This is a difficult article for me to write, because avoiding talking about the fact that my own mind can betray me so terrifyingly helps me cope with the fear of it happening again.

I still don’t know where the line is between keeping stories to yourself for your self-preservation vs putting it out there so other people can benefit from your mistakes and solutions and relieving the pressure of holding it in. It’s just that I, out of nowhere, made a snap decision a minute ago to talk about it, and now I’m following through with it, making minimal edits in the final version so I can post it before I change my mind.

I don’t know for sure if how I dealt with it was the factor that helped me heal or whether it was pure luck and time. But in case it was the methods I used, and it can help someone dealing with something similar, I’m detailing it below.

Intro

About 9 years ago, after a day spent doing errands outside in the hot Indian sun, polluted air, with too little water, a poor breakfast, and too much caffeine, on top of theophylline and montelukast (which I’d never taken before) in my bloodstream for an acute bronchitis– I came back home in the early afternoon feeling a little odd, took a shower, made a small cup of tea, sat at my desk, and got around to maybe the middle of the cup and suddenly, in the sudden span of a second, my brain seemed to break.

I suspect it was some sort of sunstroke or heat stroke. Which I was really asking for considering how I spent my day.

But it quickly became clear that the primary symptom, or side effect, was much more problematic than a simple heatstroke that could be cured with water and rest:

I was no longer processing visual input as moving pictures.

Instead, I perceived everything as still photographs. At most, more like low-framerate animated gifs. Along with that, I was having trouble with perceiving the movement of time, at least as it pertains to your senses and the sequence in which they are experienced. Even my perception of normal colour phosphenes, when I closed my eyes, were partially affected.

I did not feel nausea, or unsteadiness, or headache, or internal loss of balance and equilibrium or lack of coordination, or depersonalization or derealization, or anxiety or jitters. I knew what those felt like. They’re very different. I knew what a classic migraine prodrome was, this wasn’t that either. I did not see things that weren’t there, or have delusions or ideas beyond the frozen pictorial world my eyes were now showing me. I could still speak perfectly normally, remember words as well as ever, cohere ideas the same as any other time, any slowness came from the confusion caused by what I was seeing, and its sudden dissociation with the timing and sequence of the rest of my senses.

It was just that there’s a part of the brain that’s responsible for making visual stimuli make sense, and it had suddenly seemed to stop working. It felt a lot like a bad trip, without the drugged feeling. Really, it could have been any single factor at the time or many of them together, maybe even from months before, that caused something to happen. I still don’t know.

It didn’t stop when I closed my eyes, it was there the moment I woke up. 24/7, unchanging, unresponsive to anything I did or any emotion I felt, my visual field was a string of static images and short gifs. I had also acquired an extreme intolerance to even the smallest quanity of stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, even betelnuts) and alcohol, which would both cause the visual field effects to worsen greatly, though I had none of the other effects that would suggest any stimulant intolerance or alcohol intolerance. I couldn’t even eat chocolate, with its tiny amount of caffeine, as I found out whenever I ingested it unknowingly before I learned to be very careful.

A day had become a week, then a month, then 3 months. I’d met doctors who prescribed MRIs and scans and diagnosed it as everything from b12 deficiency to vertigo to mineral deficiencies to meniere’s disease to anxiety to opthalmic disorders and sleep apnea to a sympathetic but resigned, “I’m sorry, I have no idea, just try these pills and supplements“. My family supported me greatly through all of this, but they too, simply didn’t get it. They referred to it as “vertigo”. They couldn’t understand why I was reluctant to do trips and vacations, and even pressured me into a few of them, and I had to feign enjoyment (and try my best to actually enjoy the parts I could), . And who can blame them?

“Something’s wrong with my brain”, “I’m seeing things as still images”? What the hell was I even talking about?

It was somewhere around the 1 or 2 month mark that I started realizing I was on my own. And much later, a particularly enraging trip to the ENT one day solidified it. If I had any hope of getting better, I had to accept the fear of maybe never becoming better, I had to make up a “cure” from scratch, and I had to spend every minute of my day working an angle of it. A few paltry coordination exercises and endless consultations wouldn’t cut it.

