You Don’t Perceive Black in the Absence of Light

You'll use the color black when you need to depict what you see when you close your eyes. But that could not be what you actually see. The hue you see is an extremely dark gray tint. It is known as eigengrau in German. "Own gray" or "intrinsic gray" are its meanings.

We never truly experience complete blackness when we close our eyes, and there are a few factors involved that have to do with contrast. Darkness cannot be understood without light. Without that, you settle for something less ominous, that natural gray that manifests itself beneath your eyelids. Additionally, brain chemistry is a factor.

In that brain, a protein by the name of rhodopsin aids in the conversion of light signals to electrical ones. This enables your brain to interpret what you see. Photons trigger the protein's activation. The process of "seeing" as we know it starts when photons induce isomerization in the rhodopsin. However, spontaneous isomerization also takes place in the absence of light, giving us a very small amount of vision even when there is no light at all. In turn, this results in inherent gray.