Phantom eye syndrome

[Magical Realist]

"Amputees often feel eerie sensations from their missing limbs. These “phantom limb” feelings can include pain, itching, tingling, or even a sense of trying to pick something up. Patients who lose an eye may have similar symptoms—with the addition of actual phantoms.

Phantom eye syndrome (PES) had been studied in the past, but University of Liverpool psychologist Laura Hope-Stone and her colleagues recently conducted the largest study of PES specifically in patients who’d lost an eye to cancer.

The researchers sent surveys to 239 patients who’d been treated for uveal melanoma at the Liverpool Ocular Oncology Centre. All of these patients had had one eye surgically removed. Some of their surgeries were only 4 months in the past; others had taken place almost 4 and a half years earlier. Three-quarters of the patients returned the surveys, sharing details about how they were doing in their new monocular lives.

Sixty percent of respondents said they had symptoms of phantom eye syndrome. These symptoms included pain, visual sensations, or the impression of actually seeing with the missing eye.

Patients with visual symptoms most often saw simple shapes and colors. But some people reported more distinct images, “for example, resembling wallpaper, a kaleidoscope, or fireworks, or even specific scenes and people,” the authors write.

Then there were the ghosts.
Some people said they had seen strangers haunting their fields of vision, as in these survey responses:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfis...ntoms1.jpg

PES patients describe the ghostly images they see with their missing eyes.

A survey isn’t a perfect way to measure how common PES is overall. But Hope-Stone says there were enough survey responses to produce helpful data for doctors who treat patients with eye cancer.

“We can now tell whether certain kinds of patients are more likely to have phantom symptoms,” she says. For example, “PES is more common in younger patients, and having pain in the non-existent eye is more likely in patients who are anxious and depressed, although we don’t know why.”"-----http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfis...XdBSc9Vikp

[C C]

Sixty percent of respondents said they had symptoms of phantom eye syndrome. These symptoms included pain, visual sensations, or the impression of actually seeing with the missing eye. Patients with visual symptoms most often saw simple shapes and colors. But some people reported more distinct images, “for example, resembling wallpaper, a kaleidoscope, or fireworks, or even specific scenes and people,” the authors write. Then there were the ghosts.

PES would be another log in the fire against a radical direct perception, which might contend that what we perceive isn't anything in the head at all. Whereas the normal variety of DP really isn't much different than indirect perception, IMO. The quibbling distinction between the two is over how much the the stored preconditions of memory and our conceptual inclinations contribute to the characteristics of visual experiences. Whether the representations are very much a product of interpretation versus very little; rather than an elimination of "in-between" agencies. (I consider any "automated" optical response equipment prior to the brain, as well as somatosensory system responses, to be just other biased mediators of information. Even reflective thought in the brain correlates to mechanistic processes; the latter still don't equate to some 100% faithful apprehension of the external environment when consisting of non-neural activity transpiring elsewhere in the body.)