Showing posts with label migraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label migraine. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Parahypnic Hallucinosis?

Remember this episode:
http://xuexixs.blogspot.com/2018/08/blinking-plants.html

That was my bout with what I termed 'gardener's hallucinosis', where I spent all day pulling clear weed and etc from the gardens, and wound up with vivid blinking hallucinations. I likened it to the 'eyes open' geometric hallucinations I sometimes had back in my migraine days.

Well I've noticed a few times lately something similar happening under a specific circumstance. The circumstance is: I fall asleep in my daughter's room as I read her to sleep. I wake up a couple of hours later, stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I go get in my bed.

It doesn't happen every time, but sometimes - and last night very vividly - on waking in this way I have vivid and complex geometric hallucinations. Fine-grained, colorless - much of the content is just of very, very fine beads or dots, flickering and moving - but mixed into it are larger-scale features. Last night, the features were like a high-pass Kandinsky painting: discs and long, smoothly-curving lines, all moving and twisting around randomly, but no particular surface colors except for grayness, or darkness.

I could see it all fairly clearly with eyes opened, until I turned on the bathroom light and then the experience faded.

Maybe not coincidentally, I have been having minor headaches lately, and I think there was one yesterday. My brain must be in a state?

Monday, August 13, 2018

Gardener's Hallucinosis?

Interesting experience yesterday, Sunday.

Spent ~5hrs outside in the gardens, pulling weeds. Had done the same for a few hours on Saturday. When I came inside for good, about 5 or 6, I started to hallucinate during blinks - when I blinked my eyes, especially when not prepared for it, I would see images of the plants I had been pulling all day. Sometimes very clear, seeing leaves with their serrations and textures, and tendrils curling around - the images were coherent and (mutedly) colorful, seemingly randomly selected but each was a recognizable one of the real plants I had seen, mostly members of the 2 or 3 most common weeds of the day.

Sometimes the images were strong enough to be distracting, making it hard to see - or to recognize - what was actually before my eyes. But I think they were only actually visible during the blinks. I managed over time to notice some properties of the images - I could hold my eyes closed after an effective blink. It was still unclear to what extent I was *really* seeing the fine details, or whether the actual images were coarser and just 'suggesting', as in normal visual imagery, the fine details. Holding my eyes shut, it seemed that the form of the afterimages or noise, in the eyes-shut darkness, guided the structure of the hallucination: spots of afterimage seemed to appear as leaves, streaks as stems or tendrils. But it was not so clear as to be certain of this.

The experience lasted until I went to bed, 6 or 7 hours later, but it had attenuated by then. I slept and remembered several dreams that had nothing at all to do with plants (one I remember, now, was that my lab seemed to be based in the house I grew up in, and some newcomers were using space in the den - dream-Giulio warned me not to give them to much space, or they'll think they can take more). When I woke up this morning, the phenomenon returned for another hour or so, but is gone now.

The phenomenon resembled, to me, the kinds of hypnogogic hallucinations some people have after long, repeated activity ('the Tetris effect'), but I can't find reports of this in normal waking experience (albeit during blinks). I described it to Giulio and others, the physiological explanations are kind of clear, but as to why it happened to me and why it isn't much more common, that's an open, strange question.

Another thing it reminded me of, was back in the migraine days, seeing geometric web patterns after waking, sometimes during blinks. Similar kind of dynamic, but I don't think those experiences ever lasted more than minutes, definitely not many hours.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

april report

Sorry April.

Not that I haven't done things this month. May as well just do a quick report.

Not in any particular order:

Finished the Mass Effect games. Excellent story, very effective, really wraps you into the main character. When it all comes to an end, you feel really invested, so I guess I see why some people didn't like the ending, but they by and large were probably stupid people. Sorry. It was excellent, will stick with me.

Rented a car and drove around East Melbourne - Dandenong and Yarra territory. Had a tuna sandwich in the town of Gembrook, which looked a lot like Kingston Springs, except without an I-40 running through it. Took the guy 30 minutes at least to get around to making the sandwich - one guy, >10 customers. I went to the Upper Yarra Reservoir, where  most of our water comes from. It was nice. Nice to drive. Almost had an accident a couple times, but it wasn't that hard to get used to the reversal. A little worried about driving when JP gets here, afraid that when we're talking and I'm distracted, I'll revert to normal orientation. We'll see.

