Comment by silicon-pizza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silicon-pizza | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There seems to be a range of different experiences.

My eigengrau is not completely uniform: there are subtle variations in monochrome intensity. If I concentrate on the eigengrau, interesting patterns can appear. I have some indirect conscious control over the patterns. For example, if I concentrate and ask for a red spot to appear, usually some shade of dim red will appear forming some pattern, but I don't have control over the details. I lost this ability some number of years ago, then practiced until I got it back.

I can only do this in perfect darkness with a lot of concentration, and I need practice to maintain and improve the ability. I think it's like this article titled "Direct Control of the Visual Field", where you teach yourself to control the Eigengrau: <https://zenodo.org/record/1429102>

The article on Visual Snow shows an actively animated noise field, and I don't see any animation unless I'm really in the groove. The Visual Snow article also implies that it causes distress, and that sufferers seek medical treatment to make it go away. That doesn't apply to me. I have never used hallucinogens, I've never had a migraine, etc. I consider myself creative, so that might be correlated.

Wow. I feel like a cliche, but after reading the link I realize that I have the same, and had just assumed that it was something that everyone else also experienced and so never questioned it.

For some reason I’m better at getting triangles to form. I’m also the same as you- no migraines or anything that’d I’d consider a negative symptom.

The other optical-related illusion that someones happens with me is that if I’m focusing on something, occasionally everything else may ‘dim’ and that object will ‘feel’ subjectively closer/zoomed in, but a couple blinks and everything goes back to normal.

Edit: I’ll also add that I consider myself to have a terrible visual imagination. If I try and imagine a face (even my parents) I basically don’t get anything. If I concentrate very hard I can imagine something basic - like the wireframe of a cube - but requires a lot of effort to maintain.

I experience the same thing, although I cannot even visualize a fleeting triangle unless I am at the edge of falling asleep. I would describe the focus effect as similar to looking through a pair of binoculars, making the target occupy the entire field of view with an exaggerated sense of depth. I associate it with flow and consciously noticing the effect usually interrupts my focus enough to make it dissipate. I've never found a name for this phenomenon.

Do you have aphantasia? I can't voluntarily experience visualizations of a red spot, or any other imagery, but my understanding is that most people can truly "see" a red spot or a face when they picture it, as if they had an off-screen render buffer.

I can easily create mental images in my mind, like a rotating wireframe cube. I can see these images in my minds eye with my eyes open. I experience these mental images as a separate sensory channel from the eigenbrau, which is much more difficult to perceive and control.

To use your metaphor, my mental images are in an offscreen buffer. My eigenbrau is more like my on-screen buffer, but I can't see eigenbrau with my eyes open, presumably because then my eyes are using that channel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com