I've had strongly pronounced visual snow since I was a little kid.. Remember asking my parents "what is the thing you see when you close your eyes?"
They were confused, "black?" yeah, but.. I know the color back, like, a piece of black paper on the table in a well-lit room, I understand that it's this near ideal smooth surface that reflect very little light of no particular color.. But the thing when you've been in bed for a few minutes in darkness, and the "tv static" blobs start moving around and pulsating ?
They never really understood what I was talking about.. I talked to others, and most people report no such experience.. I was convinced (and still is) that everyone has this, and it's more about.. how well attuned they are to it, how aware they are of it.. Like with the floaters.. As I'm writing this, I sit in a dark room with my monitor, and around the white text box is a hundred little "cells" jotting around in the snow.. I don't believe for a second this is uncommon, I think the less part is becoming aware of it.
It's hard to "unsee", when you've recognized the face on the crab, it will always be there to some degree. When you've become aware of a sound, you can't unlearn it.
Back to childhood, as a kid, I was at the ear doc a few times, trying to find out what the thing was I heard.. It was not tinnitus (that came later) but, in the end they concluded it was the flow of blood in my ear.. Something everyone hears, but many people don't notice.
When I was a kid, I would blink my eyes when looking at high contrast scenes, and as my eyes were closed, play with the afterimages, eventually learning to refresh them by slightly changing the force with which my eyes were held shut.. Eventually I noticed how the light became momentarily brighter when going outside from inside a dark house.. I found that thing in my head, that thing that made it become brighter and darker, and played around with it, eventually showing my friends at school that one can change the size of their pupils by thinking about it, just like one can wiggle their ear or move their scalp.
I'm not discounting the experience, but rather, I question if this is really damage to the brain, or rather, a stimulation that caused them to notice what is already there.
They never really understood what I was talking about.. I talked to others, and most people report no such experience.. I was convinced (and still is) that everyone has this, and it's more about.. how well attuned they are to it, how aware they are of it.. Like with the floaters.. As I'm writing this, I sit in a dark room with my monitor, and around the white text box is a hundred little "cells" jotting around in the snow.. I don't believe for a second this is uncommon, I think the less part is becoming aware of it.
It's hard to "unsee", when you've recognized the face on the crab, it will always be there to some degree. When you've become aware of a sound, you can't unlearn it.
Back to childhood, as a kid, I was at the ear doc a few times, trying to find out what the thing was I heard.. It was not tinnitus (that came later) but, in the end they concluded it was the flow of blood in my ear.. Something everyone hears, but many people don't notice.
When I was a kid, I would blink my eyes when looking at high contrast scenes, and as my eyes were closed, play with the afterimages, eventually learning to refresh them by slightly changing the force with which my eyes were held shut.. Eventually I noticed how the light became momentarily brighter when going outside from inside a dark house.. I found that thing in my head, that thing that made it become brighter and darker, and played around with it, eventually showing my friends at school that one can change the size of their pupils by thinking about it, just like one can wiggle their ear or move their scalp.
I'm not discounting the experience, but rather, I question if this is really damage to the brain, or rather, a stimulation that caused them to notice what is already there.