Visual Perception

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my phobia with big colourful flowers and butterflies is stemmed from visual sensory overload. i lose all control of myself when i see them.

I also have way more trouble with visual than auditory overload. And the way I perceive things visually is very unusual.

I basically see a lot of fragments and stuff. And I think I can see my own saccades so everything seems to jump around a lot. I am very nearsighted and prefer the world with my glasses off so I am not seeing every single little detail.

I also see a good deal of visual things that I have heard may be a constant migraine aura. I see colored dots or rain-like things everywhere. I used to just stare at them all the time for entertainment. Because of this and other visual oddities I was misdiagnosed as having lifelong visual hallucinations and accused of doing drugs (later tried drugs just because the accusations made me curious, then people were wont to blame my lifelong visual oddities on drugs). I also sometimes see a rippling effect as if looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.

And like all my senses, I see things automatically as undifferentiated colors and shapes. It takes work to distinguish and define individual objects.

Also the more unfamiliar the situation, the more I get seasick from all the visual chaos. I used to not get motion sickness and would sometimes "ride the chaos" for fun back then. When I was sixteen I developed motion sickness and ever since have had a tendency to get incredibly sick after traveling. Once I am in the new place all I can see is chaotic stuff jumping around and I vomit in a way that a friend said she had never seen before except in drunk people. It is probably why I need prescription nausea meds (non-neuroleptic) in order to function.

I actually have no idea how good my peripheral vision is, because it, like my central vision, is usually overwhelmed and "zoned out."

On the rare occasions when I'm feeling highly alert, my entire visual field looks like the picture you get on one of those huge, super-sharp tv screens. The texture of the bark on every tree is visible, etc. Most of the time everything looks sort of flat and I might see the shapes of things but not consciously recognize them as objects or give them a mental label like "building" or "car." When I see a messy pile of objects in my room I see a generalized pile but not the objects that make it up. Most of the time when I walk around I am "zoned out" and get to my destination without remembering how I got there (this has almost gotten me killed, and makes it hard to learn how new places are laid out). This looks like being "spacy" but it is really my visual system shutting down because, due to limited attention or whatever, it can't process the mass of details it takes in. It took me a long time to understand this. I used to just think my visual system didn't take in enough information, just like my ears seem to take in too much.

Sorry about the length of this post. I'd be interested in knowing whether anyone else experiences something similar and if anything has helped them learn to see better.

I have, and tinted lenses sometimes help but they do other things too so I don't always wear them.

I used to experience the same when I was young, as a child my vision was super-sharp and I often had tunnel vision (I still have some tunnel effects, but not so bad now). When I stared at things, which I did e.g. in school, the tunnel vision effect got so bad, sometime everything would go grey and disappear. Also, I used to be overwhelmed by detail, for example I did not like looking at trees and bushes if they didn't have leaves on them. I could see all the detail at once and it was too much, it made me tired / exhausted. But this was when I was very young, and I grew out of this problem.



I also see the swimming pool effect too, usually when I have just woken up and I'm still tired. Its like I can see my own flickering brainwaves. I don't see coloured dots, but as a child - teen, I used to see all the floaters between my cornea and lens, I also enjoyed looking at them, how they moved and floated around, drifted about. They were transparent little dots, threads, spider-webs. These are typical floaters that young people see, located in the front part of the eye, they go away as people age.

Now I am 37, I see many bigger dark ugly floaters that are in side the globe of my eyes - I hate looking at a blue sky, its like I'm in a dirty fish bowl. Its a natural ageing process and nothing can be done about it.

I have also, occasionally seen my own retina and its blood system just as I wake up. It looks like a big spider web with white sparkly dots (blood) pulsing though the threads. The occipital lobe when fully awake, cancels out allot the irrelevant noise / false images generated in the retina.

Anbuend, I thought your description sounded kinda familiar... what other effects do the tinted lenses have for you? Thanks.

Fairly light sensitive - in glasses since about 8. Glasses do the blinkewr job, of course, but I still can start at the periphery. Recent years at night I sometimes catch flashes of light that seem to be at about 120 degress to my line of vision [usuallyt on the left] - very disconcerting.

Much more vision problem than auditory [though I have some]