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Big Scary Owl
Oct 1, 2014

by Fluffdaddy

Colonel Cancer posted:

So like if someone has schizophrenia you just scoop out their eyes with a surgical spoon and they're ok?

Fascinating

I guess it just works on people that are blind from birth but I bet no one tried your idea yet either

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Amarcarts
Feb 21, 2007

This looks a lot like suffering.
Nothing?

Big Scary Owl
Oct 1, 2014

by Fluffdaddy

BUT WHAT IS "NOTHING"? HOW DOES IT FEEL TO SEE NOTHING??

stratdax
Sep 14, 2006

Big Scary Owl posted:

BUT WHAT IS "NOTHING"? HOW DOES IT FEEL TO SEE NOTHING??

They don't see nothing.

They don't see at all! Like I keep saying, it's like trying to see out of your elbow. There's no optical input. I mean you can only see what's in your field of vision right? It's not like your field of vision is surrounded by black where you can't see, your field of vision isn't surrounded at all. So imagine your field of vision got smaller and smaller until it's a tiny pinprick, then there's just nothing.

OP unless you sever your optical nerves you're not going to be able to internalize the feeling, you can only understand it academically. Much like the reverse case, a blind person trying to fully understand the feeling of being able to see. It's impossible.

stratdax fucked around with this message at 05:16 on May 9, 2022

BigBadSteve
Apr 29, 2009

If a goon walked towards a particularly sensitive blind person, the blind person could form a mental picture of the goon based on the smell, kind of like bat sonar.

Grem
Mar 29, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 17 days!
I actually have a blind roommate I'm gonna let them answer:

Ljflhdhfflufludttur jfufuflysluscpu vidd

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine
Elentor should post more, this is extremely interesting. Curious if blind people hallucinate visuals, like you might for sounds in an anechoic chamber.

I have no sense of smell (possibly my whole life) and sometimes imagine what a rose "would" smell like, or bacon or whatever. It's pretty infuriating when people gush about scents around me and reflexively apologize because I'm anosmic (I don't care, why apologize?), then refuse to explain anything when I ask how it makes them feel. "It's impossible to say!!! It's just *an apple*, you know?" "But a blind person can learn color theory, and you can tell them something is red right?"

Nope, can't conceive of that. Smell just "is". WTF?

Wendigee
Jul 19, 2004

I'm wondering what it would be like to trip blind. I'm sure this has happened and is documented somewhere I'll take a look.

[edit]:https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-blind-people.html

Mr. Pentagon was born blind. He did not perceive vision, with or without LSD. Instead, under the influence of psychedelics, he had strong auditory and tactile hallucinations, including an overlap of the two in a form of synesthesia, according to the report.

"I never had any visual images come to me. I can't see or imagine what light or dark might look like," Mr. Blue Pentagon told the researchers. But under the influence of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as acid), sounds felt unique and listening to music felt like being immersed in a waterfall, he said

Wendigee fucked around with this message at 05:43 on May 9, 2022

GreatGreen
Jul 3, 2007
That's not what gaslighting means you hyperbolic dipshit.
I don't see black when I close my eyes. I see all kinds of transparent, slowly changing colors with vibrating edges against a dark background.
I think it's mostly the artifacts of the light from what I've been looking at hitting my eyes from when they were open. After a while the colors fade away and then everything really does go black.

As for being blind? Well, you know how your body gets that special weightless, lifting feeling when you fly around like Peter Pan? Or the sinking, hazy feeling you get when you travel back and fourth through time? Oh you don't know those feelings and have no sense of what that's like? Probably similar to how blind people think about seeing.

GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 05:47 on May 9, 2022

stratdax
Sep 14, 2006

Analytic Engine posted:

Curious if blind people hallucinate visuals, like you might for sounds in an anechoic chamber.

Could see at one point but became blind, yes. And apparently it's scary as poo poo for them when it happens.
Blind from birth, no. Not on drugs or in dreams.
Here's an account from a blind from birth guy who took plenty of lsd: https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-blind-people.html

edit lol beaten.

