Blue field entoptic phenomenon

The problem is that if you’re focused on trying to “unsee” something, you’re actually going to see more of it. And anyway, “unseeing” isn’t a thing that exists.

Instead, you need to let yourself get comfortable with seeing it. That means looking at the clouds anyway, accepting that you may also notice the static. The idea is to get some enjoyment from the clouds, however imperfect it may be. Try to pick some specific aspect of the clouds to appreciate or notice, and do this for a few minutes at a time.

When attempting this, you might find yourself thinking things like “I wish I had never seen this” and “will it ever go away?” That’s normal, but put your attention back on the clouds and whatever feature you’ve planned to appreciate. Over time, you may find that the blue field thing doesn’t really annoy you like it used to. You might even forget to notice it sometimes.

I've always thought it was cool: you can see blood cells moving in your own retina! Amazing!

(I always assumed they were blood cells — only just now discovered that it's only the white blood cells you can see.)

They're caused by little bits of gunk floating in the fluid inside your eyeball.

> They may appear as spots, threads, or fragments of "cobwebs", which float slowly before the observer's eyes, and move especially in the direction the eyes move.

The thumbnail sketch of the idea is: we know from glucose uptake studies that there's basically no way our brain is actively synthesizing every sensory stimulus at all times. The hypothesis is that the brain creates a sort of "predictive map" of reality (which is what we perceive), and then uses sensory stimulus to listen for variance from that predictive model. So most of the time, what you perceive is a hallucination of reality that maps close enough to what's going on, and only when sensory input starts to deviate from that predictive model does the brain dedicate the resources to "read" the sensory input and meld it into an update of the prediction to match reality.

There was a Kyle Hill video on this recently. He also notes that there's an easy experiment you can do to observe your brain doing sensory fusion: touch your finger to your nose. We know, physically, that the signal from the finger takes way longer than the signal from the nose to reach the brain, but we perceive the two touches as a single instantaneous event that happens at the same time.

They are produced when a sudden shift in physical pressure on the retinal cells occurs. Blood pressure shifts are the cause when standing up or sitting down, and is typically a concern. They can also be produced by physical impacts against the eyes or head.

You are much more susceptible to noticing it if you have Visual Snow Syndrome, which is basically as if your eyesight has a film grain overlaid on top of it.

What is much more interesting about VSS is that you often also have hiss or ringing in your ears similar to tinnitus (but not as severe or annoying), crowd deafness, and you are also more susceptible to ADHD-like deficits and symptoms, which must mean the underlying cause for VSS is some kind of filtering problem in the brain.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation can offer relief, if it is indeed a problem for the person.

One of the benefits is an extremely vivid imagination. Example: when you tell an ordinary person "imagine a beautiful woman on the beach", they'll just imagine a woman of their particular taste, on a generic beach. Maybe they'll notice the color of the beach towel. But with less anchored imagination, you'll imagine the type of sand on the beach, the stance of the sun, the fabric of her bikini and if it is new or well-worn, jewelry including engraved brands, foliage, and all of that within a split second and without it taking effort or thinking. You can continue let the imagination run amok and you might imagine the whole city attached to the beach and the stories of other people that live there. Doesn't make for very productive workdays though :)