What I Did

I figured that whatever the etiology, the first thing I had to do was address the easy stuff worsening or conflating the issue even if they weren’t at the level of disorder: bad glasses mess with your peripheral vision, acidity can make you feel nauseous, too much sugar and too less/too much salt can cause changes in glucose levels and blood pressure, clumsiness and bad posture make you underconfident in the way you move around, poor sleep messes with visual perception, bad circulation (familial history) to the head, dehydration and neck pain and injury can cause dizziness and lightheadedness, and being anxious makes the experience of anything at least thrice as bad and creates whole new problems.

I fixed these things with the most direct, fastest and readily available solutions, and some of them took time: bigger glasses and contact lenses, posture correction methods, dietary changes. Also, various methods of relaxation and self-talk (and self-lying, to be honest, because at some point I realized I had to sort of gaslight myself that it was all psychosomatic to regain the hope that I could do something about it), these helped me calm down and sleep. For the circulation, I took a readily available ayurvedic supplement by the company Himalaya, a medicine typically used for Hemorrhoids– reasoning that if it helps microcirculation in one place, non-specific as these herbals usually are, it might help microcirculation everywhere. Anecdotally, I suspect this last one made a massive/pivotal difference that cannot be discounted. At the very least, something I did here enabled the brain to heal in the subsequent steps. (I wish I had been more rigorous in my recording of these events)

Then, I got around to question of retraining my brain. I arrived at the following strategy, which can be loosely summarized as hypercompensation:

• Teach the mind that one perceived picture connects to the next by forcing a wide variety of very linear visual scenarios (both ordinary and novel)
• Teach the mind to reconnect sound, smell, taste and touch to the currently perceived picture
• Relearn the concept of an internal tempo and control over it with regards to imagination and muscular movement
• Teach the eye to track points, lines and movement paths even better than before
• Teach the mind to ignore destabilizing corrupting input
• Practice in real life with an actual, though manageable, level of risk

This boiled down into five categories of exercises:

• Video games
• Specific movement exercises
• Dual N-Back Training (for reflexes, an effect I discovered by accident)
• Cycling, Walking, and in the parts of the day when I was feeling very good, driving in safe places
• Patience and Acceptance

Video Games

Video games consisted of any game where the eye has to track both straight and random lines and motor function has to follow it. One of the most helpful ones for this was: Free Rider HD – Draw tracks and race bikes (I think it might have been a different site back then), and the improvements in my eye tracking were rapid in the days after I started playing it. But FPSes and third person games worked great too. The Assassins Creed series was incredibly helpful because it was based entirely on parkour and free running, (and frankly, it quickly became more about enjoying the game and stress-relief than a cure as my condition started improving. This is the reason I still have a soft spot for Ubisoft despite their, uh, hit and miss creativity)

Movies were helpful too, but not to the same level as games. And it was distressing when I couldn’t follow or appreciate the scenes I could previously pay close attention to.

Specific Movement Exercises

I figured that if I had to teach myself to connect one image to the next again in terms of an embodied, sense-integrating feeling, I had to practice everything from regular tasks to completely new ones in quick succession, with spaced repetition as with learning anything else — with one exception, I would do each movement at a torturously slow pace/tempo.

For example, if I needed to pick up something from my desk, I would purposely drag out that typically half-second movement to nearly 20 seconds. The best way to put it is that I Taichi-ified every movement I made i.e if I can do something perfectly very slowly, I can then do it perfectly very fast. I also added several poorly executed (and again, variably torturously slow and then very fast) martial arts exercises to the long list of the established balance and coordination exercises I was already doing. The latter included the entire set of neck/eye position and ball throwing/passing exercises recommended for vertigo.

I borrowed and applied the concept of muscle confusion, spontaneously changing a movement or exercise to something weird or stopping an unrelated activity to do a tracking/seeking progression intensely for a few minutes. I became extremely open to different sensory experiences as an opportunity to hypercompensate into neural regrowth (or whatever).

Moving Outside

Parallelly, I practiced vision and eye tracking/focusing exercises while walking and cycling. Later, as I got well enough to drive in limited areas, I did them while driving. Of all of the outdoor based exercises I did, the driving was easily the most helpful and it was roughly at the same time that I started the herbal tablet by Himalaya that I mentioned. Like the free rider game, the days after I initiated these two things, I made the most rapid improvements– ending up restoring my perception to nearly 80% of normal from the 50% where it was stuck after months of the rest of the stuff I tried.

