Visual perseveration

Prolonged afterimages

"I too have ocular migraines [...] I also have noticed that not only do I have the zigzags/zebra stripes - but often, when I close my eyes, I have entire visual imprints of the last thing I looked at (especially windows or mirrors etc...)"

(Sydney, Edith Frost's Homepage, March 13, 2004)

Palinopsia

Melanie Van Winkle, Migraine, photography, undated. © 2007 Melanie Van Winkle

"My piece Migraine is a depiction of the tracers I see with my headaches... I think I can show you exactly what tracers are if you are using Windows on your computer. Go into your start menu, go under settings, then under control panel, then click on 'mouse'. Under your mouse properties, there is a pointer option to allow the display of pointer trails. If you check that, your arrow will trace across the screen; i.e., a tracer to me is when I see something mulitple in frames. It is very hard to explain, but if you do that with your computer mouse it will allow you to see. It isn't double vision exactly, it is like my migraine picture; like my brain can hold motion in the air kind of as a cartoon of a fast car would have streaks after it. It is a visual echo that lasts for a split second. I hope that makes some kind of sense."

(Melanie van Winkle, Emails to Klaus Podoll, July 7-10, 2005)

"The visual imprints I have do not necessarily happen at the time of my migraine and I do not get them all time, but I probably have stopped noticing. I just tried raising my arm in front of my eyes - but this did not produce any kind of image or shadow.. but this persistence of vision intrigues me, especially the comment that most people have them to some extent... my brain has always been very visual... I seem to retain things, commercials, posters, images I have seen at some point in the recent past, and then notice they flash across my brain later in the day or the week. What I am beginning to realize is perhaps I am just more tuned into my subconscious than the average person... but am also wondering whether that is not related to the SS/migraines and vision persistence."

(Sydney, Edith Frost's Homepage, March 23, 2004)

Hallucinatory palinopsia

"I know myself to be sensitive to EM [electromagnetic] fields, so much so that they can affect my perceptual processes. A case in point: I was in San Franciso for the October 1989 earthquake. A day before the earthquake, my vision began to blur, and I had what I can only call a migraine headaches. (I am not subject to migraines).

During the EM maximum burst periods I began to hallucinate faces on people that I was talking too. I thought I must have the flu! When the pulses began to subside, all the above phenomena disappeared within an hour. (For anyone who suffers from migraines, you have my full sympathy)."

(Br. Kurt Van Kuren OSB, Newsgroups: alt.paranormal, Subject: Where Is It In The Brain? Locating Psi Abilities , December 31, 1997; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

"I only get auras occasionally (seems to be only when I'm under emotional stress), but when I do they scare the hell out of me. I don't get the beautiful patterns..... I see full-on hallucinations. Usually of everything looking decayed and bloody....probably has something to do with my job (I'm in forensics and paleopathology.... lots of corpses and skeletons), but there's nothing more disturbing than talking to someone you love and watching them rot while your head is throbbing. :::shudders:::"

(Raven, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: The Big Aura!!!, April 23, 2000)

Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, 1942 (see here)

"Having arrived at the restaurant, I sat down, then looked towards the kitchen, where in his accustomed spot stood the Lebanese chef. But ... it wasn't him. He was changing ... quickly. He was Sydney Greenstreet ... exactly as he had appeared in Casablanca. I knew I wasn't there, but the chef was Sydney Greenstreet. A remembered scene from Casablanca was somehow superimposed with uncanny accuracy over the scene in the real restaurant; and until then I had no idea that my memory had retained that image.

Several years later my doctor said to me: 'Can you imagine what I thought when you calmly told me that you saw a man become Sydney Greenstreet?'"

(Peter Adams, Some weird migraine auras, letter to Klaus Podoll, March 23, 2002)

Illusory visual spread

"One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle."

(Yayoi Kusama, The struggle and wanderings of my soul, 1975) [more]

This is a clear description of a type of visual perseveration in space first described by the British neurologist Macdonald Critchley in 1951, the so-called illusory visual spread.

References

Critchley M. Types of visual perseveration: 'paliopsia' and 'illusory visual spread'. Brain 1951; 74: 267-299.

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