GreatGreen posted:


As for being blind? Well, you know how your body gets that special weightless, lifting feeling when you fly around like Peter Pan? Oh you don't know that feeling and have no sense of what that's like? Probably similar to how blind people think about seeing.

I think even that's a bad example because everybody's been on a roller coaster and can imagine going weightless. We interact with gravity and can imagine its absence and have a frame of reference.
But trying to describe sight to a blind person is impossible because it's a completely different sense from anything they've experience before. Like try to imagine a completely new and foreign sense for sighted people, and describe it. Like if we had a sense that could perceive time or magnetic fields. It would be gibberish.

stratdax fucked around with this message at 05:54 on May 9, 2022

Wendigee
Jul 19, 2004

stratdax posted:

Could see at one point but became blind, yes. Blind from birth, no. Not on drugs or in dreams.
Here's an account from a blind from birth guy who took plenty of lsd: https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-blind-people.html

edit lol beaten.

sorry lol, i edited it in to my post up, anyway, if you missed that this is the same article and its interesting... he kind of gets a syntehesia like thing but he has no idea if it is even similar because how could he. Strong auditory and tactile hallucinations seem to be the major part of the experience.

Nigmaetcetera
Nov 17, 2004

borkborkborkmorkmorkmork-gabbalooins

Analytic Engine posted:

Elentor should post more, this is extremely interesting. Curious if blind people hallucinate visuals, like you might for sounds in an anechoic chamber.

I have no sense of smell (possibly my whole life) and sometimes imagine what a rose "would" smell like, or bacon or whatever. It's pretty infuriating when people gush about scents around me and reflexively apologize because I'm anosmic (I don't care, why apologize?), then refuse to explain anything when I ask how it makes them feel. "It's impossible to say!!! It's just *an apple*, you know?" "But a blind person can learn color theory, and you can tell them something is red right?"

Nope, can't conceive of that. Smell just "is". WTF?

Smell is just the sense of taste but in the nose and not the mouth.

sigher
Apr 22, 2008

My guiding Moonlight...



syntaxfunction posted:

I have a fun neurological disorder that when my brain gets overwhelmed it shuts down that processing part because it can't handle it. I mostly get it with auditory processing but sometimes visual (rarely).

It's a thing where if there's a tonne of sustained loud noise or light and especially if they're conflicting sources my brain sorts of breaks down and just gives up. And I just go deaf temporarily. I've only lost vision once when there was a poo poo tonne of strobe lights in different colours around at a show.

It's loving hard to describe. Silence is not the same as no sound. Walking down a silent street is fine and even relaxing. Walking down the road to get a soft drink at night goes from mundane to terrifying when you can't actually perceive sound. A group of dudes just laughing and having fun is normally whatever, but I can't hear so I don't know what they're saying, if they're laughing or screaming. I can't hear if someone is right behind me or next to me. Suddenly a key thing I rely on is just gone for a while.

The one time I went blind was the same. It's not silence, and it's not black. It's just absence. My experience is not the same as the one in OP tho, since mine is simply my brain refusing to process those signals. But poo poo it hosed up.

I have something like this but with migraines, my vision slowly fades away in places and at worst I can lose up to 80% of my vision, and it's always in the center and goes outward. So I have peripheral vision, but nothing between it. It's not black. It's just nothingness.

Edit: Everyone has blind spots in their eyes where a vein connects to the eye, look forward and hold your hand out. Watch your hand in your peripheral vision and don't move your eye. Eventually you'll find a spot where your hand is gone.

sigher fucked around with this message at 06:11 on May 9, 2022

deep dish peat moss
Jul 27, 2006

Big Scary Owl posted:

This is really interesting, I wonder if they still research about this, who knows maybe a cure for Schizophrenia could be found like this, that would be crazy.

