Sometimes I have a visual experience that is very hard to describe. It happens
when a person is talking to me and I’ve been looking at them without
interruption for several minutes. (Maybe they need to be looking at me too; I
can’t remember.)
What happens is that the person starts to seem very close to me and very small,
as though I had my face pressed up to the window of a dollhouse and they were
inside it. This is not exactly what it is like, but it’s the closest I can
come to putting it into words.
If I look away, the effect stops, but it easily starts again when I look back
at the person. I can’t make it happen at will, but once it starts I can
turn it on and off to a limited extent.
I first noticed this when I was 13 or so.
(I don’t think this is quite the type of thing Kaj is most interested in, but
it’s the only peculiarity of my mind that hasn’t already been mentioned in
other responses to this post. Indeed, I’ve never heard of it anywhere, so if
anyone has, please share!)
I’m not sure if I experience the same thing, but it sounds similar.
It sometimes happens with peoples faces, more often with my laptop screen when I’ve been staring at it for a while. It is impossible to put into words… sort of like my sense of size becomes meaningless. Depth perception vanishes. Sometimes things seem very small, or very large, but that is not quite it. It is more like my brain doesn’t know how to parse anything related to absolute size.
Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep, I’ll experience it with very high intensity. Normally when I think of an object, it is in one of two ways. Either I’m modeling it in my head, in which case it seems roughly head-sized and located (where else) in my head. Alternatively I superimpose it on the environment, and I can roughly envision it at appropriate scale. So whatever part of my brain that is responsible for these tasks seemingly deactivates. It’s really interesting in an abstract way, but its accompanied by mild nausea and vertigo.
Something similar happens to me. If I’m talking to somebody and staring them right in the eyes for more than like 90 seconds, my whole visual field seems to go totally haywire and I start seeing multiple, partial images of their face stacked on top of each other, rotated randomly, and bleeding into each other.
It’s of course very difficult to explain what it looks like because of how unfamiliar the patterns are (and thus how hard it would be to remember them in high enough detail to draw or whatever), so a real explanation will most likely have to wait until there’s technology available to simply scan my visual field onto a monitor, but it’s something like what I wrote above.
Anyway, this only happens when I’m so intent on staring them down with absolutely no interruptions for so long that I end up totally overriding my natural inclination to dart my eyes around in the specific pattern designed to scan the room and form a good representation, so it seems like this phenomenon is simply the chaotic result of overriding the preset updating system for vision.
Sometimes I have a visual experience that is very hard to describe. It happens when a person is talking to me and I’ve been looking at them without interruption for several minutes. (Maybe they need to be looking at me too; I can’t remember.)
What happens is that the person starts to seem very close to me and very small, as though I had my face pressed up to the window of a dollhouse and they were inside it. This is not exactly what it is like, but it’s the closest I can come to putting it into words.
If I look away, the effect stops, but it easily starts again when I look back at the person. I can’t make it happen at will, but once it starts I can turn it on and off to a limited extent.
I first noticed this when I was 13 or so.
(I don’t think this is quite the type of thing Kaj is most interested in, but it’s the only peculiarity of my mind that hasn’t already been mentioned in other responses to this post. Indeed, I’ve never heard of it anywhere, so if anyone has, please share!)
I’m not sure if I experience the same thing, but it sounds similar.
It sometimes happens with peoples faces, more often with my laptop screen when I’ve been staring at it for a while. It is impossible to put into words… sort of like my sense of size becomes meaningless. Depth perception vanishes. Sometimes things seem very small, or very large, but that is not quite it. It is more like my brain doesn’t know how to parse anything related to absolute size.
Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep, I’ll experience it with very high intensity. Normally when I think of an object, it is in one of two ways. Either I’m modeling it in my head, in which case it seems roughly head-sized and located (where else) in my head. Alternatively I superimpose it on the environment, and I can roughly envision it at appropriate scale. So whatever part of my brain that is responsible for these tasks seemingly deactivates. It’s really interesting in an abstract way, but its accompanied by mild nausea and vertigo.
Something similar happens to me. If I’m talking to somebody and staring them right in the eyes for more than like 90 seconds, my whole visual field seems to go totally haywire and I start seeing multiple, partial images of their face stacked on top of each other, rotated randomly, and bleeding into each other.
It’s of course very difficult to explain what it looks like because of how unfamiliar the patterns are (and thus how hard it would be to remember them in high enough detail to draw or whatever), so a real explanation will most likely have to wait until there’s technology available to simply scan my visual field onto a monitor, but it’s something like what I wrote above.
Anyway, this only happens when I’m so intent on staring them down with absolutely no interruptions for so long that I end up totally overriding my natural inclination to dart my eyes around in the specific pattern designed to scan the room and form a good representation, so it seems like this phenomenon is simply the chaotic result of overriding the preset updating system for vision.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/15/disturbing-face-distortion-illusion/