Sometimes when I’m tired I close my eyes and press my eyeballs. After about 15 seconds I start to get weird Opart style visuals with ashifting squared pattern as though I’m moving down a tunnel with geomterical objects flying back at me. This gradually shifts away as I stop the pressure and open my eyes.
Does anyone else have similar experiences, and if so does anyone know the physiology behind it?
For the record I’ve had this all my life, and never tried drugs, so it isn’t some LSD flashback.
Back in the vicinity of 1987 or thereabouts I was hanging out with friends in the university’s Art Dept and picked up a book which turned out to be meticulously done illustrations of the different visuals you get if you close your eye and press your eyelid in this place or that, in this fashion or that fashion.
Apparently they are quite reproducible and predictable.
It is a pressure phosphene
Yeah, I’ve done it. I don’t remember the specifics, but I was told it has something to do with the pain nerve impulses interfering with the optic nerve to brain communication.
Your eye feels pressure and sends that message to the brain, but some of that message gets sent through the optic nerve and shows up in your brain as the sense of sight - not the sense of touch.
IANAO - and I am repeating this from something I was told years ago. I have no guarantees about the accuracy of the info or of my memory!
Thanks,
Pressure phosphene it is. Given how common it is I’m surprised that I never heard about it before.
I did it all the time as a kid. They very much resemble what I get when I get a migraine.