I'm just a moderately-informed psych dropout and also very high right now but throwing an informed-but-not-evidence-backed guess of a theory into the wind:

schizophrenia is probably a malfunction that causes your brain to write dream imagery (and audio) into real-life memory storage, and being blind probably changes the way dream memory is stored in the first place (blind people generally dream with no or highly-reduced visual imagery). Also sound is the sense that the brain most often gets confused (it's the first line of defense against incoming predators so we're inherently trained to make snap judgments about potential sound threats and they skew toward hearing threats so that we investigate with our other, more accurate senses) but blind people have essentially more processing cores of their brain dedicated to audio processing (I don't feel like looking up the link but it's in my last post itt), so not only do they store less types of data during dreams but they are able to more accurately record them, and if my harebrained guess of a theory is right then accurate recording of dream-type memory would more or less be what causes schizophrenia

This is essentially what deja vu is for what it's worth - it's the brain accidentally writing the live recording of your senses into long-term memory instead of short term memory. So like, imagine that, but writing dream memory into short-term memory.

Wendigee
Jul 19, 2004

deep dish peat moss posted:

This is essentially what deja vu is for what it's worth - it's the brain accidentally writing the live recording of your senses into long-term memory instead of short term memory. So like, imagine that, but writing dream memory into short-term memory.

what really? so you did just see it and you remember seeing it because it gotten written to the hard drive as well as the RAM?

i always kind of assumed it was just similar to a past visual memory and my brain made me link them together because it is dying.

deep dish peat moss
Jul 27, 2006

Wendigee posted:

what really? so you did just see it and you remember seeing it because it gotten written to the hard drive as well as the RAM?

i always kind of assumed it was just similar to a past visual memory and my brain made me link them together because it is dying.

Okay so double checking myself I guess there's a few major theories, but that's the way I was taught:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releas...oment%20before.

What you're suggesting is another one of them:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079742110530020?via%3Dihub

Another (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00320.x?journalCode=cdpa&) is essentially that there's sometimes a random lagtime in processing your sensory input that essentially causes your perception of time/the environment to split into two separate paths and then the weird feeling is your brain reconciling them to reality

But there's also some research from 2018 showing that deja vu 'memories' of a past experience with the stimulus are generally false memories and they can be deliberately implanted:
https://natsci.source.colostate.edu/deja-vu-feelings-prediction-theyre-just-feelings/
They also suggest that deja vu is a sign that your brain is defragging its harddrive often and keeping its memory storages clean :)

DrankSinatra
Aug 25, 2011

sigher posted:

I have something like this but with migraines, my vision slowly fades away in places and at worst I can lose up to 80% of my vision, and it's always in the center and goes outward. So I have peripheral vision, but nothing between it. It's not black. It's just nothingness.

I have ocular migraines with this once every few years, and it’s incredibly weird. Usually I just notice I’m having trouble reading and try cleaning my glasses and blinking a few times, and notice it doesn’t help. It’s almost impossible to explain, there’s just a region in the center of my vision that’s just deleted, like the space in my field of view is gone. At the beginning, there’s not a blank or a hole - my field of view feels continuous, but there’s not not a hole either.

The technical term for it is a scotoma. It’s pretty cool as it spreads across your visual field; for me it’s a crescent. Even though the inside part is just not there, the boundaries have this neat gray-ish but kind of colorful jagged static to them. I never get a headache with it, and it’s not an emergency, so I just sit down with a glass of water and enjoy the weirdness of the experience.

