Thursday, August 23, 2012

vacation report

Spent the last 5 days (Sat-Wed) down in Tennessee/Alabama, visiting family. Monday morning, Jingping woke up about 8 and went looking around and came back saying that my parents were still home, when she thought they should be out taking a walk somewhere. I was barely awake, still hadn't opened my eyes. When I finally did a few minutes later, I found that I was halfway through a scintillating scotoma, maybe around the 15-20 minute point. It looked a lot like last time, left field, relatively straight scotoma from above fixation leftward, arcing downward and below. I got out of bed and went to sit in the sunroom to watch the rest of it. The scintillation was rather weak, but still noticeable - I knew what was happening within a second or two of opening my eyes. The headache started soon after I got out of bed, and was kind of a bad one. Above-behind my eyes, focused on the right side. Nauseated and dizzy for a day, which sucked because I had to drive down to Huntsville Monday afternoon (in my parents' Prius with an expired Kentucky driver's license, don't tell my mother). Still hurt a bit Tuesday night.

I think that maybe the slight headache I described on the 16th might have been part of the prodrome for this one, otherwise I didn't notice any signs.

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Last night on the way home I had an insight into how to explain the low-pass gain control that I'm proposing. A basic Barlow-Foldiak type anti-Hebbian learning rule should develop low-pass weights if a set of scaled filters is repeatedly exposed to low-pass input, or maybe even if it's just exposed to white noise. Gonna try this later today!

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