Voluntary change in vision

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There's a visual phenomenon that I find interesting, but very hard to describe. I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world to experience it, but I've never succeeded in describing it so that anyone else recognized it. I'm wondering if perhaps someone here might have a similar experience. I'm not sure how understandable it is if you haven't experienced it yourself.

If I look at certain kinds of things and 'tune my mind' in a certain way, my perception of what I'm looking at changes. It works best when I'm looking at something with a fairly uniform visual texture, but not an actual regular pattern. Gravel and grass are commonly available things that work pretty well. When I 'tune my mind' in the appropriate way, I stop seeing the individual items in what I'm looking at as objects. I don't see blades of grass, or pieces of gravel, or whatever. The edges of these things are still perfectly sharp - it's not as though my vision's gone out of focus. But I see the uniformity of the texture and not the individual objects that make it up. Sometimes even areas of non-uniformity fade from perception and merge into the whole thing - like a patch where the dirt is showing through the grass might not be noticeable as an anomaly, even if it is when looking normally. I am less certain about this, but I think awareness of colour fades from prominence too.

It takes some effort to 'tune my mind' in the right way; there's a tricky balancing act of paying attention to what I'm looking at enough to perceive the phenomenon, while not paying attention to the individual items in it. And I tend to lose the 'tuning' when I blink, and have to tune it again if I want to continue.

I do this sometimes because it's interesting to perceive things differently, and neat to be able to modify my perception voluntarily.

I have visual changes from time to time, but they are based on depersonalization/derealization. These are not voluntary, although thinking and focus can be used to bring on a change with no predictable outcome.

What I see for example:
1. Contrast increasing/decreasing.
2. Color saturation changing (like changing the HUE value of an image with some software).
3. Details fading, so the image starts to look more like a drawing. More abstract.
4. Ambient light changes, so it looks like the environment is becoming dim, or brighter.
5. Changes in perspective, like I can see in more 3D at times, mostly more like 2D.
6. Changes in the scope of the vision. Sometimes my field of vision seems to become smaller, sometimes it becomes bigger.

You experience anything like this?

I used to do this into my teens. I still do it on occasion, but not very often. I believe in another thread here someone said it's a form of visual stimming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC003576

Seems that what you're experiencing is a mix of how the brain 'tunes out' things like background noise and visual input in order to be able to focus ... and apophenia by you consciously hyper-focusing.

Hard to say. I'm pretty sure contrast doesn't increase; I'm not sure if it decreases. It might, or it might stay the same, or it might be that it doesn't decrease but it becomes less meaningful and so almost feels like it decreases. (I don't have anything handy that I can test it on, so I'm going by my memory of what it feels like.)

No, I don't think that changes.

I don't think so. The details are still all there, they just become less meaningful.

No.

I think when I change my vision in that way, 3D perception disappears.

No, although usually only a part of my field of vision is filled with the kind of visual texture I need to achieve the change in perception, and I'm attending to that part of the field of vision and not to other parts.

Interesting.


That wouldn't surprise me. It's certainly an attempt to get a particular sort of sensory/perceptual input. I've never gotten quite clear on when attempts to get certain sorts of sensory/perceptual input count as stimming. For me this is more a form of entertainment than filling any sort of need, whether a need to get certain input or a need to block out other input.

EDIT: I don't suppose you have any idea where or what that other thread was, do you?

Last edited by Cassia on 15 Jan 2011, 8:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That doesn't seem right to me. According to the Wikipedia article you linked, Apophenia is seeing meaning where it's not there. It feels like what I'm doing is not-perceiving meaning that is there, without really adding another meaning.

I seem to have that happen in reverse. Generally, I won't see too much detail, but then "high def" mode will kick in and I'll just about be able to see every grain of dust on pebbles (or whatever it is). I don't have conscious control of it, though. (That sounds kind of cool.)

When I was younger I was in "high def" mode most of the time, but as I got older (and pushed to become more functional in an adult sense) "high def" mode became less frequent. I think part of it is from having to spread my attention out. As a kid I could just hold my mother or father's hand, and could put 99% of my attention on a stone or a toy car or something.

I stopped around the time I started using computers more, I think.



I play video games for entertainment, but I stim on them too. I'm not sure where the line might be.



http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt146860.html

More on this page:

http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com ... -feel.html

It's called "fading." Also check out the squinting stim, it's something else I did (and still do) that I would never have thought of as a stim.