Dual N-Back Training

This was the most unexpected intervention.
I first caught hold of this game for its stated intention of improving working memory and attention.

It absolutely did not do that.

What it did instead was that within a week of practicing it twice a day for 15-30 minutes each, it not only restored my reflexes it actually improved them significantly above what it was before my problem. Suddenly I was catching things mid-air that I had knocked over, without even needing to process that I was doing it. I had never been able to do this in my life. I was able to catch car keys or tennis balls thrown at me with one hand, something I struggled with all my life despite playing games like tennis (very well if I may boast, tangentially) when I was younger. And I did not practice catching things that were falling over even once, I only suddenly discovered that I could now do it when I started catching things spontaneously.

While we can make an educated and even obvious guess at why n-back training had this effect, and it might have been cumulative with the other stuff I was doing, at the time I don’t think I found a single person online who had spoken about anything similar, and I don’t think I’d find it if I went looking even now. I’m still flummoxed that it happened at all. I repeated this n-back training intermittently over a few months till it hit diminishing returns.

Patience and Acceptance

The only way I could stay sane was to face and accept the fear on one hand that I’d never get better, but on the other hand treat myself as an outlier, capable of doing something impossible regardless of the reality. This required slowly learning patience with myself, and the ability to celebrate the tiniest incremental changes, the smallest triumphs. It also involved, as noted before, lying to myself.

I wish I could tell you the exact ways I did this. But frankly, I did it case by case. When I encountered a thought, I stopped to think of how I can expand it or counteract it, and I immediately tried the thing I thought of, without being too attached to the idea of it working the first time or being elegant.

Recovery, and Today

This experience was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. When you are unwell for a long time, your brain and imagination are your only refuge; so then, what is your refuge when your brain itself is unwell and unreliable? What do you do if you fear that all you have left is to be absorbed by or monkishly get rid of the images and phenomena of your mind, a lot of which are not enjoyable, what if you can’t take refuge in physical work, and you can’t distract yourself even for a moment?

The ordeal lasted for 2 years in total. Its peak was for 6 months in the first year, where the perception changes were unrelenting, I had to experience them 24/7. In the second year, it was intermittent, limited to certain activities and a baseline altered perception. A drastically faded form lasted for 4 more years. The closest diagnosis i could make was Inconspicuous akinetopsia/Illusory Palinopsia, and it’s a very close match. The most likely cause, in my view, was the Montelukast. While we’re on the topic, my strong view– though this is impossible to correlate or make empirical using just my case– is that the initial sensitization for this event (i.e a sensitization to multiple otherwise harmless medications and drugs) was created many years previously, when I was irresponsibly prescribed furazolidone for a third bout of antibiotic-resistant typhoid. I correlate it this way because that third typhoid infection, especially after I started the furazolidone, was the start of general long-term decline in my feeling of well-being.

Today, my perception, balance, reflexes and sharpness and control of my senses are probably better than they have ever been in my life, even before this problem.

Some vestiges of it remain. I suspect some aspects of my visual perception will remain permanently odd. Some are quite specific, for example: I can’t close a door slowly behind me without looking at the knob. If I try to do it without looking, my brain momentarily crosses the signals between the perceptions of my dorsal and ventral side, and my right and left side, and I can also no longer “see” the doorknob in my mind. I suspect this is just a very exaggerated version of something most people feel when trying to close a door behind them, but I don’t really know, because I can’t remember how it was for me before. I can no longer meditate with my eyes closed, though this is likely psychological, from the anxiety I used to feel when I closed my eyes to sleep.

A few other vestigial issues I won’t mention here in a public space in case they are exploited by malicious people.

As I recovered little by little every day, and then suddenly overnight once in a while, somewhere at the core of my mind, I felt a slow but steadily growing sense of gratitude for life and the simple things, especially the gift of our senses, the utter beauty of our universe, but I also felt a deep tiredness, betrayal, anger and a disembodied non-belonging with friends, family and society. The tiredness seeped through my tendons and bones down to my soul. And worsened in the following years by a number of painful health problems that flared up. I could not work. I was in my early 20s, but I felt like I’d aged a few decades. I felt like my active intelligence had dropped drastically. My talent for navigating and remembering cycles, systems and hierarchies, that I relied on for so many things, was greatly diminished. I felt bad for my girlfriend at the time, because I often wondered if she felt like she were dating someone in their 50s, someone inexplicably and inescapably malfunctioning. I only wanted rest, but I had forgotten how to rest. I’d forgotten how to embody any activity except those that would help me recover.

