The NYTimes has a slide show of "migraine" art provided by Oliver Sacks from his book Migraine. They attempt to illustrate what a migraine aura looks like.
Neat. I would put one up on my wall if I didn't feel so horrible that it was the pictorial prelude to someone's intense pain.
More like this
Hi folks. Last Friday I had a botox treatment for my migraines and it does seem to be having some good effects already. I'm going to give myself another day or so off from blogging since the computer can be one of my migraine triggers.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) currently is being
investigated as a treatment for major depression. (See
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3050">Psychiatry's
Shocking New Tools in IEEE Spectrum.)
When reporting on science, reporters and editors like sexy stories.
Previously, I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/01/transcranial_direct_current_st.php">wrote
about investigation of
href="http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/04/newsci_head_electric.html">tDCS
for treatment of
The first time I opened Sacks' book, I dropped it. The pictures were familiar.
It's hard for me to look at these. Even thinking about what my pre-migraine aura looks like makes me start to feel ill.
So now we know where Cubism came from...
I always wondered what other people's auras looked like. Mine are different from these--enough similarity to recognize a few, though.
Very interesting. I found some of the images familiar and others merely suggestive. I have suffered migraines, but after a particularly bad one (for me - my mother and my brother both had much worse) I have never actually had the headache. I get fairly frequently get a blind spot, then the aura, and then perhaps a mild headache unless I take ibuprofen. But the next day I have what I call a hangover. Not every aura is followed by a headache, and not every migraine is preceded by an aura. The other interesting thing is that although migraines usually decrease with age, my auras have, if anything, increased with age.