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I have experienced this several times and almost never have a headache. I definitely can't read what's beyond/obscured by the scotoma. The first time it happened was during a test in high school and the splotch grew until I was forced to read the questions in my peripheral.

I have an anecdote that corroborates your observation that cognitive experiences are more complicated then assumed: I was once very, very sleep deprived. I became aware that my body was reacting to something, as if there was a jump scare in a movie, I unconsciously flinched and pulled away from something without knowing why, and then a perceptual moment later, I heard a loud noise caused by something falling to the floor.

One of the other weird things I referred to is best described as discovering that I could be awake and asleep at the same time. I think it might be another case of our naive ideas about cognitive processes being a little oversimplified.

It sounds like nonsense, of course, but that's because we naively assume that sleep and wakefulness are opposites--that they are mutually exclusive. What if we're wrong about that? What if instead each of them is a set of processes that normally work together, but that can be disrupted, and what if disrupting them makes the boundary between them more porous?

I have CFS, which boils down to having something screwed up in my recovery from fatigue. Nowadays it's not a big deal, as long as I follow some rules, but it took the better part of a decade to reach that point. For several years I used prescription modafinil and armodafinil to control when I was awake (because otherwise I slept eighteen to twenty hours a day).

With the modafinil I managed to reach a stable state where I could usually be awake for a fairly normal part of the day, but a couple of times a month I'd get so tired that I'd fall asleep even with a full dose of the stimulant in me.

Those naps were weird, though, in that I remained conscious through them. I mean I'd lie down, relax like normal falling asleep, and start breathing in that distinctive arrythmic way that tells you someone's asleep. I would just be awake the whole time, watching myself sleep. I experimented with trying to move when I was "asleep". Sometimes I could; sometimes I couldn't.

You can imagine that I really was asleep, and maybe the stimulant just caused me to dream that I was awake, watching myself sleep. The main problem I have with that explanation is that I have never in any other circumstance experienced dreams that were so much the same over and over, and without the usual fantastic elements.

Of course, you could argue that was the modafinil affecting my dreams, and that could be true.

But my hypothesis is similar to the migraine and scotoma blindsight thing: what if awake and asleep are not opposites, after all? What if they aren't actually mutually exclusive? What if, instead, they're just two complexes of cognitive and physiological states that don't normally happen at the same time because they interfere with each other? It's not useful for them to happen together, so our bodies and brains don't normally do that. But mix a strong CNS stimulant with extreme fatigue, and things get messed up.

If it was actually happening, and not some weird drug-induced dream or hallucination, then it strikes me as another case where our cognitive processes are a little more complicated and messy than we normally assume.

Being aware while asleep is something that can happen to advanced meditators. The more aware you are the more you are there is no difference between being awake or asleep. I haven’t heard it brought up in any other contexts except maybe for lucid dream practitioners. I’ve also read accounts from those who have done dark room retreats where perception of being awake and asleep blur and the perception of what you are experiencing has a lot of mind generated in experiences that can seem very real, dream-like, or using Buddhist language, empty.

I went to school at Naropa University, where a lot of meditation was part of the required curriculum (at least, when I was there; I have no idea what it's like now). I never experience the awake/asleep thing in connection with meditation, either at Naropa or in meditation practice outside the school, but I doubt that I could be in any way considered an advanced meditator.

Should be clear: not every advanced meditator experiences this and is not a prerequisite to be “advanced”. It would just not be unusual if it did happen.

You should try and play an audiobook before you lay down to rest and see if you can hear and remember what's being played. Echoing another comment describing this as similar to sleep paralysis, playing things while I'm "asleep" and recalling them once awake has led to successful results

I've been awake while asleep too, that's what sleep paralysis is. Sounds like it was a bit different for you, in that you didn't wake up to it, but it sounds like the same experience otherwise.

Right; in my case I would instead be awake but very tired, and I'd lie down and go to sleep without losing consciousness. The first time it happened I assumed it was a unique one-time experience, but it happened again several times.

It never happened, as far as I can remember, before I developed CFS. It never happened when I was not taking modafinil or armodafinil.

Sounds like multiple PhD theses/journal articles could be mined from CFS + modafinil.

I know what you mean, but I don't know how the heck you could arrange for just the right combination of large doses of modafinil and profound exhaustion at just the right times.

To give you some idea of how profound my fatigue was, let's start with the fact that I've been extremely sensitive to stimulants of any kind since I can remember. A can of coke past 8PM would keep me awake half the night. It's a trait that I apparently inherited from my mother and passed on to my daughter.

After I developed CFS, I could take a full dose of an amphetamine and sleep like a baby. I know because amphetamines were one of the alternatives my physician tried for controlling my sleepiness and attention problems.

