[last Monday, the 13th,  I woke up with a great headache that lasted more than 48 hours. left side on the first day, right side on the second. nothing else particularly interesting.]

notes after midnight on May 17, 2013

When I was about 12, I could go outside some afternoons, in my backyard, and see giant helicopters flying across the sky, with what looked like trucks and tanks suspended below on long cables, in long processions, one giant helicopter after another. That would have been nineteen-ninety, ninety-one, the Gulf War. Just now, on my last night in this house, to which my family moved in winter of nineteen eighty-five, when I wasn't yet six years old, I went out to the car to get the computer that I'm now writing on, and I hear a roar, a helicopter, coming from the southeast. I stand and wait to see it, and can't find it, as it's getting so loud that I can feel the vibrations. I'm confused at the conflict between what I hear and what I don't see, just a sky of stars, and then I see it, an enormous shadow, a blank space against the stars, flanked by dim lights, and the sound I hear finds its match.

Now I lay on the floor of the living room, what we called the room where my mother's pianos sat for more than 25 years, which is now empty but for little piles of human junk here and there. I'm sleeping here just for the strangeness of it, and because I figure if I sleep in my old bedroom, a smaller space as the boy who painted cats might advise me, I will get a cave cricket in the mouth. Usually a room looks larger when you clear it out, but the piano room looks smaller without the pianos. The true nature of the house is revealed in this room, a set of almost ramshackle wooden boxes, this room the boxiest of all of them.

I get to hear the crickets and frogs outside, and the constant truck of I-40. I mentioned the stars. And I get to spend one last night in this string of boxes in the countryside, set in an undrainable swamp, in the Harpeth hills. Only yesterday did I get that cliched phrase - you have these hills or those hills, hills is an appendage for a pleasant or obscure prependage. But this place is in the hills, and it was flooded by the Harpeth only 3 years ago, so I think it deserves the name.

I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I never quite understood my surroundings when I lived here, I only saw what was just at my nose and never questioned it or looked further, though I thought I did. Now I think I know how to see further, but coming back here and wandering around, I feel the old ignorance surface, and it's a strange feeling of simultaneously knowing where I am and never having known, and really only knowing that I'll probably never be back.

midnight aura

Olive the Cat wakes me up every morning sometime between 2 and 5, and I go put food in her bowl. This morning, at 2:30, I'm awakened by her scratching at the baseboard, and as I wake up I think I see fortification spectrum... turns out I'm about halfway through an aura. Left visual field, about 15 minutes in (noting for reference that the pain is on the right side, supraorbital nerve). I debated turning on the computer so I could record the remainder, but I think it was too far along to be worthwhile. The spectrum extended from fovea straight left, then arced downward. I watched it for a while - I'm still impressed at how straight it is at that point, I wonder if the CSD wave somehow gets caught up in the base of the calcarine sulcus.

The scotoma seemed very small, even when the wave was well into the periphery the blind region didn't seem thicker than the scintillations. The scintillations were very clear, whereas usually I don't see them very clearly - maybe because I was dark adapted the whole time, or my brain was in a sleepytime state, or maybe it was just a random thing. I did notice that closing my eyes, even though it didn't change the apparent luminance of the scene very much, made the phosphenes completely disappear for several seconds, and they would fade back into view only weakly, slowly. I couldn't go back to sleep for ~45 minutes. Ears were almost ringing, headache started. Minor, 5/10.

Yesterday, and maybe Thursday, several times, I noticed flashes, spots, in my periphery, and thought, 'something is up'. Yesterday afternoon, I'm sitting at my computer, reading text near the lower bezel, and I feel I see a phosphene or blind spot just below fixation, where the aura usually starts - it lasts ~10 seconds and disappears. Maybe that represented a false start? The cortex is weakly susceptible, and maybe there are false starts, and then it kicks off - or doesn't. Also, after the syncope episode, I've started to wonder if the tinnitus I get now and then is, at least sometimes, an aura - I had an episode yesterday.

