Myth Busters, Rods and Night Vision

In the evenings, after the kids go to bed and we finally have time to ourselves, my wife and I often will fire up Netflix and search together to find a movie to watch via instant streaming (absolutely one of the coolest technological advances ever...).  We went through a phase where we watched the show Myth Busters quite a bit (for those that do not know, the show focuses on either proving or disproving common myths).  There was one episode in particular, that oddly enough is relevant to my wife.  This was the "pirate episode" where Jamie and Adam attempt to navigate a "pirate obstacle course" in the dark,  fist with their eyes adjusted to bright sunlight, second with their eyes "pre-adjusted" to the dark.  The myth they were trying to prove was that pirates wore an eye patch so that they always had one eye that was adequately adjusted to darkness.  This, they argued, would give the pirate an advantage particularly when going from the bright light on the deck of the ship to the darkness of the bowels of the ship.  Here is a portion of the Myth Busters episode



Now, a quick science lesson, there are two forms of receptors in a person's eye, rods and cones.  The rods are principally responsible for scotopic vision (night vision), as they are far more sensitive receptors and will respond to even a single photon of light.  However, while rods respond to much less light than their cones counterparts, they respond much more slowly, thus it takes much longer for them to adjust to the specific light conditions (hence the myth that pirates wore a patch to have the advantage of always having an eye adjusted to low light / dark conditions).

So, how does this relate to my wife? She has an uncanny ability to do almost anything in the dark.  I would argue that there are some things she does even better in the dark (any guys reading this, stay with me here, I know what you are thinking!!).  Our youngest child is just three months old, so she spends the night in her co-sleeper in our master bedroom.  So, as many young babies do, they need to eat in the wee hours of the morning on occasion, or in our case, every morning at 4:30 AM sharp.  My wife, without any sort of luminary assistance can mix up a bottle of formula, pick up the baby (I could probably not even find the baby were it not for the sound of her crying), feed her, burp her, change her, swaddle her, lay her down back to sleep and get herself back into bed all with ease.  I on the other hand, should I not turn on the light in the next room, thus providing a "sliver" of light into our bedroom allowing me to actually see what I am doing (much to my wife's chagrin, this is exactly what I do, although she might argue there is more than a sliver of light) would have spilled the canister of formula, stubbed my toe while searching in the darkness for the baby, attempted to feed the baby's ear (hard to see where her mouth is in the dark), get coated with formula when trying to burp her, stub my toe again while trying to find her swaddling blanket and last but not least, bang my knee trying to get myself back into bed.

Obviously I am exaggerating somewhat...maybe I would only stub my toe once, but I am dead serious regarding my wife's night vision abilities.  The day rods were handed out she got her fair share and then some...as for me, who knows, maybe mine were handed out at night...