Modafinil and armodafinil are the drugs that worked for me. By the way, please don't anyone assume that they'll do the same thing for you that they did for me. Everybody's different. Talk to your doctor, not some random internet storyteller.

Is it the caffeine or the sugar when you drink the can of coke or both?

I've found sugar to be way worse for my insomnia than anything else. Caffeine does play a role but excess sugar really revs me up ironically.

It was definitely the caffeine. For example, a can of Diet Coke was just as bad. I also know from experience with other stimulants that I was just extremely sensitive to stimulants in general (and so is my mother, and so is my daughter).

Not anymore, though; not since I developed CFS.

Are you actively seeking replacement ideas for underlying causes of the CFS, or are you good with what's established?

I guess I would say that I'm interested in a desultory way, but without urgency.

I've achieved a good adaptation to it, and my life proceeds mostly as if I didn't have it now, as long as I observe some rules: regular schedule, good nutrition, regular low-impact exercise. (If my exercise gets too high-impact then I cross into the kind of fatigue I cannot easily recover from.)

I do follow science and medical news related to it. The present state of affairs as I currently understand it is that it's still a syndrome rather than a disease, which basically means it's a big bag of symptoms without an agreed-upon underlying cause or mechanism. There's some evidence that ties it somehow to the Epstein-Barr virus (and, perhaps coincidentally, one of my kids had mononucleosis in the months before I developed the syndrome). There's also some evidence that suggests that susceptibility to it is heritable. Some researchers have hypothesized that it's an epigenetic disorder--that is, a genetic disease that is activated by an environmental trigger (such as a viral infection--a large fraction of CFS cases start with a viral infection).

Someone published some work that claims that folks with CFS have distinctively abnormal calcium metabolism, which might account for the difficulty recovering from fatigue.

There are still some people who think it's psychosomatic, or mostly psychosomatic, too.

That's about as much as I remember off the top of my head. As I say, I'm interested, but not urgently so. I seem to have found my accommodation.

I could be wrong but the experience you're describing sounds like lucid dreaming.

No, it's different. I'm an experienced lucid dreamer. I'm also an experienced practitioner of shamanic drumming and the associated waking dream states. It's not the same as that, either.

I have several serious sleep issues including insomnia (not usually due to racing thoughts, just inability to sleep) and circadian issues. What you are describing sounds like what I call "half sleeping", although I can always move if I try (I'll also usually unintentionally wake myself up rather quickly when lucid dreaming and can then move almost immediately; I definitely do not have sleep paralysis, although possibly it is similar but not being able to move). This happens to me quite a lot, maybe even almost daily (sometimes multiple times). I think at least some cases of "day dreaming" are a similar state as well.

Both going to sleep and waking up I often notice this state; when going to sleep, I'll either stay that way long enough to actually get to sleep (usually only a few minutes I think, possibly 15-30 minutes at most on rare occasions) or unfortunately I often unintentionally wake myself up from that state (on those occasions it feels a bit like I have a fear of sleep). After I have slept for a while I am more commonly in that state for 15-30 minutes at a time and maybe sometimes longer, it is hard to remember (total time a day can be longer but I will fully wake up or sleep for a while in between). My memory for sleep related stuff is likely much better than most people due to the decades of insomnia, however it still isn't that good (nor is my memory in general after so much sleep trouble). I think my sense of time is fairly accurate in that state and it is often how I decide to consider it half sleeping or sleeping for my sleep log (I'll often look at a clock before it happens and if the next time I look at the clock it is a fair amount later than I expect then I was likely sleeping, although sometimes when near sleep I've looked at the clock and clearly seen a different time than it actually is so that might be the issue at times as well; the clock thing is not just lucid dreaming since it often happens when I'm standing up on the way to the bathroom). My understanding is the way sleep is defined it is possible at times to maintain awareness between being awake and in light non-REM sleep so I am also not 100% sure that "half sleeping" isn't technically sleep.

My understanding based partly on looking at some research (although I'm hazy in my memory at the moment so definitely look into any particular point if interested with the idea that I might be remembering incorrectly) is that there are a number of independent processes that are usually orchestrated fairly well into what we call sleep. There are a few parts of the brain that coordinate sleep and circadian rhythm, including a part of the hypothalamus. IIRC what we consider to be falling asleep may be closely connected to a state of the thalamus that is exclusive with being awake, but other parts of the brain can indepenently be more like being awake or more like the various non-REM sleep stages. This can happen the opposite way as well with "microsleep". When particularly sleep deprived I'll often involuntarily nod my head down a bit and microsleep in what feels like much of my brain while generally still aware of my surroundings. I think microsleeps may also cause the loss of working memory at times when sleep deprived and various other short term oddities. REM sleep is a different thing entirely with movement inhibition based in the brain stem and where the brain is otherwise mostly in its awake state. While dreaming is more common in REM sleep it is yet another independent mechanism that seems related to dopamine. The memory changes with sleep might be yet another usually connected but distinct mechanism. Sleep also isn't just neurally activated but there are a variety of endogenous sleep promoting and wake promoting substances. So definitely more complicated and messy than we usually think of it with a collection of sometimes mutually exclusive states none of which fully correspond with what we consider to be sleeping.