I was dreaming about something as I woke up, and it seemed relevant somehow, but of course I've completely forgotten it now.

feeling very aggravated today, not going to say why. i want a new job. i said too much already.

intermittent intense photophobia the last couple of days, and much of today a strange buzzing distant feeling - could be that aggravation, but i'm voting prodrome. see what happens in the next few days.

ugh. is this even worth posting? i wrote a poem on patriot's day about the marathon bombing, but i'm not going to show it to you. it was four stanzas, four lines each, with a loose rhyme scheme as follows: xxxA, xxxB, ccxA xxxB. that's all you're getting.

i feel like my mind is a dismantled car engine, pieces scattered across the floor. is that how it seems to other people? my mind, i mean, is that how it seems to them, when they perceive it? what am i saying, when do others have an opportunity to perceive my mind? ugh. a dismantled engine scattered across the floor in a locked room, and the lights are too bright.

visual cortex is weird

Migraine weirdness:
1. The weekend after the AF, neck was constantly sore in a weird way. No sign of headache. Soreness disappeared yesterday (Monday).
2. Monday saw waves of photophobia, but it never lasted more than twenty minutes or so, or it was low-level enough that I could adapt to it, and wouldn't notice until the ambient light changed.
3. Today, a bit of photophobia and a faint headache, slightly nauseated. Am I just hyper-sensitive? Also, this morning when I awoke, saw the m-scaled lattice that I've mentioned before; it flashes on for just a few hundred milliseconds, and fades as the morning-light bedroom scene comes into view. I would say it looks most like Form Constant III as described by Bressloff et al (no I am not on any drugs, though Bressloff prefers to refer to drug-induced hallucinations):

(This image is from Bressloff et al's 2002 Neural Computation paper. Note the coincidental opposite symmetry between this kind of m-scaled 'spiral' pattern and the ancestor map in the previous post, which can be seen as another kind of spiral lattice - something like what you'd get if you plotted a flat lattice in the visual field and looked it it in cortical space.)

Also, to reiterate an observation I made in the AF post, in light of reading all this stuff about integrated information and consciousness over the past few days: migraine scotoma are invisible, unlike the disturbingly visible grayness I saw when my left retina stopped working. The normal explanation for the invisibility of cortical scotoma is that it is "filled in", which I've always felt was fishy.. I know it's well-studied, and now I'll have to read about it.

My feeling is that there is no filling in, at least not in the way it's usually talked about, but rather that the scotoma is a scotoma in visual space period - if you don't see the space, you don't see any blankness, and you see the scene continue directly from one side to the other, not knowing any better. Maybe it's hard to justify this intuition, but I think it's similar to noting (as hemianopia patients do) that beyond the edges of the visual field, there's not an expanse of nothingness, but rather no expanse at all. If there is no expanse, there is no edge, so you get the strange condition of not being able to see the boundaries of your own visual field, because the boundary would have to be defined as between two expanses. With a proper mapping between visual direction and field location, you can be properly aware of the geometry of the visible field, without any need for it to be bounded. (Put another way, topologically, the space behind my head is equivalent to a hole in the visual field - if I can't perceive that space as being bounded by the same boundary as the visible field, why should I be able to see the boundaries, and the invisible expanse, of a cortical scotoma?)

amaurosis fugax

Yesterday, about 5 o'clock, sitting at my desk. Go to stretch, arms behind me, pulling on my shoulder, started to greyout (I don't know a better term for this - whatever you call the visual consequence of ocular hypotension) just a bit - which is normal for me when I stretch after having sat still for too long - and instead of resolving the greyout continues. My field of view starts to fade in blotches, but I can still see - I realize that it's just in one eye. I close one, then the other, and now I know that the view from my left eye is fading.

