The muscle sense seems to become adapted to any fixed position of a limb, so that, after the limb has remained motionless for some time, you cannot tell in what position it is; to find out, you have only to move it the least bit, which will excite both the muscle sense and the cutaneous pressure sense. The sense of head rotation is adaptable, in that a rotation which is keenly sensed at the start ceases to be felt as it continues; but here it is not the sense cells that become adapted, but the back flow that ceases, as will soon be explained.
To come now to the sense of sight, we have light adaptation, dark adaptation, and color adaptation. Go into a dark room, and at first all seems black, but by degrees--provided there is a little light filtering into the room--you begin to see, for your retina is becoming dark-adapted. Now go out into a bright place, and at first you are "blinded", but you quickly "get used" to the bright illumination and see objects much more distinctly than at first; for your eye has now become light-adapted. Remain for some time in a room illuminated by a colored light (as the yellowish light of most artificial illuminants), and by degrees the color sensation bleaches out so that the light appears nearly white.
Dark adaptation is equivalent to sensitizing the retina for faint light. Photographic plates can be made of more or less sensitiveness for use with different illuminations; but the retina automatically alters its sensitivity to fit the illumination to which it is exposed.
Rod and Cone Vision
You will notice, in the dark room, that while you see light and shade and the forms of objects, you do not see colors. The same is true out of doors at night. In other words, the kind of vision that we have when the eye is dark-adapted is totally color-blind. Another significant fact is that the fovea is of little use in very dim light. These facts are taken to mean that dim-light vision, or twilight vision as it is sometimes called, is rod vision and not cone vision; or, in other words, that the rods and not the cones have the great sensitiveness to faint light in the dark-adapted eye. The cones perhaps become somewhat dark-adapted, but the rods far outstrip them in this direction. The fovea has no rods and hence is of little use in very faint light. The rods have no differential responsiveness to different wave-lengths, remaining still in the "first stage" in the development of color vision, and consequently no colors are seen in faint light.
Rod vision differs then from cone vision in having only one response to every wave-length, and in adapting itself to much fainter light. No doubt, also, it is the rods that give to peripheral vision its great sensitivity to moving objects.
After-Images
After-images, which might better be called after-sensations, occur in other senses than sight, but nowhere else with such definiteness. The main fact here is that the response outlasts the stimulus. This is true of a muscle, and it is true of a sense organ. It takes a little time to get the muscle, or the sense organ, started, and, once it is in action, it takes a little time for it to stop. If you direct your eyes towards the lamp, holding your hand or a book in front of them as a screen, remove the screen for an [{227}] instant and then replace it, you will continue for a short time to see the light after the external stimulus has been cut off. This "positive after-image" is like the main sensation, only weaker. There is also a "negative after-image", best got by looking steadily at a black-and-white or colored figure for as long as fifteen or twenty seconds, and then directing the eyes upon a medium gray background. After a moment a sensation develops in which black takes the place of white and white of black, while for each color in the original sensation the complementary color now appears.