This all sounds pretty much consistent with my guesses about what was happening. In particular, I'm predisposed to agree with your idea that sleep is a bunch of different processes that are normally well-coordinated. I hypothesize that the combination of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the doses of modafinil disrupted that coordination, resulting in my experience of being awake and asleep at the same time.

Of course, just because we both came up with similar hypotheses doesn't mean we're right, but I'll take it as a tentative working theory for now.

Do me a favor some time and try to read through the scotoma, if you remember to. I think that I would have just assumed I couldn't do it if I hadn't been reading something really interesting when the scotoma started. It's only because it came on while I was already reading that I discovered that I was able to continue.

If you remember to try it, the results will be interesting no matter which way they turn out.

I have migraine once or twice a year, and the most recent attack indeed interrupted my reading, quite simply did not see the letters through the zigzag. As it gradually covered the focal point of my vision I was trying to "squint" mentally but eventually gave up. There was no followup headache, just a slight vertigo.

Interesting data point. I just have the one experience to report, so far, but I fully intend to test it out again the next time I have an episode.

Not the GP, but I've tried to read through mine before but I've also focused my vision on the edges where the scotoma hasn't reached. I'll try to go "through" it next time...

Yes this seems very worthwhile to try. It seems like a research topic to me.

There is a condition which manifests itself as complete blindness, but if you ask a person to try to guess what's in front of them they usually "guess" correctly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

Interesting. I get these scotomas about every 6 months or so, usually lasting for 30 or so minutes. I was told they were called "ocular migraines", and a cursory glance over the internet doesn't seem to help me differentiate between the two, although I will say that [0] is a very accurate depiction of how it looks when it happens to me.

I normally just take a break from whatever I'm doing and go for a walk. The first time it ever happened to me was the first day of a literature class--that was an awkward event, explaining to my teacher that I couldn't read at the moment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scintillating_scotoma.gif

(another migraineur chiming in here)

It's a common misconception. What you're calling "ocular migraines" are more accurately referred to as "migraines with aura without headache", sometimes called "silent migraines". You can get actual ocular migraines as well, but those affect the eye (or optic nerve), and as such, are limited to the eye. Scintillating scotomas caused by migraine auras are visible with your eyes closed, and look the same in both eyes.

The image you linked is what I'm calling "flickering". My full-blown scintillating scotoma is much more vivid and fully-formed. In the incident I'm reporting, it was a 3D physical-looking structure of triangular prisms made of white light, with zebra stripes of utter blackness sweeping rapidly along them, surrounded by an aura that looked like a cross between the sun's corona and the aurora borealis.

These links are closer to what mine look like:

https://i.imgur.com/mbW2UZY.jpg

https://optometrui.tumblr.com/image/132973031235

Your first link is exactly what it looks like to me (except pulsing/shimmering). I can usually sense it before it starts then it starts as a small aberration and gradually grows to encompass almost my entire vision. Extremely unsettling the first time it happened.

Yeah, mine are always pulsing, shimmering, whirling, or moving in some other way--most often more than one way at once. My earliest ones were like a black hole in the middle of my vision with an aurora borealis slowly radiating ouward while color changes whirled around it at high speed.

Fascinating. The first image is exactly what mine look like but I was told (by a doc) that they are ocular migraines.

I'm no expert; perhaps when I see those, I'm having an ocular migraine.

If it's actually an ocular migraine (which takes place in the eye) rather than a scintillating scotoma (which takes place in the brain), that's a possible explanation for why I could continue reading. The UK's NHS says they tend to happen in just one eye, so if I was having an ocular migraine, it might have left my vision unobstructed in the other eye.

On the other hand, if that's the explanation, then I would sort of expect to have consciously experienced seeing the book while I was reading it, and I didn't--or if I did, that's not the way I remember it.

Of course, memory is untrustworthy, and it's also possible that the vividness of the ocular migraine might have persuaded my brain to tell me I couldn't see the book even though I could.

So ocular migraine is a solid alternative candidate to explain my experience. If I have another scotoma, I'll see if I can figure out a way to determine which thing is going on. Maybe closing one eye and then the other.

One time I was at a friend's house with my laptop and lowered the screen light during the night but forgot about it. The very next day, while working, I started to get that "aura" migraine.

In general, when this occurs, I stop doing whatever I'm doing, take a ibuprofen pill and go to bed for 20 minutes. After that, I have a massive headache but no aura.