DrankSinatra fucked around with this message at 07:27 on May 9, 2022

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

deep dish peat moss posted:

I'm just a moderately-informed psych dropout and also very high right now but throwing an informed-but-not-evidence-backed guess of a theory into the wind:

schizophrenia is probably a malfunction that causes your brain to write dream imagery (and audio) into real-life memory storage, and being blind probably changes the way dream memory is stored in the first place (blind people generally dream with no or highly-reduced visual imagery). Also sound is the sense that the brain most often gets confused (it's the first line of defense against incoming predators so we're inherently trained to make snap judgments about potential sound threats and they skew toward hearing threats so that we investigate with our other, more accurate senses) but blind people have essentially more processing cores of their brain dedicated to audio processing (I don't feel like looking up the link but it's in my last post itt), so not only do they store less types of data during dreams but they are able to more accurately record them, and if my harebrained guess of a theory is right then accurate recording of dream-type memory would more or less be what causes schizophrenia

This is essentially what deja vu is for what it's worth - it's the brain accidentally writing the live recording of your senses into long-term memory instead of short term memory. So like, imagine that, but writing dream memory into short-term memory.

this is the most educational post I can remember reading on SA

it's the only thing that makes a PhD program remotely worthwhile, having these kind of conversations with the nerdiest people in a field (who want to nerd back!!!)

CaptainSarcastic
Jul 6, 2013



Analytic Engine posted:

Elentor should post more, this is extremely interesting. Curious if blind people hallucinate visuals, like you might for sounds in an anechoic chamber.

I have no sense of smell (possibly my whole life) and sometimes imagine what a rose "would" smell like, or bacon or whatever. It's pretty infuriating when people gush about scents around me and reflexively apologize because I'm anosmic (I don't care, why apologize?), then refuse to explain anything when I ask how it makes them feel. "It's impossible to say!!! It's just *an apple*, you know?" "But a blind person can learn color theory, and you can tell them something is red right?"

Nope, can't conceive of that. Smell just "is". WTF?

I had complete anosmia for a few years after a severe head injury, but improbably it started to come back and now I hover somewhere between hyposmic and low-normal. Thankfully my sense of taste was fine, but odors just did not exist. It was awkward sometimes but also occasionally came in handy when I had to do something involving a particularly vile smell that I could be blissfully unaware of.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Colonel Cancer posted:

So like if someone has schizophrenia you just scoop out their eyes with a surgical spoon and they're ok?

Fascinating

Sadly, no, if you start off having vision and lose it later in life, you're still susceptible

Tree Reformat
Apr 2, 2022

by Fluffdaddy

Analytic Engine posted:

Elentor should post more, this is extremely interesting. Curious if blind people hallucinate visuals, like you might for sounds in an anechoic chamber.

I have no sense of smell (possibly my whole life) and sometimes imagine what a rose "would" smell like, or bacon or whatever. It's pretty infuriating when people gush about scents around me and reflexively apologize because I'm anosmic (I don't care, why apologize?), then refuse to explain anything when I ask how it makes them feel. "It's impossible to say!!! It's just *an apple*, you know?" "But a blind person can learn color theory, and you can tell them something is red right?"

Nope, can't conceive of that. Smell just "is". WTF?

I at least can equate "roses smell sweet" to "strawberries taste sweet". More confusing for me is pine scent. What the gently caress is the big deal about pine trees, why does everyone love their smell? I can imagine licking a pine tree, but I imagine that would be a disgusting combination of bitter, rough, and sticky, like the world's worst cough medicine on a splintery wooden spoon, but that can't be it. Is it like minty, or what??

And, like, there's almost no language for scent either. A pine tree smells like a pine tree; no one can reduce it further for some reason. Smokey is like that rare word that at least can be used generally, and even then I struggle to imagine smokey as anything other than "pleasantly salty bitter".

deep dish peat moss
Jul 27, 2006

Analytic Engine posted:

this is the most educational post I can remember reading on SA

it's the only thing that makes a PhD program remotely worthwhile, having these kind of conversations with the nerdiest people in a field (who want to nerd back!!!)

I mean I should really stress that it's based on nothing other than connecting imaginary dots in a way that sounds plausible so take it all with a grain of salt but like,

Schizophrenic people or people experiencing schizophrenic episodes tend to have very fractured or broken thought patterns (speaking in word salad or making connections between thoughts and ideas that have no sensible basis) which is similar to how dreams behave, with totally arbitrary connections feeling implicit (e.g. you're in a car that you steer with a joystick and somehow you just know that inside the dream and it makes perfect sense to you).

