silicon-pizza

Cool! I might have experienced this before and mistook it for floaters. Thanks for the new knowledge.

Floaters are particles floating around in your eye's vitreous fluid. I have them, but I only see them in rare circumstances when sunlight is shining into my eyes at exactly the right angle.

There is also a disfunction of your cornea, "Fuchs' corneal dystrophy", which can cause glare, halos and streaks, especially at night. I just found this by googling.

Wikipedia defines visual snow as a neurological condition, and I don't wish to conflate that with floaters or corneal problems.

I can experience afterimages if I look at a strong coloured light for a while, then immediately look at a white piece of paper. I'll see an after image in the complementary colour, because the image is temporarily "burned in" to my photoreceptors. I understand that this is a universal experience.

What I'm looking for is different names for each of these distinct visual experiences, if they have different underlying mechanisms.

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.

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.