What was odd is that the very next day, I got the same migraine, again! This rarely occurs to me (two days in row).

It was later that I realized that the screen light was low and that might be an explanation about why I got two migraines in two days.

Hopefully it can help someone else here :)

I get these every couple of months!

Sometimes with accompanying headache, sometimes without. That picture is a great representation of what I see. Although I would say its usually more silvery and shiny. Dunno what triggers it, I've had it sitting watching TV, tryjng to work on computer (which becomes impossible) and just sitting in a restaurant eating lunch.

Normally lasts half an hour or so. Also sometimes I can be left feeling fuzzy and foggy for a day or so after.

Like you say reading just becomes impossible!

Have you found any good medication that helps when they trigger?

I get these at my center of vision when I focus close (less than half a meter) for a few minutes. They're annoying because I can't do work that requires me to look very close for too long, but seem to have no other symptom, and no doctor has figured out what they are.

> I thought about how to explain my experience. The best hypothesis I've come up with so far is that the neurological process of seeing and the neurological process of being consciously aware of what I'm seeing are not the same thing. They're independent processes. The scotoma prevented me from subjectively experiencing seeing the book, but did not prevent me from actually seeing it, nor from correctly interpreting what I was seeing.

This sounds similar to the phenomenon of blindsight:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

> they're often made up of several more or less independent processes

I’ve recently read “ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins and that is essentially what he argues. That our neo cortex had consists of millions of a similar structure and many of them fire up at the same time.

Fascinating book, would highly recommend.

I've never experienced what you have but it's fascinating.

> our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume

I arrived at the same conclusion from different experiences. In my late teens and early 20s I worked for several years as a professional magician doing close-up slight of hand magic in nightclubs, restaurants, bars, parties, trade shows and corporate events. I performed for a lot of different types of people in different contexts and noticed how people would describe an effect they'd just seen me do to a friend who didn't see it. Their memory of something they'd just seen moments before was substantially different than what had actually happened.

This is unsurprising because my performance was carefully designed and rehearsed to create that misperception. What is surprising was the extreme detail and certainty of erroneous perceptions even from highly intelligent expert observers who were 100% focused on my every action with maximum effort. I found this super interesting and spent quite a bit of time exploring it with various experiments and pondering the implications which led me to the same realization you had about our conscious perceptions being less accurate and more variable than we internally experience them to be. In short, our memories can seem like a video recording to us but that's just a very convincing self-illusion.

In recent decades psychologists like Richard Wiseman have published research documenting this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM

I learned a bit of hobby sleight of hand as a kid, but never enough to work as a pro.

I did later learn another set of similar skills, though, and owned a business in that field for a while: martial arts.

Some martial arts are like stage magic in that they work in part by training yourself to do things that most people find surprising because they don't know how you do them or what training it requires to pull them off.

Not all martial arts use techniques like that, but some of them do, and some of the tricks of the trade make pretty good party tricks.

One example of a party trick that I've witnessed (and even learned to reproduce, poorly):

I know a guy who can take a dart in his hand, hold it with his arm fully extended, and, without bending his elbow, stick it in a dartboard from normal playing distance. It looks like magic: the dart flies across the room and sticks in the board.

If you have the relevant kind of training, then you know exactly how he's doing it (although, simply knowing it doesn't make it easy to reproduce!), but if you don't, then odds are you don't believe it's even possible.

I'd recommend the book "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sacks which I seem to remember digs into some phenomonon like these.

There are very interesting differences between certain lesions in the left side of the brain, and in the right side. For instance there are some people that are blind, but do not believe that they are, and vice versa, which lines up with your experience.

This is a great look at just got complicated the brain is. What we experience and are conciously aware of, is only a fraction of the activity in one's brain. People that are convinced their limbs aren't their own, people that lose the comprehension of the concept of 'the left side'(ie of their body), people that are convinced they are stuck in the year 1990-- the brain works in a very specific way and damage to certain areas can derange the whole process and create unexpected effects. Often this is losing access to functionality that we think "just is"-- when in fact such functionality is the result of a complex integrated circuit in the brain.

I've read the book. It's an old favorite. Thanks for suggesting it, though.

Oliver Sacks was always one of my favorites to hear on RadioLab. He was just a joy to listen to.

So really out there, but I've just watched "Your Lie in April" anime and the piano artist has some kind of anxiety attacks while playing the piano, and the symptoms are very similar to what you describe; suddenly things turn gray under-water-like and start turning and his view/hearing of what he's playing disappear, see min 1:32 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41tIxqieC0c

I couldn't find any illness associated to the condition of not being able to hear yourself/the notes disappearing while playing, but what you are describing, losing yourself while reading as the world closes around the words in a kaleidoscope-style prism, sounds really similar.