Watched a total lunar eclipse, the best one I've ever seen. The moon rose as the sun set, and it was at peak eclipse - not even red, very dark, could barely see it. Then, a threshold was crossed, and light sprang out of the southern edge, and it slowly, over another hour almost, became a full moon. Really nice view, out behind MBI.

I have a serious beard now. See how much longer it lasts.

Started writing a paper on my current project. Procrastinating on rewriting the blur adaptation paper. Need to be working on a grant proposal for UW by the end of the week.

On migraine business: Saturday, driving day, had a headache most of the day, but I also slept until 10 that day and started pretty slow, so it was a forced one. Seeing lots of weird transparent phosphenes lately, but I think the days of aura are past. Future maybe. But not present. There may have been a couple other very minor headaches in the last couple of months, but I didn't note them. I really think the "being in shape", i.e. TKD, was making me susceptible to migraines. What to do...

What else...

Guess that's it. I should be writing more lately, essaying and journalizing, but somehow it isn't happening. Working seriously, and writing the past couple of days, but most of my thinking has been done on the long walks to and from lab, rather than in journal entries. We'll get back to it, don't worry. I still love you, xuexixs.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

anxiety, nighttime kitchens, broken foot

Yep. So, I guess 2014 is the year that HAZ goes back to sleep, waking up now and then for a random update.

I suppose that when I'm especially introspective or, dare I say it, depressed, I write here more. Or anxious. Which is to say that lately I haven't been these things. There's a bit of desolation, loneliness, but I know that's temporary, so it's not actually that hard. And what I'm doing otherwise, during the days, is so fulfilling that there's not much energy left to fuel anxiety.

So that's why I'm not here much lately.

Tonight, as I left the lab, about 8:30, I went to the kitchen to get a candy bar. I don't usually do this, but my foot is kind of broken and I felt like I needed an extra boost for the walk home.

Coincidentally, the candy bar was called 'Boost'.

I walk into the kitchen - or cafeteria, or as the Australians call it, 'tea room', and it's dark out, but the lamps over the lunch tables are on, and there's a smell, something I can't identify, musty, an odor that didn't belong there. And suddenly I'm a kid, sneaking into the kitchen in my mother's parents house after everyone's gone to sleep, to look through the cupboards for cookies or crackers. The light was somehow the same, the smell of course was key - memory is so strange - and, certainly, my action was parallel. A few times I've done the same thing, probably once a week to be honest, but there's always someone else there, and I'm too embarrassed to let someone see me taking a candy bar. Ha!

So I stood there for a dozen seconds and observed the memory, and I could *see* Elizabeth's kitchen, and feel the space of their house around me. The light, the smell, the feeling of night time and quiet and not wanting to wake anyone, and being by yourself.

What else is there? Interesting birds. Doves with tall feather crests on top of their heads. Mynas fighting with their reflections in windows. They're my favorites lately, jovial, nervous birds.

Going on a camping trip tomorrow! With a broken foot! I went running Tuesday, barefoot, and it was totally fine. Short on oxygen, but didn't notice a single mechanical problem, not one false step, and I was concentrated on the feet, on the ground. But Wednesday morning I get out of bed and it hurts - and the long walk home at night, man oh man, on a bad foot. I strained some ligament or tendon or something, can feel a bruise, left foot, outside/top about halfway down. At first it felt like it was in the ankle or heel, but it's migrating. Hope it's better tomorrow, so I can do some hiking..

Had a sort-of headache a week or so ago, but they seem basically to have stopped, so we may need to revise the subtitle of this journal.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

well well well

lots to write, and trouble writing. i think writing is hard in the winter. april to september seems to be my golden writing time, winter is the time for experiments. don't really have much going on at the moment in that domain - trying to set up a thing, but i already know it's not going to go anywhere, which saps the motivation.

but more broadly, i am going places. first, to melbourne, australia. finally have a chance to put my money where my mouth is with all the consciousness business - a six month stint in the big leagues. not going to break in, and i already have a new minor league job set up after this thing is over, in madison wisconsin (shouldn't jinx it - nothing in writing yet, but it seems like a good deal). so life is finally changing. i've felt happy several times this week, it was interesting. the only real anxiety, aside from nervousness at seeming foolish when i interact with these neuroscience people in melbourne, is with leaving my wife alone in america for half a year, when we both want to be together and make progress on you know what.

