Adriaan Wessels

Migraine Visions

By Adriaan Wessels


I regularily have these visual disturbances. They have made me profoundly aware of how constructed our perception of the world is.

My migraine experience starts with hunger. I suddenly feel hungry. Shortly after that my vision becomes 'distant'. It is somewhat like seeing the world projected on a screen. The actual experience is not that obviously artificial, but that is the closest that I can come to conveying the feeling.

The next stage involves blind spots. This is where my awareness of my brain's visual processing occurs. The brain backfills these blind spots with a neutral colour, so that they are not obvious. I guess this is how the brain deals with the physical blind spots that result from our eye's construction. My most dramatic experience of this occured while sitting in class. The writing on the blackboard looked as though it had been wiped clean in patches.

After this stage the actual aura occurs. A bright sparkling patch appears in the center of my vision. Over the next 45 minutes it unfolds into a crescent that progresses out toward the edge of my vision, either the left or right. It remains a bright line with jagged edges that subtends a fairly constant angle, until toward the end it loses defenition and fills my peripheral vision. I guess that this has something to do with the number of neurons dedicated to the peripheral areas.

Once that stage has passed I can unsually see clearly again. Sometimes the process starts again, and occasionally (not recently, thankfully) I have a severe headache that lasts a few hours. I have been taking 600 mg magnesium a day, and I think that this might have helped to remove the headaches. Research indicates that there is a link between migraines and low ionised magnesium levels in the blood.

My neurologist has explained that migraine is caused by a sweeping chemical disturbance that moves through the brain. I believe that this is why my aura progresses so neatly from the center of my vision outward. Other migraine related experiences that I have had include loss of feeling in fingers, toes or lips and transient aphasia. The transient aphasia has only occured twice. Both times I was able to think clearly, and to understand people, but not to produce complex sentances. I was reduced to speaking in short words. Both instances were brief, but very illuminating. My neurologist assures me that this is caused by the disturbance progressing into the speech centers, and is thus not permanent.

(Ariaan Wessels, entry posted to Zhurnal Wiki, Topic Personal History - Migraine Visions, August 8, 2004)

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