As someone with epilepsy, the divorce between what my body is doing/experiencing and what my brain perceives or is asking for are precisely how you describe it.

It leads to a lot of out of body experiences and dissociation. As a weird side effect I also mostly only have lucid dreams now.

One thing I found odd is that there's entire groups of people who chase this kind of mental state. Usually through a state of psychedelic drugs to induce a state of altered mind. It's really odd to me because I hate the feeling myself, being forced into it. Though I suppose it's like anything, where if it's in small doses it's a fun novelty for some.

Anyway, my epilepsy has greatly affected my perception of my own perception abilities.

Very interesting indeed. This seems worthwhile to share with the medical research profession. Although perhaps it is already pretty well known and understood.

A simple demonstration of how complex our eyesight is: put your hand between your eyes, touching your nose, and compare what you see with the left eye closed and the right eye closed. On one side, knuckles, on the other, the palm. Yet when you open your eyes, your brain seamlessly fuses the images together and makes your hand largely disappear.

I have migraines fairly often and had a similar experience during a job interview. It was bizarre and troubling because at first I thought it was a floater, then I realized it was in the same place in both eyes! It grew over the course of a few minutes until it completely surrounded my visual field, then it faded away.

Did you get the job?

It's fascinating that you were still able to read without seeing! I've had migraines about every two months for the past 12 years, and with very few exceptions they've always followed the same pattern: 30 minutes of scotoma (small to large to small), 30 minutes of peace, then a strong headache for about an hour. I usually still have a mild headache the next day.

I've had the migraines mostly while sitting an the computer or reading, but it seemed impossible to me to continue to read since the zig zags were right above the letters, and frankly quite distracting. Because of that, I've never really tried to continue.

It seems weird to say that, but I'm almost looking forward to the next migraine solely to test if I can still read if I really try. That would be awesome! Thank you for your description!

Post your results, if you remember! I'm interested to know what happens.

My N is 1; I've never yet had the chance to test it a second time. I'm actually looking forward to my next scotoma for that reason!

I've also suffered from what I've understood to be ocular migraines, characterized by the intense ocular disruptions. I went to the ER when the first one hit, because I thought I was going blind.

> It was disappointed. I didn't want to stop reading. I was enjoying the book. So I decided to keep reading until the scotoma made it impossible to continue.

I do the same thing now. I had one come on recently when I was lifting weights. I just decided to power through it. It was perhaps the most intense aural disruption I've experienced but the typical after effects (which, in my case, tend to be very bad and render me useless for 2-4 hours following an "attack") were almost completely subdued. I recall that I felt like I had a slight hangover and was able to fully function after it passed.

Generally speaking, scintillating scotomas don't fill the entire field of vision. They can do, and when they're caused by migraine auras they tend to grow and then shrink again within a 20-60 minute window. I can certainly read when I'm experiencing one. I can continue to work if I really want to, but I find that having a coffee and taking a break is much more comfortable.

Migraine auras suck, but are pretty fascinating. Depending on which part of the brain they affect, different symptoms can manifest. Visual auras à la scintillating scotoma are probably the most common, but slurred speech can happen as well, or reduced sensation in half the body, probably other things as well ..

I didn't mention it, but I really like them. I mean, they're inconvenient, and they make me nervous because for most of my life they were followed by the horrible parts of a migraine, but the scotomas themselves are just so beautiful and interesting that I like them anyway. And in recent years I've been able to enjoy them without so much of the horrible parts afterward.

They certainly are interesting to "watch", but honestly, the first time I've had a scotoma, I was scared I was going blind. I remember thinking whether I'd carelessly looked into a laser at work or something, even though I was sitting at my desk reading Wikipedia when the aura came.

And almost without exception, the visual auras are followed by immense headaches, so I personally would not say I like then very much :D

Is the scotoma similar to the effects that you get by applying pressure to your eyeball?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene#Mechanical_stimulati...

Or is it quite different?

Pretty different. I used to like to induce pressure phosphenes. I found that a hazard of it was that more pressure produced more spectacular light shows, but that direction led to sore eyes.

Mine grow to fill a good chunk of my entire vision and never shrink. Instead the arc continues to grow until it is outside my field of vision and therefore no longer obstructive.

This is also what I experience.

Very interesting!

About 8 years ago, I had many migraines (a few per year but I would essentially be unable to do anything for a couple of hours). Many of those were the results of being in a noisy environment or high physical effort.

I knew whenever I was going to get a migraine because I got the auras (couldn't see in front of me, but if I remember correctly I still had my peripheral vision) and couldn't feel the very tip of my thumbs and my tongue (yes, apparently you can lose this, too). A few minutes after those feelings, sure enough I would get the migraine. When in that state, I have a big headache, can't see much, nausea.

