Is there any sort of discussion forum other than here, that may be open to theoretical discussions of perception? Can you recommend any extreme diagnostic-grade medical textbooks that might aid in such research?
Heh, you all obviously seem quite tense for some reason, probably from dealing with annoying customers that don't appreciate your knowledge and experience.
In a vague sense I suppose what I am looking for is a diagnosis. But, is it a "diagnosis" to ask a question about perception, when you
do not want the perception eliminated, treated, or "cured", but just want to understand whatever it is?
Instead I'm merely trying to verify the validility of hidden aspects of my own perceptions that are not obvious to anyone else because it is not
possible for anyone else to directly share in experiencing what I am perceiving. And I am trying to document these things in a form where others may be able to understand their own hidden perceptions.
For example, why not stroll on over to Wikipedia, to the article on
myopia, and scroll down to the bottom third of the document? You will notice something in there that seems vaguely familiar for some reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia
"Due to the extreme vision error, the person is instead able to see microscopic details within their own eyeball, such as the protein strings that naturally float freely in the clear aqueous humour of the eye..."
If you choose to put on your Wikipedia editor's hat, wield your opthamology degree, and proceed to use it to bludgeon my edit to death, that is in fact most welcome because I so far have not found anyone who has any idea what I'm even trying to talk about. Including most eye doctors who seem vaguely irritated that I'm "wasting their time in the office" asking such questions.
Most of this is the result of me trying to explore topics of New Age spirituality... and failing miserably at it. "If you sit in a dark room and observe your hand over a flat painted wall, you may be able to see your own 'aura'."
Um, well, I can't see anything like that. However I am noticing some other things here that seem unusual, that aren't apparantly documented anywhere that I've been able to determine. Stuff like this:
Visual perception is normally a form of tunnel-vision. When watching TV or reading a book, attention is typically focused into a very small region of the eye. The rest of the field of perception is not blacked out or grayed out, but is simply "not present" because it is being ignored by the neurons.
However, it is possible for the entire field to become visually active with conscious effort. It is possible to look straight ahead, but not look at anything in particular, and instead casually observe the entire field of view, and see the world quite clearly with a full 180-degrees of clarity.
If you wear glasses, you can become actively aware of and can see the entire framework including the bows and what seems to be physically impossible out to the extreme sides while still looking binocularly straight ahead.
This perception in fact exists all the time but is being unconsciously suppressed, possibly to conserve the neural processing capacity of your brain. Because it is not a normal perception, this full-field vision takes effort to consciously rouse, and will rapidly drop back to tunnel-mode when your attention to it fades.
I'd like to stick that on wikipedia somewhere, but I have yet to find an article that discusses anything like it. I suppose I could start my own article, but what is the proper term for what I'm discussing? Is this, in fact, something that IS known and documented anywhere in the field of opthamology and/or neuroscience? I have no idea..
I am trying to find a place where people are open to such discussions, but this forum is apparantly not the place, even if it would seem exactly the sort of place for such discussions. So where else can I look to find experienced, knowledgable people that may be interested in discussing such things?
I fully welcome book recommendations no matter how technical the subject matter, just so long as they can help me further along this informal research and exploration, and specifically apply to what I'm talking about here..
-Javik
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