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The Necker Cube Illusion [but for reals]
Lieberkuhn
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Edit: this isn't H/A, folks. Feel free to chime in with random weirdness you've experienced if you don't have anything to say about mine.
So I experience a very strange phenomenon from time to time, and I have yet to find another person who also experiences it or has even heard of it. Psychology textbooks yield no answers either. Let's see if D&D knows what's up.
First of all, the Necker Cube.
You've probably seen this fellow before. Though it's a static image, it has two equally valid interpretations: it is either a cube whose closest face is pointing over your right shoulder, or a cube whose closest face is pointing below your left elbow. (If you want to be pedantic, there's also a third interpretation where it's just a bunch of 2D lines.)
It's possible to switch between these two interpretations at will, and sometimes it will even switch by itself, without any conscious effort on your part. What's very difficult to do, though, is to see both interpretations simultaneously; your brain can really only handle one at a time and prefers to just switch rapidly between the two. The Rubin Vase is another example of this dual-interpretation jazz.
Now here's where it gets weird: I experience this effect with real-life locations.
The location (usually the inside of a house, though it can happen outside too) never physically changes: like Necker Cube, it's always the same layout. But there will be two different interpretations of the place -- there is my usual interpretation, and, rarely, there is the "different" interpretation; despite having an identical layout, it just feels like a completely different place. I'm not sure how else to put it. I don't mean that the place sometimes gives me a certain feeling (like how you might feel creeped out in your house at night, but feel fine during the day), and I don't mean that the place becomes unrecognisable; I am absolutely familiar with both interpretations once I've had a moment to learn them. They're just... different places that exist in the same location.
I can switch from the rare one to the usual one at will, but not vice versa. When it switches on its own, it generally happens before I enter the location in question.
This doesn't happen often. And it happens much less, to a much milder degree, today than it did when I was a child. In fact, I'm not even sure that it even happens to me anymore; I find that my flat feels sliiiiightly different than usual when I enter it after spending some time away, but I assume that's normal. What I experienced as a child, however, was definitely not nomal. The difference between the "usual" and "rare" interpretations were so vast that I often got hopelessly lost in the rare one; it just wasn't even close to looking anything like the usual one.
If you were able to understand any of that, well done. Does anybody recognise this? Or have any ideas as to what was going on?
So I experience a very strange phenomenon from time to time, and I have yet to find another person who also experiences it or has even heard of it. Psychology textbooks yield no answers either. Let's see if D&D knows what's up.
First of all, the Necker Cube.
You've probably seen this fellow before. Though it's a static image, it has two equally valid interpretations: it is either a cube whose closest face is pointing over your right shoulder, or a cube whose closest face is pointing below your left elbow. (If you want to be pedantic, there's also a third interpretation where it's just a bunch of 2D lines.)
It's possible to switch between these two interpretations at will, and sometimes it will even switch by itself, without any conscious effort on your part. What's very difficult to do, though, is to see both interpretations simultaneously; your brain can really only handle one at a time and prefers to just switch rapidly between the two. The Rubin Vase is another example of this dual-interpretation jazz.
Now here's where it gets weird: I experience this effect with real-life locations.
The location (usually the inside of a house, though it can happen outside too) never physically changes: like Necker Cube, it's always the same layout. But there will be two different interpretations of the place -- there is my usual interpretation, and, rarely, there is the "different" interpretation; despite having an identical layout, it just feels like a completely different place. I'm not sure how else to put it. I don't mean that the place sometimes gives me a certain feeling (like how you might feel creeped out in your house at night, but feel fine during the day), and I don't mean that the place becomes unrecognisable; I am absolutely familiar with both interpretations once I've had a moment to learn them. They're just... different places that exist in the same location.
I can switch from the rare one to the usual one at will, but not vice versa. When it switches on its own, it generally happens before I enter the location in question.
This doesn't happen often. And it happens much less, to a much milder degree, today than it did when I was a child. In fact, I'm not even sure that it even happens to me anymore; I find that my flat feels sliiiiightly different than usual when I enter it after spending some time away, but I assume that's normal. What I experienced as a child, however, was definitely not nomal. The difference between the "usual" and "rare" interpretations were so vast that I often got hopelessly lost in the rare one; it just wasn't even close to looking anything like the usual one.
If you were able to understand any of that, well done. Does anybody recognise this? Or have any ideas as to what was going on?
While you eat, let's have a conversation about the nature of consent.