Hopefully other people will relate!

It's been the opposite for me actually. I've had migraines for over 12 years now, and they appear mostly during relaxing, quiet phases a couple of days after stressful events (or prolonged phases of stress).

For example, my wife and I worked overtime and through the weekends for three weeks before our anniversary, because we wanted everything done by then. We went to a resort for our anniversary, and sure enough, on the second day of relaxation I've had an episode.

"A scotoma is a blind or blank spot in the visual field. "

Oh, I've had those - though not as lasting or opaque as they sound for you. I always thought it was one step prior to the "blinding" pain level I'll get from different nerve compression syndromes and injuries I have/had; for obvious reasons I try to manage my life to limit agitating the nerves and to not reach the blinding pain level - where for at least a few moments I can't see or don't experience anything but the pain; quite the short circuit mechanism to grab one's full attention.

Thank you for teaching me something new! I used to get these more frequently but just had one last week for the first time in ages. Mine look quite a bit like [0] and I never knew what they were or that they had a name.

Mine used to happen a bit when playing sport so I always associated them with dehydration, but it seems like that’s probably not it.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scintillating_zigzag...

> has led me to adopt the working hypothesis that many of our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume, and that they're often made up of several more or less independent processes

After finishing my CompSci degree I was bored and did some first year psychology degree courses and that was also one of my main takeaways (I don’t mean it was an original take, just one of the main takeaways I remember from these courses).

See for example split brain individuals[0] where the connection between the two hemispheres is severed/damaged - up to a point this was a common surgery to treat epilepsy a decade ago.

Patients seemed fine on first glance, but ultimately there were interesting incongruences [1]. I’m probably doing injustice to the description of the experiment so please read the linked page, but essentially they created a situation where each eye saw a different image (e.g. one related to chickens and another to snow) and then asked to choose with different hands from a set of pictures the picture most related (e.g. an egg or a snowman). The right hand (connected to the right hemisphere and thus the left eye) chose one thing connected to what the left eye saw and the right hand chose another.

Let’s say the left eye saw snow and the right saw chickens. The most interesting part is when the patients were asked about their choices, since only the left hemisphere can talk (the speech center). So they explained why the left hand chose something correctly, but made up some unrelated explanation about their right hand choices (“eggs are white like snow”)! In other more horrific terms, the right hemisphere had some level of thinking/reasoning going on but could not speak since it now had no mouth.

So, in healthy individuals there’s definitely syncing between the two hemispheres and different centers going on, but as any complex system I’m sure there are hiccups.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

[1] https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm

More than interesting. Thank you for sharing this experience. I’ve had mild scintillating scotoma a few times but didn’t know what they were, and never had any other symptoms of migraine.

I'd say your luck was good, in that you didn't have to experience the worst symptoms of migraine, but it was bad in that you didn't get to see some of the spectacular visions that I've been gifted with.

You can find some kind of experimental evidence for your hypothesis that " the neurological process of seeing and the neurological process of being consciously aware of what I'm seeing are not the same thing" in this book: Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by Ramachandran, Blakeslee

I have struggled explaining what the auras looks like, but for me they look like confetti, in particular the shiny stuff used to celebrate sports championships. Sorry for piggybacking on your fascinating account, but unless you experience it yourself, it is hard for non-affected people to imagine what it looks like.

Yes, there are many levels of perception (there is also blindsight), this can be studied by looking at what happens in neurological disorders like yours and more severe ones. Read the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife by Oliver Sacks if you find this kind of stuff interesting.

Read a fantastic book that makes the case for 'composite cognitive processes' called "Self Comes to Mind".

It touches upon the composite nature of sight and other senses and functions.

It's ultimate goal is putting forth a theory of how self naturally arises from the composite.

I did find this very interesting. When you experienced the Scotoma, was that combined with pain by the eyes? I get migraines from time to time, but could never imagine pushing through the inability to focus my eyes because it usually comes with pain/nausea.

In the incident I described, there was no pain.

The first migraine I remember was in my mid teens. It was extremely painful, with searing pain through my head and down through my torso. It felt as if someone had stuck a red-hot blade right through my head and into my body and was just holding it there.

Up into my early thirties, migraines continued to be very painful. Like you I often experienced both pain and nausea. Besides the knife through my body and the nausea, I often also experienced any kind of sensory input as painful. Hearing sounds was painful; seeing light was painful; tasting or smelling anything was painful; touching things was painful. During an attack I would generally just try to find a soft, quiet, dark, warm place to lie down until it went away.

Beginning in my late thirties, the painful and unpleasant aspects of the migraines began to diminish. By my forties, the attacks had become much less frequent, and when they occurred, they were much less painful.

