I noticed this years ago while drunk on a bench staring at a sunny Alaska day, and have never been able to unsee it. It's completely ruined my lifelong enjoyment I would get from watching the clouds.
It's one of those things that I've sorta explained to people that I can't look at the sky too long, but never want to give them the name of it or tell them what to look for because it may ruin their sky too.
This is actually a pretty common problem. In fact, I’ve experienced it myself. The crux of the problem is in the idea that you need to “unsee” it to enjoy the clouds again. That’s not a productive goal.
The problem is that if you’re focused on trying to “unsee” something, you’re actually going to see more of it. And anyway, “unseeing” isn’t a thing that exists.
Instead, you need to let yourself get comfortable with seeing it. That means looking at the clouds anyway, accepting that you may also notice the static. The idea is to get some enjoyment from the clouds, however imperfect it may be. Try to pick some specific aspect of the clouds to appreciate or notice, and do this for a few minutes at a time.
When attempting this, you might find yourself thinking things like “I wish I had never seen this” and “will it ever go away?” That’s normal, but put your attention back on the clouds and whatever feature you’ve planned to appreciate. Over time, you may find that the blue field thing doesn’t really annoy you like it used to. You might even forget to notice it sometimes.
It's similar to tinnutis, and anxiety. You have to learn a degree of non judgemental response to unpleasant phenomena. It's key to resilience. I was helped a ton by the work of Steven C Hayes.
I always thought it's something connected to my high blood pressure, I typically see them on any bright background when air pressure changes or when I'm doing some exercises. I have normal eye pressure and no visible changes to retina, checked by opthalmologist. I just don't care about those dots when I see them, I accept them as sensor noise of my eyes, no reason to be angry at them.
Seriously? Ive noticed this since I was a kid and it doesnt bother me a bit. For a while after doing a ton of drugs irresponsibly, at night everything looked like tv static. Lasted about 2 years. That one bugged me lol
Thanks for sharing i just discovered this a week ago!
Crazy that we can see our own white blood cells and all we have to do is look up at the sky :)
In my experience those white lights/graininess exists even when looking at other objects. Been trying to find a name for this.
Is this true in others experience?
I know there’s a phenomenon called visual snow but it’s not a negative experience like that seems to be for people. There’s also eigengrau but I experience this even in good lighting.
They're caused by little bits of gunk floating in the fluid inside your eyeball.
> They may appear as spots, threads, or fragments of "cobwebs", which float slowly before the observer's eyes, and move especially in the direction the eyes move.
I know what you're talking about. My neuro said it was still visual snow syndrome. I don't find it to be a negative experience, just something you see. Like (mild) tinnitus, it's only negative if you perceive it as negative.
I can see stuff with my eyes closed while facing a bright light or in a dark room or with eyes open in a dark sky area. Some of it is floaters but there are other effects, not exactly matching the descriptions on wikipedia but it could be the same things.
I’m most fascinated by the concept of how our brain edits things out. The sensor to information pipeline is rather complicated. So much filtering and projecting and such being done.
Most wild thing I've heard lately is the cognition theory that most of what we perceive is surprise.
The thumbnail sketch of the idea is: we know from glucose uptake studies that there's basically no way our brain is actively synthesizing every sensory stimulus at all times. The hypothesis is that the brain creates a sort of "predictive map" of reality (which is what we perceive), and then uses sensory stimulus to listen for variance from that predictive model. So most of the time, what you perceive is a hallucination of reality that maps close enough to what's going on, and only when sensory input starts to deviate from that predictive model does the brain dedicate the resources to "read" the sensory input and meld it into an update of the prediction to match reality.
There was a Kyle Hill video on this recently. He also notes that there's an easy experiment you can do to observe your brain doing sensory fusion: touch your finger to your nose. We know, physically, that the signal from the finger takes way longer than the signal from the nose to reach the brain, but we perceive the two touches as a single instantaneous event that happens at the same time.
I've had these - or rather, been able to see them - since I was a child out on playing on a large, empty field of fresh snow. I originally assumed they were little ice crystals freezing on my eyes (since it was very cold, and I was often outdoors in the snow when I saw them). Some time in my teenage years, I learned what they really were, which is even more fascinating. Once I notice them, I can pretty easily tune mine out, like one of those optical illusions where you can consciously switch between perspectives. (I have some floaters, and can normally do the same thing with them as well.)
I've never experienced important health issues, but since being a kid I noticed that staying still in squad pose and then standing up would cause very bright dots moving in my vision that would slowly go away. These should be caused by blood with low oxygen moving from my legs and into my brain. A few times my vision got very dark and I experienced a headache and eye pain, and felt like passing out.
I've also became temporarily blind due to high voltage exploding wire at a few inches from my face. I remember the perfectly white line of the wire and the colors gradually but quickly becoming average gray from the middle to the sides of my vision, then the wire and the color disapeared with "no signal", there was no recognizable color, not even black.