Schizophrenia often involves delusions of grandeur where the individual believes themselves to be an integral part of some vast thing - they're a super important piece of the puzzle. And that seems to be similar to the types of dreams people experience - dreams where you're a rockstar, or where you're the scientist who cures cancer, or where you suddenly realize you can fly, or where you're the one the monster is chasing. These are all pretty similar to how a lot of schizophrenic people present their delusions to the world.

There's also a phenomenon called oneirophrenia which is the sudden onset of hallucinations accompanied by dreamlike feelings (generally a symptom of other conditions like sleep deprivation) and it's sometimes confused with schizophrenia. I don't know if this means anything but it's interesting that schizophrenic-type hallucinations accompany dreamlike feelings even outside of schizophrenia.

Tree Reformat posted:

I at least can equate "roses smell sweet" to "strawberries taste sweet". More confusing for me is pine scent. What the gently caress is the big deal about pine trees, why does everyone love their smell? I can imagine licking a pine tree, but I imagine that would be a disgusting combination of bitter, rough, and sticky, like the world's worst cough medicine on a splintery wooden spoon, but that can't be it. Is it like minty, or what??

There's a whole lot of interesting stuff about this out there but basically our brains just do not activate sensory processing when reading about scent, touch, or taste in the same way they do when reading about sight and sound. For whatever reason sight and sound are inherently tied to language processing on a biological level in a way that other senses aren't - most likely because sight and sound are the ways that we convey language. Like there's dedicated hardware for processing language in your brain and since it has to rely on visual and auditory information in order to take in the language that it processes, it's able to mesh the two together to more easily create language that conveys visual or auditory information.

I'm very interested to know if blind people who read braille have an easier time discussing the sensation of touch, since it's part of their language processing.

deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 08:54 on May 9, 2022

Bula Vinaka
Oct 21, 2020

beach side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaWoV7Cr-JM

GreatGreen
Jul 3, 2007
That's not what gaslighting means you hyperbolic dipshit.
When I used to work really strange shifts, and I'd get really, really tired due to long hours and sleep deprivation.
When I was sitting around, slowly nodding off but fighting the desire to sleep (don't worry, I wasn't driving or operating machinery), I'd hear voices that weren't there. Sort of whispery, sort of not, any given one would never originate from any particular direction or point in space. Sometimes I'd hear a voice whisper my name or any name I might have had in my mind, sometimes it was just a few random half-intelligible words. I never heard anything angry or aggressive, just emotionally neutral. I also feel like I knew what was happening while it was happening... auditory hallucinations because I was tired. So as a consequence, because I felt like I knew what it was, I wasn't scared of it, which meant it never manifested as anything "scary," which just furthered my understanding that it was just something weird happening with my brain because the tone of all that stuff always directly followed my brain's own mood and thoughts, which it wouldn't have necessarily stuck to if it was coming from "outside" my brain. Anyway, this hasn't happened to me in a very long time, and nothing close to this kind of thing has ever happened to me while I've been well rested, just when I was about to pass out from being tired. I'd guess this kind of thing can happen to anybody given the right state of mind.

So that brings me to thoughts about schizophrenia. I don't have it so I can't say for sure, but the small hallucinations I've had make me think the theories about schizophrenia being the part of your brain that experiences/creates dreams getting cross-wired with your normal waking consciousness makes total sense. I think all dreams really are is just your brain being in such a state where it thinks it should be experiencing sensory stimulus but it isn't, due to you being asleep and having your eyes closed and being in a quiet bedroom or whatever. So your brain, as it so often invisibly and seamlessly does in normal waking life, just makes the poo poo up that it wants or thinks it should see, like how it erases the jitter in your vision (saccades) when you move your eyes around, or how people with amputated limbs feel phantom pain until they do mirror therapy and "see" their amputated limb in the mirror which immediately stops hurting at that point. Imagine if your brain just started doing that kind of thing during your normal day, but at the level of full on dream states being integrated with your normal reality, and you can't tell the difference. And dreams are not bound by real life principals like object permanence or adherence to Newtonian physics, so it could create all kinds of stuff.

