If you are seeing this… stop scrolling.
These are muscae volitantes, tiny little thugs having a disco in your eyeballs 🪩
Well, actually let me explain why you see them.
They’re tiny clumps or strands of collagen inside the vitreous gel that fills your eyeball.
When light passes through, they cast shadows on your retina, so you “see” them, usually as specks, threads, squiggles.
What’s worse, these cobwebs drift when you move your eyes and seem to dart away when you try to focus on them. I know you’ve tried hard to get them to stop moving. IMPOSSIBLE.
What’s worse, once you start seeing them, it’s hard to un-see them. Making you uncomfortable and you might begin to lose your mind.
They are also commonly referred to as “floaters” not to be mixed up with 💩.
They’re extremely common and almost always harmless. They tend to increase with age as the vitreous gradually shrinks, and they’re more noticeable in nearsighted people.
The name “muscae volitantes” literally means flying flies. Physicians named them after the way they seem to dart away when chased.
You can never look directly at one, because they move with your eye. The harder you try to pin them down, the more they slip. This is their defining trick.
It can get more exciting, if you also see tiny bright dots zipping fast across the blue sky in curved paths, those aren’t floaters at all.
That’s the blue field entoptic phenomenon, and you’re literally seeing your own white blood cells moving through the capillaries in front of your retina.
Your own bloodstream, briefly visible.
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