peripheral vision

Vision off to the side of your field of view. When you see something out of the corner of your eye that's peripheral vision working for you.

Retinitis pigmentosa begins with a gradual loss of peripheral vision, eventually leading to tunnel vision or total blindness.

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Something interesting to do is to attempt to actually look at things with your peripheral vision. It is hard at first since we are used to turning our eyes and head towards an object when we try to see it.

You have to stare at something straight in front of you and try to get your brain, not your eyes, to focus on the periphery.

A really useless skill I guess, since your peripheral eyesight is really crappy and blurry, meant only for detecting motion. It is just interesting to try....

Another interesting peripheral vision experiment can be done at night in bed, if you have a TV or anything else that keeps a LED on.

Just try to look at the LED with your peripheral vision. You'll notice that the LED (no matter what color it is) looks white! This happens because the eye structures used to distinguish colors are concentrated on the central part of your field of view.

The hardest part on this experiment is convincing yourself that you're not seeing the color, since you already know what you're expecting to see.