What happens to your brain and/or eyes when you stare at an image, then look away and the image remains?

Question

When you stare at a dot or an abstract image for 30 seconds, then look away, you can still see the remnants of the image seemingly floating in your vision. I am curious as to what happens to your brain and/or eyes for this to occur.

Answer 1

It's actually caused only by the cells at the back of your eyes.

When a photon comes into your eye, your receptor cells 'catch' it with specially designed proteins that change shape in response to specific frequencies. The changes proteins are then detected and slowly changed back to their original state.

But if you stare at something for a long time, it can exhaust most of your supply of unchanged protein, leaving a huge surplus of the other types. When you look away, then, you are far more sensitive to any colours EXCEPT the one you were looking at. Thus if you stare at a green dot, you'll tend to see a red dot when you look away.

This effect fades rather quickly... your receptor cells do a good job of getting all those proteins back into circulation! Hope that helps!

Answer 2

You have "rods and cones" in your eyes that fire when you are looking at an image. When you stare at an image for that lenght of time, what you see floating in your vision is the remainder of the rods and cones.

Answer 3

basically imprinting