I had always been bad at relaxing and winding down, but now I couldn’t relax at all, because I had spent every single moment of a whole year re-engaging with the external world around me, forcing my mind and body to integrate each sense input, every motor feedback into the proper mental slot. The muscles around my neck and shoulder and face and jaw were permanently tense, because you generally cannot steel your body to do something it doesn’t seem capable of doing, against uncertainty you cannot comprehend, unless you tense these muscles first. The tendency to obsessive-compulsive habits that I had successfully fought only a couple of years before returned in the form of coping and distracting strategies engaged through the day.

I hadn’t had panic attacks since my teens, but they finally came boiling through to the surface, though because of my experience with them I was able stop them before they blew up. Until years later, when I learned how to sleep well, my dreams were filled with scenarios of being happy and then a sudden twist of having some part of my body or environment or some unseen force pulling the rug from beneath that happiness. Most dreams were either nightmares or wish-fulfillment, and I’d wake up and feel either relief or sadness that it wasn’t real. I’d pat my sheets around me to check that I was indeed safely in my bed. I’d turn my head, dart my eyes around, get up slowly and lie back down, all to do a quick check that it was all indeed working fine, and I hadn’t regressed in my progress.

And I still have these kinds of dreams sometimes. I’ve learned not to take it seriously. Regardless of how well I now sleep (better than ever!), I still have the habit of checking that my senses are working properly the moment I wake up, and I can’t stop it. I’m afraid to stop it. The few times I’ve woken up feeling dizzy from the previous day’s dehydration (this happens often at my farm) or some other issue, I am terrified its going to suddenly transform into the old problem.

I have only ever had one superstition, that of jinxes and bad luck. This experience solidified that superstition to the point of pathological. I refused to talk about things I was excited about or working on. I’ve only recently broke this fear by forcing myself to speak to my closest friends, and to make my business notes and drafts, and also a few personal notes, fully accessible to certain people, but I had to fight every fibre of my being to do it. It’s also the reason I’m writing this article nearly 9 years later.

I have a bad habit now, albeit a well-founded and functional one, of assuming any health problem that strikes me that doesn’t have an obvious cause is psychosomatic. This keeps me out of my own head, helps me not ruminate, helps me see time as a valid recovery option, and is very probably accurate in its diagnosis at least some of the time, but it’s clearly a hacked together solution borne out of desperation. It is not sustainable.

I’d be lying to you if I said I don’t have a constant, low-grade fear that it will all come back. That I misdiagnosed it or misunderstood its cause, and therefore its just a matter of making that one wrong move.

Any resentments I had, have settled to this very general subliminal sort of fear, except for one which only grew: my resentment against and concern for medical systems (including alternative ones) that are so stressful and disrespectful to their practitioners and caregivers, so narrow in their poorly tacked-on scientism or self-aggrandizing orthodoxy, so lacking in meritocratic or trait selection, either so young in their life experience or so entrenched in tradition, that doctors can encounter an absolutely arresting unusual medical problem that feels like it’s straight out of an episode of House, but they don’t have the energy and time left to muster even a cold, impersonal, objective academic curiosity, let alone the deductive mindset and empathy vital to their jobs as diagnosticians.

But, remember that slow and steadily growing sense of gratitude I talked about?

It eventually grew to the point of helping me see the shatterpoints that would allow me to change my entire personality, all the traits that bogged me down before I had any problem: from introvert to extrovert, from heavyhanded to lighthearted, depressive and anxious to a simple transient tendency to melancholy, performative and defensive to authentic, aggressively political to annoyingly curious and rigour-minded, overly introspective and spiralling to embodied and physical and able to soak in my senses, from ennui and nihilism to spiritual and soulful.

And as for going from serious and wary to playful and trusting– that’s something I’m still working on.

I think we’re all working on that one.

So, wish me luck.
And good luck to yourself. 🙂