Take a picture of your friend's face while you're both upside-down.
You get it? It's a rightside-up upside-down picture!
[Awesome..] We tried it! They're super fun to make. Here's one that I took of Sara.
And here's one that Sara took of me!
You can submit your entries at ashow.zefrank.com at the Bill Wadman Upside-Down Mission.
And now, the marvelous Lee Hall animates one of your dreams.
Severus Snape, Sherlock Holmes, and I were searching for a missing child in a warehouse.
Unsurprisingly, they were constantly bickering with each other.
We reached two boxes labeled "head" and "body."
The men were too afraid to open them, so I did the honors,
and discovered they contained Tonka trucks.
As we stared in confusion, someone burst through the wall and said,
"It's okay! Hagrid already found him!"
Bye-bye, it's the bye-bye song... [reverse noises]
Alright, we're gonna play a game called HotDuckGoose. Here's how you play:
Open the link below on your smartphone to steal the duck from whoever has it.
This will continue until one of you finds the goose.
Whoever finds the goose gets a poster of their choice.
We tried it with the forumnistas, and the duck traveled around the entire globe.
HotDuckGoose!