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Comment by wozer | Hacker News Reader

> Migraine can even drive full-blown visual hallucinations similar to the ‘reflections of the living light’ painted by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess who was thought to have experienced a condition that is now called migraine with aura.

I don't think the aura effects are usually considered hallucinations?

I get mild migraines sometimes, with hardly noticeable headache, but with aura. In a way, it's pretty cool. You can directly perceive the abnormal brain activity and how it develops in real time. (I get the classic zigzag lines wandering across the field of vision.)

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I also have migraine with aura. There are visual effects but also when I am looking into the mirror I can't see half of my face and give this is a wrong perception of reality you might consider it a hallucination?

When I have aura it's always morbidly fascinating to me how a part of my vision is not black, but it's just "missing"

Same, the fortification aura is really kind of amazing, putting aside the debilitating pain that's quickly approaching. It's really weird to have a part of your vision just "not there" as opposed to being black. It's even stranger when looking at a face or some recognizable object, and half of it disappears into nothingness while the other half still exists. Fun to play with.

the first time i had this, everyone's nose was missing. for ten seconds it was funny and then i hid in a bathroom stall at work, and texted my wife goodbye. i was positive i was about to die. its really stressful to have bodies.

my mom used to get these and said it was like "seeing dots"

anecdotally of course too, but is it more common for women? I've only ever known 3-4 people that got these kinds of migraines and they were all women.

I sometimes but not always get an aura before a migraine.

Which was pretty fun the first time i got an aura, as i was working in a chemistry lab. I described what was happening (loss of vision, flashes of light, rapidly oscillating black and white patterns) to this greybeard lab technician and within 5 minutes the entire lab was evacuated, out of fear of some weird chemical poisoning us all.

Yes, its much more common for women, its rare for men.

I happen to be a man who gets migraines with aura, but I do think they’re more common in women. They started when I was 14.

I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.

Needless to say, the first one scared the crap out of my mother and I.

I may or may not have a headache when this happens.

Neat, eh? I was talking to a guy who suffered from seizures in college, and apparently his “aura” is very similar, and I've always wondered if there was some connection since my father also suffers from epilepsy.

Migraines and epilepsy have a lot in common, including some symptoms and triggers. Drugs and things that lower seizure threshold also tend to cause migraines. Some epilepsy drugs also act as migraine prophylactics.

> I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.

I’ve experienced migraines for years, but last year had my first instance that messed with speech. It certainly unsettled the friend I was with at the time.

I'm male and I get visual auras with migraines (not often, only once or twice a year). It's like a small area of old TV static or (as I call them) "dead pixels" in my vision. It's usually centered right in the middle of my vision, so reading becomes impossible but I could do something else.

It usually spreads a little bit before dissipating. They can happen with or before the actual migraine pain.

AI hype terminology? Should be a visual effect.

Hallucination is a medical term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination

The usage in relation to AI is a reference to the medical term, not the other way around.

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