I jump up and run to Eli's office, and by this time, my left eye view is almost completely blank, except for a space around the fovea, maybe 5° wide and 2° high. This makes sense - the foveal blood supply comes from the choroid, not the apparently blocked ophthalmic artery. The blankness is plainly visible as a flat gray. This is different from the scotoma of the migraine aura, which is as visible as the space behind my head. The boundary between the visible center and the blankness is shimmering, flickering, like the smoldering edge of slowly burning paper. Eli gets his ophthalmoscope to try and see what's happening, and the superior field starts to fade back into view.

It's then stable for about a minute, the inferior field is blank gray, and there's a smoldering horizontal boundary between the superior and inferior fields. I see some strange parafoveal phosphenes, like super-high contrast arcs. Eli is shining a light in my eye, and I'm shocked to realize that this bright light is totally failing to punch through the grayness. I wave my hand in the scotoma and though I can't see it, I feel like I can sense the motion.

The inferior nasal field returns, very subtly, so that I just realize it's back without noticing much about how it returns. It's patchy but quick - then the inferior temporal field returns. After this point, I can't find any other blind areas; everything has returned. In fact, I can't find any obvious differences between the two eyes, though at this time Eli is urging me to go to the ER to get examined. My heart is pounding and my head is starting to hurt. For the next 10-15 minutes, as I'm on my way to the hospital, I can see my pulse with the left eye, but then no more, and everything is back to normal.

Eli gets me in to see someone at MEEI, and I'm examined by an ophthalmology resident. The doctor pronounces this a case of ocular migraine, which as far as I understand means "we don't know, but everything looks ok".

Typical Wednesday afternoon. Hey, April is here!

**edit @ 16:21**

While I don't like the 'migraine' label, I guess I can't deny that there might be something to it. It is unknown what the proximal cause of a migraine is, though it's definitely associated with cortical spreading depression in the brain, the physiological correlate of a migraine aura; the current consensus seems to be that the CSD produces substances that inflame tissues in the brain, which then is perceived as pain, and which fits with the experience of headache beginning partway through the aura.

But what causes the CSD? One sure way to cause it is to deprive an area of cortex of blood - stroke causes CSD even in areas of cortex that still have blood supply but happen to be nearby the ischemic areas. So it could be that the aura/CSD is caused by a very local, transient ischemia. The ischemia can't be very large or long-lived because there don't tend to be other symptoms accompanying the well-described auras.

I would be happy if I could confirm that this episode is somehow related to the migraines, i.e. that I experienced a spasm of the ophthalmic artery of the same sort that I usually experience on a much smaller scale, and deeper in my brain, immediately preceding a migraine aura. I also do not feel much affection for this experience, in contrast to the fascinating auras - I hope this does not happen repeatedly, because I don't think it can be good for the retina to periodically starve it of oxygen.

random report

random thoughts after a trip home:

politics:I had the idea that you can view different political philosophies by how they respond to (or acknowledge) a certain axiom, that the state is effectively the ultimate master of all people, that any individual is subject in all ways to the power of the government. Fascists acknowledge the axiom and embrace it, they treat the state as a parent and the people as children, and they endeavor to make the state worthy of this status and authority. Anarchists, while they also acknowledge the axiom, view it as the reason that there can be no state, why the state has to be overthrown and dismantled and prevented from recurring. Anarchists will say that people should be their own masters (or not even that), and that no one should ever make himself master of any other. Socialists are the third group that acknowledge the axiom, but they seek to make the state somehow equivalent with the people - through democratic means - so that while it is still true, it becomes unconcerning, since now the people are their own masters, through the mechanism of the state. American libertarians - and the model American political philosophy that is given lip service but not much actual credit - believe that the state has the potential, which has usually been fulfilled, to take on the role of master of all its subjects, but that it can be contained and controlled like a pack animal. I think that Americans in fact, in their popular political system, actually take on aspects simultaneously of socialism and fascism, believing that the state is a function of democracy at the same time that it is - and I think this is a contradiction with the first property - a benevolent external force that requires respect and adoration. The American left and right both take this attitude, but toward different aspects, although in my systematization they are mostly deluded into thinking that they are model Americans, i.e. libertarians. I guess I am closer to a libertarian than anything else, though if there is some label that applies to a half social anarchist half american libertarian, it would mostly cover me (I like NASA and public healthcare and the NIH).