anyways, that's getting personal. but it's all wrapped up together, life and work and study, everything. i think this is best - the best thing, or sequences of things, that i can do. as of this summer, god willing, we will have new lives in a new place, and a few years of new stability, and new ways to imagine the future. i am getting a reversal in a particular feeling i usually have, a reversal i haven't had in many years, i think: that i'm fooling *them*, rather than fooling *myself*. for once, i must take advantage of this state of affairs. stop backing down, and go seize some opportunities for once.

see if you do it. report back here in december of 2014. i expect great progress.

(random other notes: headaches getting more frequent lately. woke up with one today, maybe tripped by dehydration, but also been seeing distracting afterimages and pseudoscotomas for days. no aura in almost 6 months though. may be past those days? now just little specky spotty auras? i'll be sad if they never return..)

Monday, October 14, 2013

objectivity

I finished Chalmers' book - The Conscious Mind - this weekend. A funny thing was that the next-to-last chapter, basically just a set of musings on the relationship between his proto-theory and artificial intelligence arguments, didn't interest me at all. This is funny because if this was 2001, I probably would have skimmed the book up to that chapter and then read it over and over and over again.

It's an excellent, important book. I wish I'd read it back when, but now was good enough timing. As I mentioned in a previous entry, just about all of my thinking on philosophy of mind and consciousness in this book; I think some of the ideas I developed naturally, like a lot of people do, but I've also read many of Chalmers' papers over the years, and a couple I've read many times, so he's undoubtedly responsible for straightening my thoughts on the subject.

But this book, it's one of those cases where reading is like sharpening your mind. You may have a set of knives, but you've let them clatter around in a drawer for a while, used one here and another there, and so they get banged up and dulled and maybe a bit tarnished, and so finally you sit down with the whetstone and a cloth and sharpen and clean, and there, a drawer full of shining, sharp knives. That's what it was like, reading this book.

In a way, it just sort of set me up with new vocabulary, or ways to structure my thinking about perception and experience, and why they are interesting, and what the alternatives are in thinking about how they are interesting. Sometimes, this is enough to take away from a book - it helps you organize, doesn't revolutionize your thought, but it helps you straighten things out, like putting the knives into categories, with the tips and blades all facing together.

But he also inspired me, and hopefully just at the right time (though I was asking for it, looking for it, so it's silly to bring up the notion of coincidence). He talks about psychophysics - although in more basic terms than the conventional science - and he presents it as a way of using subjective experience as evidence, as a thing to be explained. This was how I felt about it for a long time, but as the years and papers and experiments wheel on, you can't help but start to see things operationally, in terms of functions and moving parts, and you operationalize your subjects too, and they become black boxes that press buttons. This is so wrong!

It's wrong, and I used to know it was wrong, and I've maintained a sense that it's wrong - I recognize that this sense is part of what sets me against the West Coast internal noise crowd in modern psychophysics, and which allies me so much to the European tradition. But I'd kind of forgotten, explicitly, how it's something of a travesty against psychophysics to operationalize your subjects, especially if you're interested in psychophysics per se, and not in using it as a means to another worthy end.

What I'm rambling about is what we all know - when you have a subject in a psychophysics experiment, and you give them instructions on how to do the task, you are asking them to take hold of a phenomenal object, and to give you responses based on that object. Often the object is so ineffable that it can only be explained by example - 'this, you see this? when you see this, press this button; or, press this button when you think you see this, here'. The central object in the entire experiment is the thing that is seen. The instructions to the subject are the closest that the experimenter comes to the phenomenon of interest. But it's too easy, I see now, to slip into the mode of giving those instructions and then thinking that the phenomenon is in the data, and that by describing the data or understanding the data, you're understanding the phenomenon.

Ultimately, maybe, it's just semantics. Ultimately, all you have to analyze in any rigorous sense is the data. But I think that many psychophysicists forget, and start talking only about performance - I've done this many times now. I've gone long enough without enough inspiration, for years now, only seeing it peek through now and then, always having trouble circling back to the real object of fascination. But this book, Chalmers' book - or probably, just a few choice passages from the book - has renewed my clarity, and as I said, just in time, because I feel that the importance of these ideas, for my research and my writing and my very career, is swinging right into center stage.

