I was doing some studying lately, and I ran into something that may or may not be epilepsy related. Actually, I think it might only be related if you have occipital epilepsy, but I'm not a doctor.
Anyway, it's called Visual Snow Syndrome. Basically, as I understand it, a person's vision is distorted by what is described as something like seeing static on a poorly tuned television (for all you younger people, back in the old days, we had to tune televisions with antennas to try to get a signal, and often the reception was poor, with static covering the image or maybe just static all together). Of course, it varies in degrees of severity from barely noticeable to near blindness. There are other symptoms as well, such as seeing small flashes of light, afterimages, or tracers from moving objects, night blindness or difficulty seeing in the dark, sensitivity to light. One that I recognized is seeing moving patterns of lights when you close your eyes or if you're in a dark room. I've personally had a few of these since I was a child! I remember being young and laying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, or with my eyes closed, and seeing what I can describe as green clouds of light or waves that just continually washed over my vision. Since I've always had it, I thought it was normal, but apparently not!
Anyway, if you google it, I thought it was pretty interesting, and wondered if any of you have heard of it, or maybe experience it yourselves. I believe I've got a mild case of it myself. I've been getting extra sensitive to negative afterimages in my vision lately, it makes it hard to read sometimes, especially on the computer. After a while I can't even see what I'm reading, or parts of it are blocked out, and when I look away I see the negative afterimage of lines of text for a minute or so. I wonder if it's gotten worse from one of my medications.
Anyway, it's called Visual Snow Syndrome. Basically, as I understand it, a person's vision is distorted by what is described as something like seeing static on a poorly tuned television (for all you younger people, back in the old days, we had to tune televisions with antennas to try to get a signal, and often the reception was poor, with static covering the image or maybe just static all together). Of course, it varies in degrees of severity from barely noticeable to near blindness. There are other symptoms as well, such as seeing small flashes of light, afterimages, or tracers from moving objects, night blindness or difficulty seeing in the dark, sensitivity to light. One that I recognized is seeing moving patterns of lights when you close your eyes or if you're in a dark room. I've personally had a few of these since I was a child! I remember being young and laying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, or with my eyes closed, and seeing what I can describe as green clouds of light or waves that just continually washed over my vision. Since I've always had it, I thought it was normal, but apparently not!
Anyway, if you google it, I thought it was pretty interesting, and wondered if any of you have heard of it, or maybe experience it yourselves. I believe I've got a mild case of it myself. I've been getting extra sensitive to negative afterimages in my vision lately, it makes it hard to read sometimes, especially on the computer. After a while I can't even see what I'm reading, or parts of it are blocked out, and when I look away I see the negative afterimage of lines of text for a minute or so. I wonder if it's gotten worse from one of my medications.