headache: A really irritating headache on Friday, which I think was partly provoked by jumping jacks in the afternoon and magnified by beer in the evening. Two aspirin either did nothing to help or kept it from getting much worse. Not sure this was a migraine, but I think it was. I could feel it mostly above my right eye, and could actually touch it at the supraorbital foramen. By this I mean that by pressing on this spot, I could modulate the main locus of pain; this is a common sort of property of my headaches. This is just one specific branch of the trigeminal nerve, and except for some slight twinge of pain in my right maxilla, I couldn't find any other specific locus. So, I don't know if this qualifies as 'migraine', or if it's actually some sort of ophthalmic nerve neuritis, but just by scanning a google search of 'migraine and trigeminal nerve', you can see that there is thought to be a strong link between migraine pain and over-excitatory dysfunction of neurons in the trigeminal nucleus, so...

Also, had a nice conversation with my aunt about migraine. So along with my mother and her, she says that my grandmother also had headaches, but not my grandfather, so that must be where it comes from.

work/writing: I realized that the project I'm currently working on would be good to divide into two papers: one on the broader aspects of blur adaptation and the connection to contrast adaptation (which I hope to have data on by the end of this week), and the other on the absence of phase-blur adaptation. The latter might make a good PLoS-1 paper.

TKD CSD

So, 4 days ago I dreamed of seeing a scintillating scotoma, and then became vaguely paranoid of how inconvenient it would be to have one on Sunday morning before my black belt test; then, today, after I'm home from the test and from grocery shopping, I for some reason start a conversation with j* about how migraines can be associated with relaxation after stress, and tell her the story of VanValkenburgh's Vacation; and this afternoon, coming in with the groceries, i get distracted for a little while by a foveal afterimage, probably from the sun glinting off a car windshield - but maybe it was something else. Yesterday, or a couple of days ago, I was distracted for maybe a minute by the noisiness of my visual field, having momentarily noticed how snowy everything looked. I think that was Friday...

So finally, about 9pm tonight, in the kitchen about to explain to j* why my shoulder hurts (because I briefly dislocated it by swinging my arm wildly at an odd angle towards an 18-year old), I realize that my foveal vision feels scotoma-like (if there is a word for 'feels like a scotoma', I don't know what it is. Specific feels, like 'rough', or 'bright', or 'salty', have specific, ancient, singular morphemes attached to them, so it's hard to invent a new word for a new feeling, or for one that is rare or obscure enough that it hasn't been named). I pick up a knife and start trying to use the sharp tip, at arm's length, to find a blind spot, but can't find it; the start is always odd, since I think the scotoma is very small and maybe discontinuous, and maybe even not binocular. For whatever reason, I can tell that it's there, but it's often hard to find. Then, as I've mentioned many times here, it seems to disappear; then it reappears.

This one was right field; headache is very slight, I felt it start midway through the aura, as a little jolt of pain, then disappeared. I have to shake my head to feel it; possibly would be a little worse if I hadn't taken an ibuprofen soon after the scotoma was after, though I took it for my shoulder...

So I got another recording with scotmap, which I think is good, but all my code from last summer is written implicitly for a left-field scotoma, and my code is complicated and uncommented, so it will take me a little while to straighten it out and make another good animation to post up here. I do have the data transformed and fitted to the wave model I came up with, and the result is very similar to the last measurement: exactly 3mm/min, starting a few millimeters on the V2 side of the inferior V1/V2 border, 10 or so millimeters from the foveal confluence. This is consistent with my feeling that there is a scotoma, and yet being unable to see it directly; the scotoma begins in V2.

There's something weird at the end, a bunch of data at a much smaller eccentricity; this may be an error, I don't think it's the 'rough spot' that I have mentioned before. Will work it out this week.