Also, I have a headache right now, officially it's been 59 days since the last, longest gap since record keeping began (May 2012). I gave it a 3.5, but I'm going to go raise that to a 4.5 now, it's getting worse.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

asti nasti

slight psychic turmoil what with the coming application deadlines, projects to work on, etc. as is usual in these situations, nothing much of anything is getting done.

just wanted to report that i keep seeing flashes and scotomites, and now suddenly getting some photophobia. it's been 27 days since the last recorded headache, which is at least twice the normal interval (though that interval varies by at least its mean). so i'm due (plus, look at this nice plot, and note that today is thursday:).


the plot on the left is the average headache rating per day of week; when they start on the weekend, they are worse. the one on the right is tally per day of week; more start on the weekend. this is just a year or so's worth of numbers, but obviously i'm prone to headaches on the weekends, probably when susceptible. reason? relaxation, sleeping late (and late coffee), irregular eating, possible alcohol, etc.

anyways, let's see what happens.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

update

no thoughts to essayize lately, at least none which aren't going into manuscripts. productive summer of writing so far, will have produced at least 4 papers of my own this summer and lots of stubs for future work. current paper is unfolding in an interesting way; collecting a little more data, should have it all done in another week or so.

going to montreal this weekend.

decision on postdoc i applied for won't come til octoberish. preparing faculty applications in the meantime.

migraine news: last friday night developed a fine, sharp, right-side headache, on the trainride home from seeing Pacific Rim - best movie i've seen in a movie theater *maybe ever* - came home, went to bed, couldn't sleep til 2am because of the pain.

interesting thing was, when i closed my eyes, i could see, faintly, these very, very fine striations, like looking at my thumbprints from 50cm distant; 20+ cpd. they would follow one direction and fade into the black/redness of the eyelight; then i would see the other orientation, and they would fade, and so on. they kind of had the appearance of the extreme eye movement striations, but finer. maybe they were from irritation of the optic nerve? i couldn't tell if they were in one eye or the other, only noticeable when both eyes were closed.

Monday, July 29, 2013

seeing spots

phosphenes aplenty these past few days, and a headache since saturday (mid-monday now), but no aura. i'll spend this post describing the phosphenes, which are interesting.

the phosphenes are always exactly foveal, less than a degree across. they are never noticeable for more than a few tens of seconds. the sensation is very similar to the very beginning of the typical aura. their appearance is very subtle, as though there is a smudge over the central view. it's comparable to having looked at the sun glinting off a surface and having a bright foveal afterimage. sometimes it seems that i can close my eyes and see a floating spot, like an afterimage, which easily fades from view; sometimes i can't see anything.

another sensation that the phosphene is similar to is lustre or shimmering as from interocular conflict. earlier today i found myself gazing into the distance above my desk, thinking about something, and thought i was seeing a spot; then after a few seconds i realized that my left eye was seeing a mark on the underside of a plywood shelf, where a screw pokes out, with my left eye, while the same view by the right eye was occluded by a hanging piece of paper. once i understood what i was seeing, the sensation seemed to change; it is as though i am strongly sensitized to the onset of the aura, and when i think i am seeing it, or seeing these blippy phosphenes, i feel that i know i'm seeing it, which turns back around and affects the way it feels to see it.

a third way of describing the sensation is as scotoma-like, but there is never any scotoma, or at least not any so large or stable that i can see it. it's more like what is seen is interfered with; maybe it's a scotoma in the confluence? mostly in V2/V3?

anyways, the foveal spots are always brief. in the past few days i've noticed them a dozen times. during the same period, i've repeatedly noticed the familiar difficulty with reading text, especially in the morning. i look at black text on a white background, and it's very difficult to read, as though the letters are jumbled. i think what's happening is that the afterimages aren't being properly suppressed, and that it's only noticeable with the high-contrast stimulus of black-on-white text, especially on a computer screen where the white is really bright. at other times i've noticed problems with afterimages, especially of textures, seeming to 'stick' from fixation to fixation, thinking that i see something in one location when it's actually carried over from the previous fixation. these sensations aren't afterimages in the common sense of light impressed in the retinas, which have their characteristic slow fuzzy fade; they are clearer and sharper at the same time that they are less substantial.