Lieberkuhn on
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it's fatal
In all seriousness that just sounds like you should go to an optician and get them to run you through a series of eye tests - that sounds possibly like a stereoscopic problem
Hmm, I don't think this is a problem with my eyes; my vision is fine and I can see three-dimensionally perfectly well. Besides, I've experienced it since I was tiny and no optician has ever picked up on anything wrong with my eyes, beyond myopia.
I'm pretty sure this is a brain thing; something along the lines of the ability to recognise objects.
Link plz?
No. They both feel normal, but different from each other. Like entering a familiar room after it's had the furniture moved around and walls painted a new colour, only without the furniture-moving and repainting.
I am very intrigued as to why you asked, though.
You probably just rarely have a certain part of your brain stimulated for no good reason. Like brief activity in the part of your brain that makes you feel someplace is unfamiliar. You could feel that even though, at the same time, you know everything about the place.
It could be another emotion. It doesn't sound completely healthy, but it doesn't sound like something to worry about either; especially because it's happening less.
It's probably not serious
Is this normal? I have always assumed it was, but maybe it isn't...?
I haven't experienced anything like these, at least not often enough to have registered it.
However, there are certain regions of the brain responsible for self-location. I'm not a doctor, and I've only taken a couple of neuro classes, but it's entirely possible that something in your brain's a little bit off, so the self location thing doesn't work quite right. When they tested them in rats, they found that they could remove certain things from rooms and the rats would still be able to identify it, as long as it was similar enough. After a while, it would adapt.
It's possible that you spontaneously lose the ability to differentiate precisely, but are also aware of it when it's going on? It doesn't have to be specifically vision related, it could be other stuff.
That said, an optometrist probably wouldn't identify problems deeper up the chain in the brain. Their specialty stops pretty early in the visual cortex, I'd think.
OH GOD IT'S A TUMOUR
Heh.
I had considered that maybe it was a recognition thing, but it's not that the place feels unfamiliar, per se. That's why I used the Necker Cube analogy; it's two recognisable interpretations, as in two cubes facing different directions, and not one that's "a cube" and one that's "I don't know what it's supposed to be, maybe a shape".
Just like, "this is a new place and I don't know exactly what I'll see if I turn left", only you're either hypersensitive to unfamiliar places to the point where simply leaving your home for a week triggers an unsettled feeling, or you have a slight impairment in recall.
Either way, it does not seem serious and you're not using any red alert phrases like "sinister" or "evil", "geometric" or "mechanical".
Haha, I know it's not a big deal, whatever it is, and I'm not bothered or scared by it. I'm just intensely curious; it's so weird that no-one else has ever experienced it! I'm even starting to wonder if I just dreamt the more extreme examples from my childhood. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd see in a dream.
I guess it is like familiarisation, but not. The first time it happens in a given place, I will need to familiarise myself with the "alternative" version, but once I've learnt it, it's as familiar to me as any normal place. My perception of the two different versions seems to be normal; the only abnormality is that there's a second one in the first place!
Go to a neurologist!
Because now I'm curious too. Every time someone has an experience I'm not used to I get intensely curious.
All my mental weirdness is boring. You already know some of it. I'm also obsessive compulsive, which _J_ thinks is the coolest thing in the universe.
Oh wait! I do have one thing. I think I perceive words differently from other people. Like, people will see "faucet, bathtub, table" and probably just think they're a list of words. But they have a specific feel, each of them. Faucet in particular has a very peculiar feel.
I'll also be able to stop and look at a word and feel that it's spelled funny. Faucet, again. Have you ever looked at it? Something's just weird about it. Bathtub and table aren't weird. Faucet is. I can't think of others right now, but they certainly exist. And I'll decompose random words and realize that their spellings are strange. I just... I dunno. It's hard to explain. But some words are different from others.
I sometimes see ants crawling all over me, but I know it's just me being a silly goose.
I think it'd be cool to be self-skeptical and self-aware enough to be curious and calm about going insane. Like say, having Alzheimer's and recognizing that you're not working with a full deck without flipping out.
Yeah I guess the OP was a little one-sided. My bad. But I also assumed the thread would get derailed because damnit, this is D&D.
Anyway, I have a question for you. Do you ever feel that certain words (or perhaps numbers or letters) have personalities, or colour associated with them?
This happens to me occasionally with certain words, and then it will go away after about a day.
For example, one day I got hung up on the word "uncle" while trying to read something. It just didn't seem right at all.... the spelling, the word itself. It felt like a completely made up, nonsense word.
Is there a term for this?
The occurrence of weirdness has lessened as I age, but it's still there. I wish I could think of more examples, I know I have some.
"Uncle?" Man, now that I look at it, that word's weird too. Actually, most words are a little weird. "Faucet" is just a very, very exceptionally weird one.