However the monkey wrench is that people born blind apparently don't get schizophrenia. You'd think they'd at least have the capacity to hear voices / feel touch sensations / smell things that aren't there. If blind people can dream those sensations but can't get schizophrenia, then I suppose the theory that schizophrenia is simply "uncontrolled dreaming while being awake" wouldn't necessarily hold up.

GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 09:35 on May 9, 2022

Big Scary Owl
Oct 1, 2014

by Fluffdaddy
Some really cool and informative posts itt, thanks folks! I hope I never get blind tbh, I'm not sure how I'd be able to do anything. Not being able to smell and taste seems fine but not having sight is hosed up.

Sourdough Sam
May 2, 2010

:dukedog:
What do you think it was like for Blinken from Robin Hood Men In Tights when he could finally see only to be struck blind once more seconds later. Could he comprehend what he was seeing?

isaboo
Nov 11, 2002

Muay Buok
ขอให้โชคดี

DrankSinatra posted:

I have ocular migraines with this once every few years, and it’s incredibly weird. Usually I just notice I’m having trouble reading and try cleaning my glasses and blinking a few times, and notice it doesn’t help. It’s almost impossible to explain, there’s just a region in the center of my vision that’s just deleted, like the space in my field of view is gone. At the beginning, there’s not a blank or a hole - my field of view feels continuous, but there’s not not a hole either.

The technical term for it is a scotoma. It’s pretty cool as it spreads across your visual field; for me it’s a crescent. Even though the inside part is just not there, the bouundaries have this neat gray-ish but kind of colorful jagged static to them. I never get a headache with it, and it’s not an emergency, so I just sit down with a glass of water and enjoy the weirdness of the experience.

I used to get scintillating scotomas too. Doctor suggested a regimen of 400mg of vitamin B2 (riboflavin) daily and it reduced both the frequency and duration.

Since I've stopped drinking they have gone away entirely and now I don't take the B2 at all.

500excf type r
Mar 7, 2013

I'm as annoying as the high-pitched whine of my motorcycle, desperately compensating for the lack of substance in my life.
Huh, that's what that is? I knew it was a form of migraine because once my vision clears up the headache settles in but I've been getting the floaters in my vision since I was like 14 or so, I can't remember any time specifically while younger. Sometimes it seems like it's light that triggers it (light bulbs, headlights, sunlight glare, etc) but it's hard to tell. Can happen two days in a row and then not again for a year

Anne Whateley
Feb 11, 2007
:unsmith: i like nice words
I have them occasionally too. My brain does such a good job of filling in the blanks -- extrapolating like it does with your normal blind spot -- that I didn't realize it was an issue with my vision at first. The first time I had one, I knew I felt gross and wasn't thinking right, and then I realized I couldn't read (clone stamp doesn't work for text), so I figured it was a stroke. That was fun.

I only get a couple a year, and I just take an NSAID and caffeine (you get weird looks rubbing espresso powder into your gums, but it works fast), and go straight to bed. I don't drink at all, and for me it's mostly triggered by bright direct lights fwiw

Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Re: Migraine, specifically Migraine scotoma is called Migraine Aura, or Migraine Aura without Infarction.

It's a double-edged sword because migraine auras can be triggered by images and similar procedures (especially in photosensitive people) but you can also shut down a headache if you get migraine auras sufficiently earlier than the actual migraine. If you take pills as soon as it starts and it lasts, say, 30 minutes it's possible to get just the auras, effectively turning it into an acephalgic migraine.

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

Elentor posted:

Re: Migraine, specifically Migraine scotoma is called Migraine Aura, or Migraine Aura without Infarction.