a headache started saturday sometime, then disappeared, then reappeared yesterday, subtle - only noticed it when changing posture - and remains today, where it was slightly excruciating earlier and mostly gone now. right trigeminal nerve, felt it above the right eye at the supraorbital nerve, and above my upper right teeth.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

halted aura

today in the lab, around noon, started to get really light sensitive, felt very unsteady, a little nauseated. for the past couple of days kept seeing weird flashes of blue light, like lens flares in the j.j. abrams jokes. also, i've noticed the eye crank lines more than usual in recent days, of course when making extreme eye movements, but not really extreme. i feel like the visibility of those phosphenes is linked to the migraines.

as the day went on, it (the discomfort) basically got better. had a coffee around 4, after that i don't remember being bothered so much, just had half the lights off in my office.

then, about 7:15, wrapping up my files, and notice it's hard to see; then discover a fairly well-developed scotoma in the left field, less than 5 degrees out. for whatever reason i hadn't noticed it up to that point - i don't remember exactly what i'd been doing for the few minutes previous, probably reading something, which is when i usually notice.

so i got out my tracking program and had some problems - one problem was that the new target i had set up was just too phosphene-like. it was a dumb idea, flickers too much, too noisy. better to just have a slow-counter-phasing block like a perimetry target. even when i could find the aura, it was hard to set the target. which leads to the second problem: the scotoma was weak. i think that even when i did find it, the target shone through, which i've never seen before. usually the scotoma is absolute, and i did find some times/places where it seems the target (or my finger) really were invisible; but, it also seemed that i could pass the target over what felt like a scotoma region, and its contrast would seem to attenuate, but it wouldn't disappear.

i got a couple of 1-2 minute recordings, breaking in between, and then the aura evaporated. it seemed normal in its geometry, if faint, barely ever saw the fortification spectrum, but at some point - i'd say 15 minutes into its normal course, barely 10-20 degrees out, it just disappeared and didn't come back. i think i stopped the second recording around the time it disintegrated, so i have a record of where it was. it was weak and small from the start, so the CSD wave must have just disintegrated. very strange. for a while after, a few minutes, i had a clear feeling of visual disorganization in the left field, but nothing obvious, nothing i could really pin down, and certainly no scotoma.

no headache whatsoever - there was a slight headache in the afternoon, right side, normal place, but transient and weak, i gave it a 0.5.

came home and had dinner, bit of a weird feeling but nothing significant. weird.

Thursday, July 04, 2013

titles are hard

woke up this morning, after nine, opened then closed my eyes, and saw a glittering arc in my left visual field: this is the fourth or fifth time now, at least (i could pin it to one of those if i looked back over these records) that this has happened as i awoke. the aura was typical, about 10 minutes or so in, already with the leftward midline jag, then arcing downward. like last time, when i woke in the middle of the night at a similar stage, i decided not to run and record the end of it, just laid there and observed.

i watched half of it with eyes closed, and the scintillations were a bit plainer that way, typical fortification spectrum. i noticed that even - or especially - with eyes closed, eye movements seem to briefly abolish my perception of the scintillations. with eyes open, the same seems to happen, but it's less plain. the scotoma was very thin, which i've noticed before with the early morning (and the previous, nighttime) auras.

a few minutes after i awoke the headache started, and i gave it a 3. left side aura, headache focused on right frontal nerve. might have peaked at 4 or so around or after noon, when i could feel it in my teeth, but now it's more like a 1, i have to shake my head or stand up to feel it.

july fourth! getting work done lately. checked the proofs of one paper and submitted another. need to revise a third. need to work on a fourth and a fifth, editing and improvements of unsubmitted papers. and then there's a sixth that needs to be written, outlined it in toronto. so it's been a good summer for papers, at least.

that's it for now. spending july 4 playing video games, need to get back to that before it's time to cook dinner.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

toronto

just in time to make it 2 for June:



Notes at the Robards Library on the U.Toronto campus, 3:30 pm on 6-26-13.

My feet are very tired. Got up this morning at 5, took a shower, kissed my wife goodbye, and went out to meet the waiting taxi. Had a coffee at the airport.

Got on the prop plane to Toronto at 6:30. Had a coffee on the plane, with a muffin and a cup of yogurt. Clearly I am thinking of food.