But yeah, whenever I think about a word for too long, it starts to feel funny. And the spellings just seem.. strange. Sort of alien. But only when I think about them for a long time.
Haha yeah I guess my scientific curiosity cancels out my sense of mortality.
I once woke up to a horrible flashing light in the right-hand side of my vision, which was so intense and relentless that it reduced me to tears. Closing my eyes did nothing to make it go away. Once it finally subsided, I realised that my right-hand peripheral vision was gone. Completely. I could see anything to the left of my and anything directly in front of me, but everything to my right simply wasn't there.
I guess most people would freak the fuck out in that situation. My reaction was to go "cool, the hallucination shorted out my vision" and start testing how much was missing. (My vision returned to normal after 10 minutes or so.)
Just in your right eye? Or both of your eyes were messed up so the right field of vision on the right was shorted out?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8r0sfpEfYc
It still sounds a lot like synaesthesia, though. I've experienced that "oddness" with words too, but I also have synaesthsia, so I assume the two are related. I mean, you're looking at a word and imagining a very specific sound to go with it. If that's not synaesthesia, then what is?
Both. I literally couldn't see anything to my right, with either eye, when looking straight ahead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu
Hmm. You know... actually I think you're right. It could by synesthesia. I just always ignored it because there actually is an s sound in faucet, though I guess the way I'm fixated on it and the way that that's what defines the word is not normal.
I'll tentatively describe myself as a synesthetic :P
Oh cool. I was just wondering because I wanted to pinpoint what was happening. From that I can glean that whatever wasn't working right during the period where you couldn't see was in the left hemisphere's occipital lobe. That processes everything on the right side visually.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/what-the-f
The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.
The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.
A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala "lights up"--it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans--when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.
The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.
I have come across this before. I don't think that's what I have, though, because the alternative version isn't unfamiliar: it's simply different. I recognise both versions; it's just that one is very uncommon and takes me longer to get used to because I "visit" so rarely.
I guess it's possible that I'm half remembering it? Like, I'm failing to recognise the room, but still have enough memory that it seems familiar, and this half-memory on top of the feeling of "this is a place I've never been before" combine to create the illusion of a new place altogether that I can recognise on subsequent visits? I don't know. Maybe. That probably didn't make sense.
How do you feel about the term 'visual dysphasia'? All the medical dramas on TV have aphasia cases where some dude gets clonked on the head and can't read anymore. Either you can't understand words or you can't express yourself. If you watched LOST, one of the characters ran into a tree and could only speak in Korean for a few hours. Wikipedia says dysphasia is the milder version of that.
Here's one where the patient speaks only in gibberish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_aphasia
"You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before"
I was going to say that it sounds a lot like "word salad", until I looked it up and realized that Wernicke's aphasia is just the technical name for that. It's an interesting condition, but I think jamais vu fits what I experienced much better. I wasn't hit in the head or anything before experiencing the unfamiliar word feeling.
Ramachandran is interesting because he started in human vision but moved to neurology so a lot of what he studies deals with how brain injuries change people's perception of the world. His books tell a lot of interesting stories about people he's worked with over the years. His work on understanding and helping with phantom limbs is pretty fascinating.
A lot of people with phantom limbs will have the limb end up in a really uncomfortable and/or painful position. Even though it's not there it can be a real issue since the brain perceives it as being there and in a bad position. He found that you can trick the brain surprisingly easily with a few mirrors that reflect your other limb, allowing your brain to see it and perceive it in a position that is not painful but is normal, relieving the pain for a time.
His books are really accessible if you are interested in this kind of thing, Phantoms in the Brain is a good one to start with.
This happens to me all the time.
I call it "really, really bad short-term memory and an absent mind."
But it's more that I'll be writing something, and if I have no easy means of checking my spelling, I will become convinced that I'm either spelling a word wrong when I've done it right, or I'm spelling it right when I've done it wrong. Sometimes if I think about it too hard I blank and can't do anything about it. Happens more when I'm tired, which always amuses my friends on msn.
I once wrote an essay in school where I'd spelled every instance of the word "of" as "uv." And this wasn't grade 3.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
This happens to me every once in a while as well.
There are a spectrum of misidentification syndromes that happen in stroke and brain tumor victims - syndromes where the affected person acts as though something familiar (a person or place) as been replaced by an identical duplicate. Basically, they can recognize the object, but they do not feel as if it is familiar. It sounds like you're experiencing something similar to a reduplicative paramnesia but without the delusional thought process to go with it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's pretty awesome, really. And something I hadn't considered, since I've only ever really heard of it with respect to people.