Ask HN: Teach me something new

In the incident I described, there was no pain.

The first migraine I remember was in my mid teens. It was extremely painful, with searing pain through my head and down through my torso. It felt as if someone had stuck a red-hot blade right through my head and into my body and was just holding it there.

Up into my early thirties, migraines continued to be very painful. Like you I often experienced both pain and nausea. Besides the knife through my body and the nausea, I often also experienced any kind of sensory input as painful. Hearing sounds was painful; seeing light was painful; tasting or smelling anything was painful; touching things was painful. During an attack I would generally just try to find a soft, quiet, dark, warm place to lie down until it went away.

Beginning in my late thirties, the painful and unpleasant aspects of the migraines began to diminish. By my forties, the attacks had become much less frequent, and when they occurred, they were much less painful.

The scotoma remained prominent, though. In my teens, it was generally a circular area of blackness surrounded by a rapidly-whirling multicolored aurora. It gradually changed over the years, going through several different shapes and color patterns. Most recently it's usually been brilliant white geometric shapes with rapidly-moving zebra stripes, turning slowly.

The scotoma has always been much more vivid than real vision. The shapes and colors are much much brighter, clearer, and more vivid than any real image I've ever seen.

Over the past fifteen years or so, the frequency is down to once every two or three years, and it's commonly just the scotoma for a little while, and none of the other symptoms, or perhaps a little minor discomfort in my torso and a little dizziness. Sometimes it's just a set of sensations that are really hard to describe--sort of just a hint of the feeling of falling, or a very faint experience of dizziness, together with an impression that part of my visual field is sort of starting to flicker randomly. Usually that flickering turns into the scotoma, but in some recent cases, I just have the flickering for a few minutes, and then nothing else.

In the incident I describe here, it was just the scotoma for a little while. (Sorry I'm not more specific about how long it lasts. I'd guess maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but my sense of time is kind of screwed up during an attack.)

If you're younger, maybe the trajectory of my migraine offers some hope. Mine have gotten much easier to take over the years. Maybe yours will, too.

I have experienced this several times and almost never have a headache. I definitely can't read what's beyond/obscured by the scotoma. The first time it happened was during a test in high school and the splotch grew until I was forced to read the questions in my peripheral.

I have an anecdote that corroborates your observation that cognitive experiences are more complicated then assumed: I was once very, very sleep deprived. I became aware that my body was reacting to something, as if there was a jump scare in a movie, I unconsciously flinched and pulled away from something without knowing why, and then a perceptual moment later, I heard a loud noise caused by something falling to the floor.

The scroll wheel on your mouse is probably a functional middle button.

On Linux, you can usually left-click-drag-release to highlight some text, move your mouse cursor to a new location (in any window), and middle-click once to paste the text you highlighted there. No explicit keyboard or right-click copy and paste required.

Well there is this famous paper by Volovich [1] where he argues that space is basically pixelized and p-adic numbers might best describe their geometry. But of course this has no connection with the reality we have access to. p-adic numbers are also used in various areas of number theory (not my expertise). I see them like the lesser known sibling of real numbers.

[1] https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/volovich1.pdf

Do me a favor some time and try to read through the scotoma, if you remember to. I think that I would have just assumed I couldn't do it if I hadn't been reading something really interesting when the scotoma started. It's only because it came on while I was already reading that I discovered that I was able to continue.

If you remember to try it, the results will be interesting no matter which way they turn out.