Looking out the plane window while we were still on the Boston tarmac, I noticed that I could see the flicker of sunlight through the propellers - I was sitting right next to the front of the left engine, on a plane that was two thirds empty - but only in my periphery. So the propellers were rotating no faster than 60 Hz. Once we went to take off and the engines revved up, I couldn't see the flicker anymore - revving up meaning revving faster, you see.

Got to Toronto by 9, the Billy Bishop airport, on a little island on the lake in front of the city. First person off the plane, last through customs. Canadian customs are actually pretty challenging! Dunno what was up with that.

Then, took a 1 minute ferry ride to the shore, and walked north on Bathurst street. Made it to Kensington market and found a little open air restaurant to get breakfast. It was almost 10. I was already soaked with sweat. Ninety degrees out, humid, and not a cloud in the sky, and I'm wandering the streets of a strange city with a 10 pound bag on my back and a poster tube on my arm. I had a cheese omelet, which came with salad and hashbrowns, it was pretty good. And toast.

I am so hungry. I then wandered for about an hour, through Toronto Chinatown, until I came to the Toronto Art Gallery or whatever it's called. Bought a ticket and discarded my luggage, and wandered the museum for 3 hours. Best part by far was the set of installations on the fourth floor, something I've never seen before: little repeating 3-d audiovisual pieces, rooms full of stuff with recordings playing - some of the recordings were little dramas, one was just a rainstorm, from start to finish. It was great. Had a coffee at the museum.

Then I left the museum and went the wrong way, south instead of north, deeper into the city instead of towards the University of Toronto. Finally I made it here, and now I'm resting in the library, cooling off and writing these notes. I took lots of little videos of my day so far.

From here, I need to 1) get something to eat, 2) get to a subway station, 3) figure out how to use the Toronto subway, and 4) use it to get to York, or as close as I can (then I have to take a bus, apparently). If all goes well I'll be at York University in no less than 90 minutes. Wish me luck! I'm so hungry.

part 2, 18:56pm, June 28 2013

Meeting is over. Sitting in the weird weird weird Billy Bishop Airport departure area/lounge. It would be much nicer if half the flights weren't delayed because of some storm.

Meeting was interesting. Had several talks with F.K., about my current in-review JOV paper, for which he is one of the reviewers; about my current little blur adapt project that I presented (to 3 people, I think) here at this meeting, he had some very helpful comments there; and on other random spatial vision lightness brightness topics. Lots of fun, I think talking to him made the whole meeting worthwhile.

Also met with D.G., as a sort of pre-interview for a postdoc position. Not sure I want to really apply. I was testing to see if it was something that might be up my alley, definitely far up it, but now I'm thinking maybe too far. It's probably too much of a stretch to try to work natural scenes and spatial vision into the level he's working at. I'll study his work over the next couple of weeks, then let him know.

Also managed lunch with F.W. to discuss migraine psychophysics. She seems to have cooled a bit on the migraine spatial vision business, but is still interested. Similar attitude to N.H. about the difficulty and unlikelihood of having migraineurs do vision tasks or perimetry during their auras, though I am not convinced. I will take the long view. M.D. is enthusiastic, I met with him last week. I am almost thinking of writing an entire proposal out, it seems it would be relatively straightforward. I feel I've put all the requisite pieces together, i.e. bounced ideas off all the important people. The main thing that's missing is predictions as to how certain psychophysical properties might be influenced, which is something that L.L. brought up on his own. So now, it seems I should get back to him.

Interesting things I saw... C.B.'s keynote address was pretty bad. I don't know what the general opinion was, but it seemed for the wrong audience - like he was addressing a bunch of visual physiologists in 1992. Don't know what was going on there. Good talks were R.K. on superior colliculus, showing us maps and explaining function, things that if I've ever learned them I've forgotten; G.L.'s talk was interesting, reading and training reading with CFL patients; H.W.'s talk was good, R.B.'s I thought was too much review; A.P.'s talk on form perception and V4 was very interesting. A.P.'s and R.K.'s were like little topical seminars on things I didn't know; I guess R.B.'s was similar but I already knew all of it. D.Z. gave a talk on how MRI magnets affect the fluid in the semicircular canals, resulting in constant nystagmus for anyone who gets into an MRI machine. I remember the slight shock I got the one time I was put in an MRI magnet, but I don't remember noticing nystagmus. I might have thought it was concentration problems, instead.

