Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi
Does anyone else experience visual hullucinations?
My brain and visual system do this weird thing where they take a collection of objects and merge them into something new.... Like a tree a street sign and a flower box suddenly become a donkey.....
Most of the time it is so ridiculous I know it is happening but at other times it is more challenging like i might see a person bending over, and I wonder what is wrong so if I am on my bike I will turn back to see if they are OK only to realise it was just a Bush and a dustbin...
This tends to happen when I am more stressed....
Can anyone help?
If you have vision loss then what you might be experiencing is a condition called "Charles Bonnet Syndrome", a condition where the brain can't interpret the lack of stimulus from areas where the eye has suffered damage so it fills in the lack of signal with old information that the brain thinks make sense.
It's usually associated with central vision loss like macula degeneration but it can happen in any condition with vision loss, it's just more rare.
I can't remember where I read it now but its interesting
mouse2 said:Apparently the hormones released when stressed can affect eyesight
That's interesting....- I'm suffering from a lot of stress right now and I'm aware of 'movement' in my peripheral vision - sort of like if a bee flies past or a big spider on the floor - my brain is triggering a response but there's nothing there. Hmmmm.
Opps I posted the thank you to you to mouse below..... Thank you mouse too.... Both comments have been helpful.
Thank you your post helped..... I guess my mind is doing a lot of searching for a answers amidst chaos at the minute. I am a visual thinker and I store all information in patterns so it would make sense that this is what is happening.
I wonder is it connected to what I read the other day? I get worse eyesight when stressed so googled it. Apparently the hormones released when stressed can affect eyesight
I also have that rather often. I see a pillow and think: 'is that the cat?' I think it's important to realise it for what it really is, just your brain connecting the dots if you see something just at a glance, or you're thinking about something else and what you see just doesn't get your full attention.
Probably this is what drives some people mad if they experience it too often. I guess deteriorating eyesight is also a bit to blame for how often it occurs, and stress no doubt.
The human mind is far from perfect, you know, pattern recognition, looking for meaning in chaos, seeing faces in random objects. I saw a youtube video last week on the colour 'brown'... brown is not a colour in the rainbow, and the reason why is really weird.
There are also people who have problems with recognising faces. My mom told me very often things like: look, that boy, that's almost exactly your nephew, ...