You are likely describing “photopsia”, which can express in many ways and is sometimes referred to as “seeing stars”. I myself call them “fairies”, as for me they are tiny rainbow scintillating spots that spiral around and disappear between 1-4 seconds.
They are produced when a sudden shift in physical pressure on the retinal cells occurs. Blood pressure shifts are the cause when standing up or sitting down, and is typically a concern. They can also be produced by physical impacts against the eyes or head.
I have this as well, it's mildly entertaining but not overpowering. The floaters only appear when looking at a very bright blue clear sky, it never triggers otherwise.
When it does I can pause, appreciate the show, and then go back to my day. It's a fun one for sure.
Everyone has it, most people just don't notice it.
You are much more susceptible to noticing it if you have Visual Snow Syndrome, which is basically as if your eyesight has a film grain overlaid on top of it.
What is much more interesting about VSS is that you often also have hiss or ringing in your ears similar to tinnitus (but not as severe or annoying), crowd deafness, and you are also more susceptible to ADHD-like deficits and symptoms, which must mean the underlying cause for VSS is some kind of filtering problem in the brain.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation can offer relief, if it is indeed a problem for the person.
One of the benefits is an extremely vivid imagination. Example: when you tell an ordinary person "imagine a beautiful woman on the beach", they'll just imagine a woman of their particular taste, on a generic beach. Maybe they'll notice the color of the beach towel. But with less anchored imagination, you'll imagine the type of sand on the beach, the stance of the sun, the fabric of her bikini and if it is new or well-worn, jewelry including engraved brands, foliage, and all of that within a split second and without it taking effort or thinking. You can continue let the imagination run amok and you might imagine the whole city attached to the beach and the stories of other people that live there. Doesn't make for very productive workdays though :)
About 10 years ago I went to an ophthalmologist. I had experienced a situation which I can only describe as a visual phenomenon traveling from one part of my visual field to beneath it. I was partially blind because of it. I can only think it was a very small stroke or something. They found nothing wrong with my eyes and in passing I mentioned these white things.
Combined with my inability to explain what I saw, the doctor was visibly annoyed and said I need a psychiatrist not an ophthalmologist.
It was most likely a scintillating scotoma, a kind of visual aura associated with migraine.
The migraine can come without headache, in which case I’ve heard it’s called retinal migraine. I had a similar experience, also thought I had a stroke. Went to the ER where they did MRI and then referred me to an ophthalmologist which immediately recognized what I described. I’ve had it a few times since, mostly during periods of high stress and bad sleep. Nothing to worry about once you know what it is.
Over what time frame what the phenomenon? Have you heard of migraine aura? Descriptions vary, but they typically involve a visual disruption traveling across your field of view. They aren't always followed by headaches, and I have trouble seeing when I get one.
They're visible to me all the time, along with the floaters, retinal noise and afterimages from saccades (sure, my visual cortex blocks out the actual moving of the eyes, but my retinas still retain the afterimage from before the saccade, yours does to, if you start paying attention).
When I was a child I started noticing these effects, and I probably concentrated on them more than the other kids, I must have somehow taught my brain not to apply whatever filtering it is that allows many people to simply ignore them.
I spent a lot of time trying to see the darkness and hear the silence, and for this I suppose I was rewarded with a heightened awareness of what's actually coming from my eyes, and the constant hiss from my ears (not tinnitus, that came later and is different) along with the sound of my pulse.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-8896-8_...
"The inaccessibility of the retinal blood ves-
sels precludes direct, noninvasive measure-
ments of retinal blood flow. Indirect optical
methods taking advantage of the visibility of
the retinal vasculature must be used. A variety
of methods have been applied.[...] Methods based on the perception of white
blood cells (WBCs) moving in retinal macu-
lar capillaries by means of the blue field
entoptic phenomenon. Macular capillary
blood flow is determined either by counting
the number of WBCs passing in a given time
through a single capillary 13 or by evaluating
the average number and speed of WBCs in
the field of observation using the blue field
simulation technique. [...]"
What about “the tunnel”? Does anyone experience that when looking at the sky? I’ll notice it maybe 1-in-20 times I look at a blue sky. It isn’t always there. It looks like moving through a tunnel — it’s a set of dark and light blobs moving outward from the center of my visual field
Hmm. I see a dark tunnel when I close my eyes. It’s blobby. Kind of like a swooshing in and out spiral. It’s almost blue or purple against the black which gives the shape of the tunnel. Or maybe it’s reversed, as i try now and it’s definitely a most dark blue but blueish indeed. It expands, contracts, swirls, and goes.
It's one of those things that I've sorta explained to people that I can't look at the sky too long, but never want to give them the name of it or tell them what to look for because it may ruin their sky too.