So that was the meeting. Mostly good, a little slow in some places. I got to attend the retirement of the great H.W.. Poster sessions were too brief, barely worth the trouble, though I did get F.K.'s comments and H.W. came by and didn't complain about anything, though he didn't volunteer compliments or suggestions either. He thought the phase filter was a neat idea, though.

***

Observations on Canada

The way of speech is different. They do say 'soarry' instead of 'sarry', and they say it a lot. I hear a lot of 'os' instead of 'as', 'possengers' instead of 'passengers'. There's something else, a character that feels narrow somehow. I don't know what 'narrow' means there, but it feels right, so I'm using a word that feels right to describe a feeling that I can't otherwise describe. May all be in my head.

The York campus, which is in the northern Toronto suburbs, had lots of animals. I saw a raccoon, a groundhog, and a rabbit, and lots of black squirrels. I saw the groundhog and the rabbit at the same time. I don't think I've seen a raccoon up close since I was a kid, probably out at the cabin or something. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a groundhog up close. This was all right in the middle of campus.

When I was trying to get up to York, just having gone into the Spadina station, I got turned around and lost and couldn't find my way. An older guy, long white hair bound up behind his head, heavy set, white beard, noticed that I looked confused, stopped, and told me where to go.

Again, I feel that the people are different. A part of it must be in the speech, which sounds American but is subtly different. I think a professional would be necessary to explain the differences completely. Multiple idioms that I've heard from C* and D*, many times up here. I wish I could explain the feeling better, because I don't think it's all language. Maybe more visits will resolve this place better for me. It may be because this is big Toronto City, but people seem to dress strangely, less conservatively than Americans in general. Gaudiness isn't standard but seems more common than on Boston streets, at least. I guess I can't generalize from Toronto to Canada. Toronto is clearly an immigrant city, I would say barely half the people I saw in the city were white, lots of Chinese, black, brown, etc. In that sense, it reminds me more of San Francisco or LA. It's very unlike Montreal, which did not have such an American appearance, and which at the same time was much more white.

Aside from the people, it looks exactly American. No obvious differences in infrastructure. The York campus has lots of tunnels and connected buildings, which I would guess is more due to the winter cold and snow and not some sort of Canadian preference for warrens. When I walked through the city I got feelings of China-ness somehow, I think because there was so much construction going on. Nothing about watching the streets makes it look different in any obvious way from watching American streets.

All flights are delayed by hours. Some are nearly canceled. I don't know what's going on, must have been a string of storms across the northeast.

First time ever, I saw another Tennesseean at a vision meeting. He was an undergraduate from MTSU of all places, said he was from Bellevue. I questioned him a bit and he just talked and talked. Despite being from Bellevue, he seemed not to have heard of Cheatham County or Kingston Springs, and so I didn't like him. Complained of Tennessee as a place to escape, where no one wants to return. How can you want to escape if you don't even know your surroundings? Not that I'm not ambivalent about this myself, and I'm half over as old as this guy, but I don't think I was ever that bad. Main thing that rubbed me wrong was that he talked too much, which I guess is just a personality trait. It will probably get him places, I don't know.

Back to Canada. The buses were just like American buses. The subways were regular subways, long cars like the China style, where you could walk from end to end. Spadina station where I first got on was a link between two lines, one of which I didn't travel on, but it looked a lot like the Boston green line, trolly cars running through tunnels. I would have liked to try that one. The friendly white-haired guy got off one of those.

Forgot to mention til now, had a headache yesterday morning, give it a 7, maybe even 8. Woke up with it and it got worse through the morning, coming and going. Quasi-hangover, but I'd just had 3 beers with a full dinner the night before, not enough for a real hangover, though I think the alcohol probably did cause it, in addition to dehydration from the long trek across the city and the general relief of arrival. Slept terribly Wednesday night, partly from the headache starting, and partly from Terry calling and texting me every 10 minutes starting around 6am, probably had barely 5 hours total.

Right eye trigeminal was sore, still sore today, but the headache disappeared over lunch yesterday, went from a 7 to nearly zero. I was still a bit dazed and confused, but got over it pretty quickly. Slept well last night, got at least 8 hours in, maybe more.