Who's afraid of light and sound?

To get back to our titular topic (haha, titular) for a moment: migraines are definitely a thing that is weird. Although I am technically a migraineur, I hesitate to identify myself as such because of the relative benignity of my condition: I typically suffer from migraine scotoma (blind spot) followed by aura (broad arcs shimmering with a pattern of variegated ziggurats cycling through the color palette, or rather (since I can almost see through them to the world beyond) brightly hued shadings of my visual scene, so that a crescent of my visual field appears to be shimmering like a piece of quartz held up to the sunlight). These vaguely hallucinatory experiences are followed by photophobia, hyperacusis, and a headache roughly equivalent to awakening on a Sunday morning after having the night before consumed three drinks instead of my more wonted two. That is: no big whoop. Please note that if my writing seems a bit odd at the moment, I'm writing while migraining, which is leading to a few word-finding difficulties - for instance, is there a more felicitous phrase for my meaning than "no big whoop"? If there is, my neural networks are experiencing a temporary slowdown in services at several key nodes, leading to a commensurate degradation of the quality of information culled from my synaptic fields - a bit like when that YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens won't load, and each refresh of the page leads only to additional input from the YouTube commenters - but inside my brain.

A brief aside: a pet peeve of mine about journalistic portrayals of cognitive neuroscience (all cognitive neuroscientists have a lot of pet peeves about journalistic portrayals of their field, it's part of the job description) is when journalists express amazement at a scientists contention that this cutting edge new treatment or that traumatic experience or whatever can "literally re-wire the brain". First of all, probably as a journalist you should learn the difference between things that are literally true and metaphorically true, but that's not crucial here. More importantly, for those who didn't take psychology or neuroscience in college, here is how the brain works: you have cells in your brain called neurons. A big part of the job description of neurons is to communicate with other neurons. Neurons communicate at spaces called synapses. These synapses change in various complicated ways so that neurons communicate more or less with certain other neurons. This changing of synaptic strength is almost certainly a major component to the formation of memories. If you want to use the metaphor of "rewiring your brain" to describe changes in synaptic strengths, then every time you park your car in a new location and manage to remember approximately where it was, you have successfully rewired your brain. Congratulations. It's not that big a deal.

In any event, I hesitate to identify myself as a migraineur because of the tepidity of my headache - true migraine sufferers tend to guard their membership ranks somewhat jealously. Those at the innermost circle of this cabal require that their surroundings be dimly lit at all times, and boast of losing entire weeks to a particularly vicious cluster of attacks. These folks are understandably perturbed when the hoi polloi use the word migraine to describe a bad headache that they had one time. In short: if you've never spent all day puking and hiding in bed, you probably shouldn't front. Although, to be honest, this one I'm having at the moment is shaping up to be worse than usual: I'm definitely feeling nauseous right now, which is not typical for me.

But speaking of neural short circuits, when thinking of the migraine cabal I cannot help but be reminded of a brief enthusiasm that swept my high school (remember: all boys, predominantly white, blazers and ties and Anglophilia) at some point in the mid-nineties for throwing the frat sign of the Omega Psi Phis, a historically black fraternity - arms up in a U shape, wrists bent to form the seriphs of the Ω. There were so many brief fads that swept through my school that left me utterly perplexed, but looking back on this one, I have to wonder: what the fuck? That was so inexplicable. The general interaction went something like this: one (white) kid would throw the sign, and another (white) kid would guffaw appreciatively but then caution that you'd better not let any Omegas see you do that. I mean, what? Were there were black college students hiding in odd corners around our school, waiting for the opportunity to give some white ninth graders a beat down so as to avoid any dilution of their frat's brand? So confusing. But I digress.

So there are a number of things about migraines that are weird. Hallucinating is weird. Suddenly realizing that large objects are disappearing into your blind spot is weird. Having a phenominological representation of the way in which your visual conscious experience is draped across the calcarine fissure is a bit unnerving. The crescent that I experienced had the tip of one horn pointed directly into the very center of my visual field, and it swept upwards and to the left, which would mean that the corical spreading depression of my migraine was in the right hemishpere of my brain, constrained to that portion of striate cortex below the calcarine fissure? I think? In any event, it makes you feel physical and not metaphysical, to have your conscious experience be so messy and neurological. For those following along at home, try taking your finger and poking your left eye (through your eyelid!) at the left-most portion of your eye. Do you see a little black dot appear at the right hand side of your visual field? Try poking a little further up and down, and see how the dot goes in the opposite direction. This is happening because your eye actually represents the visual scene upside down and backwards, because the lens of your eye flips the picture before it hits your retina. I don't know why, but even though I've known this on an intellectual level for many years, it still freaks me out a little when I demonstrate it to myself with this trick. Migraines are the same, but worse. They make me feel like my entire existence is very physical and very delicate and very temporary.

In college I used to joke that if you had a mad-scientist type device which, if it were broken, would lead to the end of the entire universe, you would take very good care of that device. You would not toss it about or leave it sitting on the edges of tables or credenzas, for fear that the cosmos would be snuffed out by your carelessness. Most likely you would create an enormous fortified bunker far beneath the earth's surface to protect your device. If, like me, you believe that your own personal universe will end when your brain ceases to function, then why not take similar care with your own delicate neural device? At the very least, I argued, we should all be wearing helmets at all times. This seems like a fairly air-tight argument to me, but my friends would inevitably talk me out of wearing a helmet for the rest of my life, on the grounds that social convention was more important than my desire to protect my own personal universe from destruction. Now I'm thinking that, Barack Obama-like, I must be the change I wish to see in this world. I'm the one that I've been waiting for. If I can convince everyone else to start wearing helmets, then there will be no social convention to hold me back. This blog post is my first attempt to build a critical mass. Next up: perhaps a Facebook group?