The scotoma remained prominent, though. In my teens, it was generally a circular area of blackness surrounded by a rapidly-whirling multicolored aurora. It gradually changed over the years, going through several different shapes and color patterns. Most recently it's usually been brilliant white geometric shapes with rapidly-moving zebra stripes, turning slowly.

The scotoma has always been much more vivid than real vision. The shapes and colors are much much brighter, clearer, and more vivid than any real image I've ever seen.

Over the past fifteen years or so, the frequency is down to once every two or three years, and it's commonly just the scotoma for a little while, and none of the other symptoms, or perhaps a little minor discomfort in my torso and a little dizziness. Sometimes it's just a set of sensations that are really hard to describe--sort of just a hint of the feeling of falling, or a very faint experience of dizziness, together with an impression that part of my visual field is sort of starting to flicker randomly. Usually that flickering turns into the scotoma, but in some recent cases, I just have the flickering for a few minutes, and then nothing else.

In the incident I describe here, it was just the scotoma for a little while. (Sorry I'm not more specific about how long it lasts. I'd guess maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but my sense of time is kind of screwed up during an attack.)

If you're younger, maybe the trajectory of my migraine offers some hope. Mine have gotten much easier to take over the years. Maybe yours will, too.

I suffer from migraines from time to time, over the years I've found that some foods can trigger them, for example plant oils. I eat salad with olive oil and half an hour later I start getting these headaches that start at the eyes.

I’m sorry that you experience migraines, I have only experienced one in my life during a stressful stint in graduate school.

I lost, temporarily, the connection between what I wanted to say and the words that would come out. It was crazy.

Steven Pinker in “How the Mind Works” describes a bunch of phenomena that uncover how the brain is structured and how it processes information. The book doesn't quite have a lot of detail, but is pretty interesting nonetheless.

Take some acid and what you are describing regarding consciousness becomes fairly apparent. The amount of things that automatically happen or get filled in for us goes unnoticed until you get a chance to step outside of it for a while.

I can't say that I agree. I got pretty thoroughly familiar with several psychedelics in the late 70s and early 80s, and although I value those experiences to this day, they didn't teach me anything especially relevant to the scotoma or sleep/wake experiences I've reported.

Interesting. In my experience, I end up cleaning my house the next day, because I noticed that the light switch in my room isn't just a light switch, it's a dirty light switch. I'll see stains or smudges that I never noticed. Suddenly there are tons of details that I can see that just got smeared in "normal" waking life.

Well, I noticed a bunch of things during and after tripping, and some of it was even true, but I didn't ever notice that seeing and being aware of seeing were two separate and separable processes, and I didnt ever notice that I could be awake and asleep at the same time, not until the events I recounted here, both of which occurred years after I had, as they say, gotten the psychedelic message and then hung up the phone.

Well I'm glad you got the call.

Are you familiar with split-brain?[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

Yes, it was damn interesting. Thank you for sharing. Do you now try to read through all of your scotomas?

I will, but that incident was the last time I had a full-blown one.

Well that’s great to hear! May it be your last.

I'm sort of hoping I'll get another chance to try it. Obviously, I'd prefer another scotoma without the rest of the migraine, though!

You a mad lad, brah

These are called ocular migraines. I’ve had them since a kid, roughly once every two months or so.

what’s really interesting is after having heart surgery, I would have like 10 a day for weeks. Others in post-cardiac surgery message boards reported the same experience. It went back to normal frequency months after surgery, but definitely an unsolved mystery!

I used to suffer from these auras from 2005 to 2015. I never had one before, and they completely disappeared since then. I don't think they were ever followed by any headache, either.

A funny but related story: I was visiting Paray-le-Monial where there's a diorama about the visions of Saint Margaret-Mary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mary_Alacoque ), who is at the origin of the current cult of the "Sacred heart of Jesus".

In fact from the descriptions, it's very clear that the brilliant, shimmering lights that she related as her visions and revelations of the "Sacred Heart" were simply scintillating scotoma from her migraine, then followed with terrible access of headaches that she interpreted as her mystical ordeal from God.

It's amazing how her beliefs allowed her to turn migraines into sainthood. The ability to give meaning to unavoidable pain is a precious thing

wow you had described so well. Curious, what is the book? wondering if that is the confounding variable

Disappointingly, I don't remember the book for sure. I think it might have been one of the volumes of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which I re-read from time to time for pure pleasure.

Thats cool as hell thanks for sharing!

Hrm. I had similar experiences beginning a few weeks after a 'mild' TIA in the lower right part of my cerebellum in 2002. But it manifests itself slightly different. My whole field of view, both eyes disintegrates into something of a mix like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_puzzle or one side of an unsolved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Cube , 'scrambled' into about 250 to 400 fields.

Not quadratic, and not regular in a geometric way, more like leaves, roughly the shape of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombus

It starts as something like a fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyout within about a second, two at most, and then I'm having this 'screensaver effect' for about 30 seconds to a minute, or so.

