Enhanced Optical Sensitivity

I have been living with migraine headaches since the age of 16 going through the

full set of symptoms including auras, headaches, etc. One of the interesting and

actually quite amazing parts of a migraine attack is the phase of Enhanced

Optical Sensitivity (as well as acoustic) which brings out colors in such strength,

depth and sharpness that it is sometimes painful in itself and which for me very

early on brought on questions about reality and subjectivity of perception. Just to

mentioned that I have had descriptions of similar experiences form people that

used drugs, people who returned to the colorful world after spending extended

periods in colorless places (e.g. Antarctic) and of course other migraine patients.

Anybody on PN have similar experiences or thoughts about the subject?

Never experienced anything myself, but the other end of the stick is those who have color deficiency or color blindness. Talk about perception of color!

I used to have the same experience in Vietnam, after firefights. Maybe, the reverse of Mark Twain's observation is also true - the knowledge that one is <i>not</i> to be hanged today wonderfully concentrates the mind......

Not that it really matters, but for the record, the statement about hanging and "concentrating the mind" was said by Samuel Johnson.

 

The occasion was the accusation that Johnson had written a "deathbed" statement for a gentleman who was hanged, and this was part of his explanation for how the man, otherwise not known for his literacy, had come to write so elegant a statement.

 

By the bye, I think it is agreed that Johnson WAS the author of the statement. ;)

Damn, you're right. Knew I should have checked that.......

Google Kirlian photography

I got migraine under control using biofeedback, but I never had any color changes, just light sensitivity. When I worked in steel mills after a night shift and coming out into daylight the color changes were intense for an hour or so (my blue jeans looked purple, for example).

 

"...brought on questions about reality and subjectivity of perception."

 

The issue is with the receptor, not the transmitter.

I would like to remark that basically any of more or less dramatic change of phisical circumstances do affect all senses to one degree or another. Use of controled substances acting dilative or contractive to thin blood vessels in brain and eyes will affect vision.

 

A hit on head as in boxing usually bring a lot of dynamic colour effect to the vision.

 

The colour blindness usually colour specific, say persone don't see the red to some degree while do see other colours allright.

 

The aura is a phenomenon which is not perseived by vision. That is to say we don't see aura, if we see something it is not an aura.

 

A migrain can be easy treated away by well qoulified doc of the kind. Don't put value in disease.

All of our senses, but especially vision, are very complicated. There is a lot of processing, that isn't entirely understood, that goes on between the original sensing by nerves and the perception that is formed in the brain. We seem to have evolved a mechanism to do a heck of a lot of adjusting and filtering, to present our conscious mind with enough of the relevant data to find food, escape from prediters, etc. but not overwhelm us with too much. Our eyes for instance do a lot of self correcting for the intensity and color balance of the source of illumination of what we observe. The way we perceive colors, edges and movement is not at all straightforward.

 

Sounds like somewhere in the migraine process some of this preprocessing is going out of whack.

 

There is a reality... it's just that translating an infinite spectrum of wavelengths of light into electrical pulses from merely 3 sets of cones and then reconstructing that into a perceived image of the reality requires some amazing stuff to happen.

i hate headaches!!! of any sort! i am glad its very rare i get a headache...thank god! i am pretty surprised to read that headaches,help us capture color,better.if thats true,then i am happy being a normal healthy photographer...

Serengeti sunglasses do it for me. Enhances cloud gazing if you are into that. Drug free enhanced perception overall. Try a pair.