A few days ago I came across the following video, and I thought I’d share it here for two reasons. The first reason is that you might find it surprising, possibly amusing and possibly also bit scary. Keep your eye on the cross in the centre of the screen and observe what happens to the faces either side:
Most people who I’ve shown this to report peculiar distortions of the (familiar) faces either side. This phenomenon is clearly related to the limitations of peripheral vision.
The second reason for posting this is much more personal and relates to my struggles over the years with a form of panic disorder (which I’ve blogged about before, e.g., here). The term `panic disorder’ has a very broad definition, so that different individuals experience different forms of panic attacks and they can also take very different forms for the same individual. For me, a “typical” panic episode begins with a generalised feeling of apprehension or dread. Sometimes that’s as far as it goes. However, more often, there follows a period of increasingly heightened awareness of things moving in my peripheral vision that I can’t keep track of, accompanied by auditory and visual hallucinations. I’ve tried to explain the latter in conversations with friends and colleagues and usually when I do so I describe how the faces of people around me become distorted in a grotesque and terrifying way. When that happens I usually run as fast as I can in whatever direction I can to get away.
On top of the effect of these attacks themselves, there is also the frustration, when they are over, of not really understanding what had happened. What is happening in my brain when a panic episode begins? What is going on with my peripheral vision when it goes awry like it does? Why do some particular places or circumstances trigger an attack but other, apparently similar, ones don’t?
When I first saw the above video it struck me immediately that it might contain a big clue about these episodes, as the facial distortions that appear there are very similar to what I experience. Perhaps what goes wrong is that peripheral vision takes over from central vision, i.e. a kind of opposite of tunnel vision, as a result of some malfunction in the way my brain deals with peripheral data.
Most of the time we just discard data from outside our line-of-sight unless it’s something extremely dramatic and disturbing (whether good or bad); presumably we can’t process everything across our entire field of view so we usually filter out observations coming from the edges. What seems to happen with me is that something interferes with this filtering process so that almost everything gets flagged with a danger signal. My response to these is to look about manically trying to establish whether the threat is real before, usually, just getting out of there as quickly as I can when it becomes overwhelming.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete answer to any of the many questions I’ve asked myself about this but somehow seeing the effect in the video makes me feel more comfortable with what happens because at least I can see that others can experience a similar phenomenon, even if in very different circumstances.
P.S. I should say that although about two years ago I quit the medication I was taking to control them, I haven’t had any of these psychotic episodes since then. Reducing stress by leaving my job at Sussex was almost certainly a contributing factor.
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In the Dark 