Meanwhile, here's a general migraine data plot, relating my estimates of headache intensity on a 10-point scale (notice what a fortunate migraineur I am) to the time elapsed since the previous headache. Most of these ratings are retrospective, based on these journal entries. I see a relationship: more frequent means more intense. The outlier at zero is the night in China last month, where there was no headache at all, which I attributed to the simultaneous alcohol intake with the aura.


In other news, I have failed to make progress this weekend on E*'s presentation.

Also, saw a nice show at the BSO last night: Hindemith, Liszt, and Prokofiev.

dream aura 2

dreamed last night that a scintillating scotoma was starting; i think i was trying to read, but couldn't see letters, space was distorted as though there were blind spots. i'm wondering if now that i'm familiar with the scotoma experience, the normal dream experience of being unable to resolve text in a dream is now naturally triggering thoughts, and ensuing dream experience, of a migraine aura.

i went to get my laptop so i could start recording the aura, but then i got distracted by downloading a video game, which then autonomously tried to download other games, which made it impossible for me to get back to matlab to run the aura recorder.

after a few minutes, i realized that either i had missed the whole thing, or it had stopped, because there was no scotoma and i couldn't remember seeing any of the big peripheral scintillations. at some point after that, i realized it had all been a dream, and i started wondering whether i actually had a headache or not; then i awoke, and went through the same train of thought again. but happily, no headache.

my tkd black belt test is sunday, and i am slightly nervous that i will get a headache sunday morning; i have a superstitious feeling that i have *caused* the headaches before by thinking too much about being about to have one, when in fact i think i've just subconsciously noticed aspects of prodrome. anyways.

dinner aura

(this and the previous post were written as dated, but are posted today, 1-5-13; the times are today's time).

last night, just as we were starting our saturday night banquet, i noticed that everything i was looking at seemed distorted, and then realized that a scotoma was developing, just below and right of fixation. i wasn't able to pay much attention to this one, since i had to eat dinner without looking like a lunatic, but it seemed normal; straightish out to the right of fixation, then arcing downward. there was a period early on where the scotoma was very difficult to find, but i think it was just distributed, or at least not exactly the same in both eyes, but was still there. whereas usually the headache would have started about halfway in, this time there was nothing; maybe a slight sense of headache-like pressure behind the forehead, but no pain. i am guessing this was maybe due to the constant alcohol ingestion? by the time the 10-15 minute mark came around, i had probably had at least 2 shots of baijiu.

absence of a headache was good, since following this i went with jp's father, uncle huang, and uncle wang to get my 'feet washed', which really turned out to mean a full-body massage. a full-body massage while fully dressed in winter getup, sweaters and pants and long underwear. it was nice, though! and lucky no headache, since there was a stage of head-beating.

also, i didn't detect any sort of prodrome. in the morning, i had felt it inordinately difficult to form sentences, and made some strange mistakes in chinese, producing strangely wrong words, which i noticed at the time as out of the ordinary. otherwise, nothing obviously in prediction..

train headache

slightly excruciating headache. developed on the train. may or may not be migraine, it's a fuzzy cloud of pain centered between behind my eyes and my palate. maybe a sinus thing instead, or maybe there's an interaction with the winter air and the train heating. nauseated and photophobic. i keep holding my breath.

visual phenomena at the two edges of sleep

1. going to sleep last night, and saw that high t.f. flicker, though i didn't have a headache at the time. actually, haven't had one in almost 2 months, i think. woke up this morning feeling like i had a hangover, but no headache per se, so maybe i had a migraine in my sleep? or, it was an overdose on thai food. there were definitely abdominal repercussions.

