Cinematographic vision

"I keep forgetting to ask the doctor about this one. Since I've started taking trazodone, I've noticed that sometimes during the night (if I have to get up to go to the bathroom) or when I first wake up in the morning I have a weird visual phenomenon.

It's like, if I look at something in motion (wave my hand slowly across my field of vision), I get dark outline lines of that object in the positions where it has been, following it. Usually showing for several positions at once. I'm pretty sure I only notice it when the lights are fairly dim. Kind of like some kind of motion-edge-detection algorithm for video special effects.

Anyone else get this? Dr. Nye, does this sound like something that might be a trazodone side effect? Or just coincidence? It's been going on for a couple of years now, usually in spurts of a week or two. Or does it sound like some other neurological thing, such as an ocular migraine? Does it sound like there is any reason I should be concerned?"

(Lori Sabo, Newsgroups: alt.med.fibromyalgia, Subject: Trazodone side effect?, June 16, 1997)

"One day when I was a kid - also about 13 - I noticed strange fuzzy shapes on the periphery of my visual field, and any movement I observed seemed to leave visual trails. I couldn't look at the fuzzy shapes directly because they'd move with my eyes, and as the morning progressed the colourful swirls slowly expanded into my visual field. Eventually I only had a tiny little square right at the centre of my vision, as if I was looking through a small clear square in the centre of a pattern of coloured oil-paint poured on top of water.

It was kind of intriguing even if a bit unsettling, but the swirls eventually obliterated my view entirely. The total 'blindness' only lasted a couple of minutes even though the progression from when I first noticed the patterns until total visual obscurity lasted several hours.

All of a sudden my vision snapped back to normal - which was weird in itself - and was replaced by a tingling in my right thumb which eventually spread all the way up my arm until my whole arm, shoulder, and the lower right side of my face was numb.

That also disappeared as quickly as the visuals, and was replaced by a faint sense of nausea and an inability to speak fluently. I got rid of the speech thingy by repeating tongue-twisters to myself, and just when everything seemed to have returned to normal I was struck with a mind shattering headache, the likes of which I'd never felt. It lasted for *hours.* I couldn't think, sit up, sleep, nothing - just lay there wishing the hammering would stop. (oh, and praying - for all the good it did)

A repeat - virtually verbatim - of the above happened about a month later, so my parents took me to the doctor who diagnosed migraine headaches.

Weird symptoms, huh? From then on I had a headache every day and one of the above little episodes about once a month, and I used to panic if I got to school and realized that I'd left my panadol (equivalent of tylenol) at home. Doctors were useless because the only treatment they offered was to take pills when the migraine symptoms appeared - fat load of good that is. I wanted to be rid of the cause, not to treat the symptoms, so eventually I went to a chiropractor who diagnosed vertebral subluxation due to my mother's position during my birth and the way the doctor dragged me out.

My daily headaches stopped after about three visits to the chiro, and after two years of backcracking, the migraines all but ceased. I've had about three in the last seventeen years."

(Stix, Newsgroups: alt.atheism, alt.meditation, talk.philosophy.misc, Subject: What happens when we die?, October 1, 1997)

Chronophotography of man jumping over high jump by Etienne Jules Marey.

"There is a rare but dramatic neurological disturbance that a number of my patients have experienced during attacks of migraine, when they may lose the sense of visual continuity and motion and see instead a flickering series of 'stills.' The stills may be clear-cut and sharp, and succeed one another without superimposition or overlap, but more commonly they are somewhat blurred, as with a too-long photographic exposure, and they persist for so long that each is still visible when the next 'frame' is seen, and three or four frames, the earlier ones progressively fainter, are apt to be superimposed on each other. While the effect is somewhat like that of a film (albeit an improperly shot and presented one, in which each exposure has been too long to freeze motion completely and the rate of presentation too slow to achieve fusion), it also resembles some of E.J. Marey's 'chronophotographs' of the 1880s, in which one sees a whole array of photographic moments or time frames superimposed on a single plate."

(Cited from Oliver Sacks, 'In the River of Consciousness', The New York Review of Books, Volume 51, Number 1, January 15, 2004)

"In a synoptic paper called 'A Framework for Consciousness,' published in Nature Neuroscience in February 2003, Crick and Koch speculate on the neural correlates of motion perception, how visual continuity is perceived or constructed, and, by extension, the seeming continuity of consciousness itself. They propose that 'conscious awareness [for vision] is a series of static snapshots, with motion 'painted' on them...[and] that perception occurs in discrete epochs.'

I was startled when I first came across this passage a few months ago, because their formulation seemed to rest upon the same notion of consciousness that James and Bergson had intimated a century ago, and that had been in my mind since I first heard accounts of cinematic vision from my migraine patients in the 1960s."

(Win Smith, Silicon Investor, March 2, 2004)

"My daughter who has migraines that have a predominant vertigo component, has described the symptom of feeling like she's in a movie where the images are being played too slowly."

(Judy, Newsgroups: alt.support.headache.migraine, Subject: Migraine auras experienced as child, January 16, 2006)

References

Crick F, Koch C. A framework for consciousness. Nat Neurosci 2003; 6: 119-126.
Sacks O. In the river of consciousness. New York Review of Books 2004; 51 (no. 1): 41-44.

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