It's a double-edged sword because migraine auras can be triggered by images and similar procedures (especially in photosensitive people) but you can also shut down a headache if you get migraine auras sufficiently earlier than the actual migraine. If you take pills as soon as it starts and it lasts, say, 30 minutes it's possible to get just the auras, effectively turning it into an acephalgic migraine.

Have you seen "El aura"? It's a 2015 Argentinian neo-noir where the protagonist has migraine auras

Dr. Gojo Shioji
Apr 22, 2004

Elentor posted:

Re: Migraine, specifically Migraine scotoma is called Migraine Aura, or Migraine Aura without Infarction.

It's a double-edged sword because migraine auras can be triggered by images and similar procedures (especially in photosensitive people) but you can also shut down a headache if you get migraine auras sufficiently earlier than the actual migraine. If you take pills as soon as it starts and it lasts, say, 30 minutes it's possible to get just the auras, effectively turning it into an acephalgic migraine.

All this talk is wild because it matches my adult experiences perfectly. I didn't even know there was a name for it. As soon as I notice the blind spot(s) starting, I grab 800mg of Ibuprofen. The visual aberrations will increase, peak, and taper off in around 30 minutes and I'm left with a mild headache rather than a totally debilitating migraine.

Maybe I should look into taking B2 supplements.

Rupert Buttermilk
Apr 15, 2007

🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

Elentor posted:

Re: Migraine, specifically Migraine scotoma is called Migraine Aura, or Migraine Aura without Infarction.

It's a double-edged sword because migraine auras can be triggered by images and similar procedures (especially in photosensitive people) but you can also shut down a headache if you get migraine auras sufficiently earlier than the actual migraine. If you take pills as soon as it starts and it lasts, say, 30 minutes it's possible to get just the auras, effectively turning it into an acephalgic migraine.

Holy poo poo; for as long as I can remember every so often I'll get an aura, whose main characteristic is slow moving 'sparks' flying inward from the edges of my sight. No pain whatsoever. I actually rarely get headaches, unless I have too much sugar.

Now I know what that is.

THANK YOU.

HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

I have a visual impairment that means I have a very limited visual field. The parts that are gone aren't replaced with darkness, they are replaced with nothing. It's like - you don't perceive darkness around the back of your eyeball, right? You just can't see there. No input from there. It's like that. An absence of input, not an input of 'darkness'.

I get migraine aura without pain but I guess there's always time to develop the pain later!

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

vision system: :eng99:

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

Nigmaetcetera posted:

Smell is just the sense of taste but in the nose and not the mouth.

Is that why nosmics b**** and moan if they ever lose their sense of smell, because they just like having two senses of taste?

CaptainSarcastic posted:

I had complete anosmia for a few years after a severe head injury, but improbably it started to come back and now I hover somewhere between hyposmic and low-normal. Thankfully my sense of taste was fine, but odors just did not exist. It was awkward sometimes but also occasionally came in handy when I had to do something involving a particularly vile smell that I could be blissfully unaware of.

Yep, you can always volunteer for garbage & recycling chores in roommate situations. It works great until you remember that garbagemen are basically American untouchables if you're not mobbed-up.

Tree Reformat posted:

I at least can equate "roses smell sweet" to "strawberries taste sweet". More confusing for me is pine scent. What the gently caress is the big deal about pine trees, why does everyone love their smell? I can imagine licking a pine tree, but I imagine that would be a disgusting combination of bitter, rough, and sticky, like the world's worst cough medicine on a splintery wooden spoon, but that can't be it. Is it like minty, or what??

And, like, there's almost no language for scent either. A pine tree smells like a pine tree; no one can reduce it further for some reason. Smokey is like that rare word that at least can be used generally, and even then I struggle to imagine smokey as anything other than "pleasantly salty bitter".