2. been meaning to write this down: jingping usually gets up before me what with the school and all, and usually when she gets up to leave it's still dark. if she turns on the bedroom light and i'm sufficiently conscious but still with eyes closed (and maybe also if my face is pointing in the right direction), i will see a quick red flash. nothing interesting, right? but the flash has a geometric structure, a hexagonal lattice, like an M-scaled honeycomb. a typical sort of visual field hallucination, but i only started noticing it in recent months.

that is all.

meh

I keep noticing, lately, near- and far-peripheral flashes, phosphenes. There was one a few minutes ago, maybe 10deg below fovea, very obvious and yet hard to localize (it was almost as though it extended close to the fovea); I checked for a blindspot, found none. So, based on all these recent sparky things, I predict something happening in the next few days (especially since the BA paper is just about done, so I'm about to go through another relax-contract phase).

lull

finally working on that blur adaptation paper. not much else to think about or report.

***

last saturday (the 6th) woke up with a headache, fairly painful: i'd rate the usual ones at 2/10, and this was a 4/10. today, i wake up with one even worse: i'd put this at 6/10 (assuming it can get much worse). this is awful - it's as bad as that night tukrong punched me in the head 10 times. what is going on with my brain?

中秋快乐!

quick notes for the end of september:

week 1 of bring-your-laptop-to-work was a success; worked steadily in the lab every day, and came home each night to do particular jobs by hand, with pen and paper. extremely effective. laptop came back home friday night; going to continue this for the foreseeable future. should make the next MS revision and the following MS submission much easier.

headache last night, gradual onset; eventually focused pain above right eye socket; photophobia; went to bed, closed eyes, weird eigenlicht flicker, maybe 40-50Hz; what is that? slight headache remnant now, indistinct.

recent weirdness with reading text, usually notice in the morning; right now, left of fixation feels scotoma-like, but i can see there..

**

also, a story: when i sit at the kitchen table, in the chair by the window, i have a view of the pantry area, with the fridge and the back door. my leather sandals are wedged between the fridge and the wall, by the door, so i can wear them outside when i go to throw trash out.

i regularly mistake the sandals, peripherally, for Olive the Cat, sitting by the back door, wanting to go out. then i foveate them, and see that they are my sandals. this has happened repeatedly, maybe dozens of times: deja trompé!

morning aura

in rochester for the OSA vision meeting.

woke up this morning about 6:30ish, with terry yelling at me to wake up. went to take a shower, and while there, realized i couldn't see my fingertips as i was washing, grabbing soap, etc. got out of the shower, got dressed, left the room and went to the lobby. got there a little after seven, and the scotoma was well into the periphery, flickering etc. it was just like the last three: left field, straight right-left through the upper field and arcing downward into the lower field.

the last one i managed to record, back in june, had a time gap between the foveal scotoma and the peripheral arcs, which i had post hoc explained as me needing to recalibrate some part of the perimeter or something. but during the last two, i noticed that the scotoma actually does seem to disappear between the foveal appearance and the peripheral arcs. wonder what is going on with that...

didn't notice any peripheral rough spot this time, but it was so early that i might just have been too dazed.. these morning scotomas that i've experienced - the last one a few weeks ago, and the one last year in the winter - they seem to have started just as i awoke. may be coincidental, since it's just a sample size of three, but i haven't had one start a half hour after waking, and i haven't woken up halfway through one (though the first time, i think i lay there with my eyes closed for the first 10 minutes or so). might be interesting to look up what sort of neurochemical changes occur in cortex, esp. visual cortex, during waking.

headache was ok, took some tylenol this time. nauseated all day long.

**

yesterday (or maybe thursday night, not sure), i remember feeling suspicious that something might be about to happen: i had the thought, i should keep track of these suspicions, to see if they're actually correlated. it is possible that i am suspicious very frequently, and just notice the coincidences..

random

I seem to have gotten into treating this thing as a migraine journal, so here: headache last night (Saturday). Strange one, came on slowly, from mid-afternoon, increased gradually until 10 or so, when it was actually pretty irritating. May be something else. It's kind of still here, vaguely. Front of the head, above-behind the eyes, but something about it is different. Dunno.