Most fields are just scrambled into random positions, sometimes even jumping into others, while about a few dozen are impossible blacks or grays with vertigo inducing feelings, because they seem to jump back and forth between infinity and back. Really hard to describe.

Anyways, this absolutely messes with my orientation, and I shiver or even shake slightly.

However, I do not fall. One time this happened to me while carrying a cup of coffee on a saucer from the coffee machine in a conference room back to my seat. The cup clattered on the saucer because of my shaking, but I managed to put it down on the next table with a loud clack, and drop myself into some spare chair next to the wall.

Without spilling a single drop!

Witnesses described my moves as something like an industrial robot on fast-forward. Not fluent, but in fast and small consecutive steps. But I couldn't see!

Havn't had one of those for years now, also no debilitating pains, those came first. Thing is, I mostly had these when I felt under (time)pressure, stressed, angry. (I think)

For instance, bicycling fast somewhere to be there as arranged? Happened several times, full brake!

Bicycling fast, really pushing it, but just for fun? Never happened. (So far)

Really, really strange!

Funny thing is, MRIs decades later show nothing. According to the radio- and neurologists there arent even traces of something bad, and my brain has exceptionally good blood circulation.

Oh, back to language! At the time this happened I had trouble speaking in several ways. First to find words, then to form/speak them. But only in German, which IS my native language.

Not so in English!

Also I didn't really notice it at first, because I tend to not 'think in words', but mostly visual in pictures, movies, abstract mashups of these.

I also had ataxia, but not one-sided as usual, but right arm, and left leg.

Really, really strange. But mostly gone now.

Except for losing temper fast.

That stayed.

Can't have a better defence against BS though! :-)

That's all super interesting; thanks for the description!

It's probably totally unrelated to any of this, but I also think primarily (though not entirely) nonverbally, and expressing myself always involves translating nonverbal thoughts into words.

And, for what it's worth, I'm a native English speaker trained (but horribly out of practice) in German (and Latin and Mandarin and Tibetan and Hungarian and Greek and Esperanto and Lojban --don't ask me to communicate in any of them without several weeks of remedial practice!).

Wow. So many languages. I've got only English as second language. Sometimes I miss Russian and French to research old 'roads not taken' in programming languages, computer architecture, and general algorithms.

Latin and Greek would be good too, of course. For the classics, or classical education I didn't have. Went totally technical early on.

"Fachidiot", so to speak ;-)

On the other hand, you can talk with me in English, but I can't do much better than a young toddler in German, unless I first spend some serious time and effort to reacquire some fluency.

In my defense, I've had some decent fluency a couple of time in the past. I ran into a German couple in Athens once and we had a nice conversation. They said nice things about my German :-).

But now in all those languages except English I'm just a dabbler.

At least I know that I can acquire some fluency; I've been able at different points in the past to carry on basic conversations in German and Hungarian and Mandarin, and read some of the easier classical texts in Latin and Greek and Tibetan.

The idea of improving my skills in any of them (or all of them!) is appealing enough for me to occasionally work on them (especially on Latin and Greek), but my attention inevitably gets captured by my numerous other interests, and my language skills fade again.

Worse, there's a long list of other languages that I think are really interesting, and that I would no doubt acquire if only it were quick and easy enough. As it is, though, I mostly just read about languages because they're so interesting. Well, and construct them. Conlanging is a hobby, too.

Hrm. I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore.

Btw., the English lessons I had in school were rather boring and uninspiring. I didn't really learn it that way, that happened when I had to read Neuromancer by William Gibson, and didn't get it. So I bought a small to middle dictionary from Langenscheid and read it again with the dictionary at hand. Then it somehow clicked for me.

That worked for reading, hearing not so much. That came later by watching movies, news(BBC/CNN), listening to radio(BFBS), and having at least some fluency in speaking even later, because of work.

Nowadays I'm only caught slightly off guard when someone is unexpectedly speaking to me in English in daily life, like people asking for the way, to some location, or things like that. Sometimes I need one to two seconds until it registers what they said, or asked. Sometimes not at all, instantly.

Oh, and under stress my German is getting worse, I'm at a loss for words, have to really 'search' for them, while I could speak it in English without any problem.

So strange...

"I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore."

Should be "I had that interest when I was younger, but not anymore."

I thought you might like the correction; forgive me if I'm wrong. In my experience, differences in the idiomatic use of verb tenses is one of the more difficult things about learning languages.

If you hear a native English speaker say, "I've been younger," then what they're saying is, "I'm old."

Yah. I can do better. But not when being awake for 23hrs, reading, reading, reading. Not doomscrolling. And switching to HN from time to time.

Good night :-)

Sleep well!