Pine has got to be sticky sweet sap, right? Like the wood-eating Redwall animals loved

The books by and about chemist Luca Turin are the only non-academic sources I've found on perfuming and breaking down scents. His review book is uniquely interesting because it actually uses non-smells as a reference point (sometimes)

Elukka
Feb 18, 2011

For All Mankind

Anne Whateley posted:

I have them occasionally too. My brain does such a good job of filling in the blanks -- extrapolating like it does with your normal blind spot -- that I didn't realize it was an issue with my vision at first. The first time I had one, I knew I felt gross and wasn't thinking right, and then I realized I couldn't read (clone stamp doesn't work for text), so I figured it was a stroke. That was fun.

I only get a couple a year, and I just take an NSAID and caffeine (you get weird looks rubbing espresso powder into your gums, but it works fast), and go straight to bed. I don't drink at all, and for me it's mostly triggered by bright direct lights fwiw
Migraines can mess with language processing too, for extra "Am I having a stroke?" fun! Even if you can see properly, you can't understand the words because language processing machine broke. I had one once where I couldn't form sentences. I'd try to say something and the wrong word came out, and for a few minutes I could pretty much just say one, irrelevant word. That was not very fun.

Mine come from bad sleep.

Elentor posted:

Re: Migraine, specifically Migraine scotoma is called Migraine Aura, or Migraine Aura without Infarction.

It's a double-edged sword because migraine auras can be triggered by images and similar procedures (especially in photosensitive people) but you can also shut down a headache if you get migraine auras sufficiently earlier than the actual migraine. If you take pills as soon as it starts and it lasts, say, 30 minutes it's possible to get just the auras, effectively turning it into an acephalgic migraine.
I had this once and it was actually a bad thing. I had one where it was just the aura, and then it came back less than 12 hours later and went through the full cycle, but worse than usual. Migraines are pretty rare for me, normally I might not have one for a year or more.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 10, 2022

stratdax
Sep 14, 2006

Nigmaetcetera posted:

Smell is just the sense of taste but in the nose and not the mouth.

Taste is things like sweet, sour, salty, etc. But all the flavour is from the sense of smell. So strawberry, licorice, etc. So it's not "just" the sense of taste but in the nose.

Memories are so closely linked with smell that we'll get a huge flood of memories when a familiar scent wafts by. I wonder if people with no sense of smell get the same flood of memories from another trigger (like sound), or if it just doesn't happen.

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

stratdax posted:

Taste is things like sweet, sour, salty, etc. But all the flavour is from the sense of smell. So strawberry, licorice, etc. So it's not "just" the sense of taste but in the nose.

Memories are so closely linked with smell that we'll get a huge flood of memories when a familiar scent wafts by. I wonder if people with no sense of smell get the same flood of memories from another trigger (like sound), or if it just doesn't happen.

Ha, actually yes: listening to podcasts takes me back to all the places I was traveling when hearing them. The order is pretty consistent for episodes with multiple listens. Years of memories automatically indexed like the Method of Loci.

There's a third input to flavor on top of taste and smell, called the trigeminal nerve. It controls facial muscles etc but is also how you detect mint / metal / capsaicin / alcohol / ammonia. Anosmics can "taste" all those things on their tongues or in their nasal cavity, and so can nosmics pinching their nose, because the substances trigger that nerve.

One time I was getting the medical equivalent of a legal smell test and every substance got a huge whiff. The last one the Doctor (jerk) presented was ammonia, and it literally knocked me backward. So I guess I can be revived with smelling salts, that's a plus.

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HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

Tree Reformat posted:

I at least can equate "roses smell sweet" to "strawberries taste sweet". More confusing for me is pine scent. What the gently caress is the big deal about pine trees, why does everyone love their smell? I can imagine licking a pine tree, but I imagine that would be a disgusting combination of bitter, rough, and sticky, like the world's worst cough medicine on a splintery wooden spoon, but that can't be it. Is it like minty, or what??


Pine smells fresh and sharp and clean, and it's a good neutraliser of other scents, like it isn't cloyingly strong so as to be unpleasant, but it masks a lot of unpleasant smells. That's why people like it a lot.

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