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Not 1 but 5-9 photons, still less than billions :)

pretty amazing

It’s cool our brains have that as a heuristic for whatever reason. Wonder if you could train yourself to see 1-3?

If you tune up your sensitivity to 1-3 photons, you'll probably find a maddening TV white noise overlaid on your vision.

I do see exactly such a noise in dark rooms, am not unnerved by it at all.

Well that's expected when SNR is low. But in a dark room it's harder to see because SNR is low. I was just saying that I wouldn't want to artificially lower SNR in all environments, but maybe it wouldn't and maybe others do.

I think the noise is suppressed not merely because it's harder to see, but mainly because neural networks tend to hallucinate given such an input. In other words, there's fine tuning between losing weak signals and hallucinations.

Is there a link with Visual snow syndrome?

So that would be yes but our noise filter in brain doesn't let us see it

You are not a retina. You cant see photons.

Is this also acknowledging the more recent study linked in one of the top comments?