As for work, I should have done more this weekend. I have 3 current main foci: FVM presentation, blur adaptation revision, and R01 application.

The presentation is >90% done. I'm leaving it for a few days.

The blur adapt revision is 0% done. I'm trying to figure out what "simple" model to replace the section in the paper with. If I can't get it to work by the end of the week, I think I'll have to stick with the original "complicated" model, and *add* material (thus making it *more* complicated) to explain why the simple version can't be easily adapted to work. What this entails is about an hour of programming and 24 hours of running the simulations/measurements so I can see the results and decide on what isn't working and make changes and repeat the process. In the meantime, I do nothing productive. So:

R01 application is... well... I don't want to do it. It's futile, but it's my job. Will start soon. Should have started this weekend.

dream science?

Too many entries - let this be the last one for August.

Fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably, implausibly, Monday night I had a dream that directly relates to Monday's entry. I'll leave out irrelevant details: I dreamed that I was experiencing a migraine aura.

In the dream, I noticed the phosphene-like foveal scotoma, and at first had the "is it an afterimage? what bright light did I look at?" reaction, and then realized what it really was. It was upsetting, actually, because the last one was just 1 week previous, and I felt like once a week is a bit too frequent.

I then set about trying to record the aura with my perimetry program, except that my computer was now a large, flat panel lying on the floor, like a giant i-pad. The layout was of course different - not a blank gray screen, but a thin-line black grid, like a Go board, on a wood-brown background. Jingping was there, and kept trying to move the grid around, and I kept telling her to stop.

Once I was trying to record it, the scotoma was no longer foveal, but extended 10-20 degrees out, straight to the left and then arcing downward towards the inferior vertical meridian. This makes me think that I wasn't actually experiencing an aura in my sleep - to get from the foveal scotoma to 10-20 degrees should take 15-20 minutes, and I don't think that much time actually passed in the dream - it seemed like less than a minute. Of course, time and space are both funny in dreams, so who knows. There was no headache on Tuesday, anyways.

It was very frustrating trying to set the fixation point in the dream perimetry program. I just couldn't fixate - I would set it in one place, and then felt that it should be somewhere else. I think I finally gave up and started sticking my hand in the scotoma to probe its size.

So, whether or not I was really experiencing an aura, or just dreaming that I was experiencing one, is an interesting question. It seemed like a real one, and I noted lots of spatial details: the tiny phosphenic bead of the foveal scotoma, the fuzzy noisiness of the peripheral scotoma arc (though the periphery seemed clearer somehow in than true peripheral vision), the thin black lines of the perimetry grid, the unfixable fixation spot.. If visual experience includes V1 activity, and if the visual aura occurs in V1, and if V1 is quiet or suppressed during dreaming, how could I have seen what I did, unless spatial vision includes a good deal of higher-level inference?

It seems that I proposed an experiment on Monday afternoon, and then did the experiment in my sleep that night. I have never been so efficient!

punched in the head

title says it all. punched a few times in the head, and now i have a headache. feels migrainish. it is possible that getting punched in the head in just the right way can trigger a migraine. or maybe i have a concussion? i do have a big red bruise on my forehead, so maybe the pain is on the outside, muscular, and i just can't tell the difference since it's all just front-of-the-head.

anyways.

**edit, 0:23, 8/27/12
the bruise is still there, fading, and the flesh is a bit tender - worse yesterday - but the headache was gone when i woke up saturday morning.

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.

**

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!

nausea, photophobia, headache

woke up slightly late today, started to feel sick on the train; slightly nauseated all day long (mainly manifesting as excessive salivation, gross), a bit of photophobia. might be eyestrain or due to my crooked (broken, $10) glasses. briefly on tuesday night inverted the contrast on firefox, but then switched it back. at the time it was because my glasses seemed smudgy and i just couldn't get them clear, thought, "ah, it's a sign!", but decided no, it's the glasses. right now definitely a slight headache. as usual in my forehead, just above my eyes, maybe a bit left of center.