In article <3790408A.2ED6 at online.no>, Tore Lund <tl001 at online.no> writes
>In the book "Complexity" by Roger Lewin (1993) there is some mention of
>a visual disorder suffered by one of the interviewees (Chris Langton).
>After an accident with a hang-glider he felt he was not the person he
>used to be, and this was accompanied by an altered perception of visual
>space, described as follows:
>> ...Chris felt he was living in the middle of a cube, the sides of
> which were cinema screens with pictures projected on them. "It's
> hard to describe," he told me. "It was as if I could see the world,
> but somehow I wasn't in it, no emotional presence."
> (Beginning of chapter 8, page 151 in Phoenix ed.)
>>Has anyone heard of similar cases? Is there a name for this condition?
>Has it been studied in detail? Seems to me that anomalies of this sort
>could give us important clues to the nature of our stereoscopic vision.
I haven't read the book, but the quote above sounds like he could be
describing the depersonalisation/derealisation syndrome. I'm not sure
that he's really describing a "visual space anomaly"- rather he seems to
be saying that the world has lost all emotional meaning for him, and
that he feels no more involved in it than if he were watching a movie.
This metaphor- "it's as if I was watching a movie"- is very commonly
used by people with depersonalisation to describe their experience. The
"cube" part just seems to mean that the "movie" is going on all around,
rather than that his vision was distorted.
Depersonalisation is basically the feeling that one has no "real"
existence, that one is like an automaton. Derealisation is the feeling
that the world around you is somehow unreal, lacking in life and
meaning. The two phenomena often occur together- indeed it's
questionable whether they are really 2 distinct experiences, or just
different aspects of the same thing. We all experience this
occasionally- eg when jetlagged, or after being up all night on-call.
However a chronic depersonalisation state may arise as a primary problem
or secondary to other psychiatric or neurological illnesses/injuries.
These phenomena are currently the subject of research at the Institute
of Psychiatry in London. You can get more info and references at our
website: http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/home/dpu/index.htm
Best wishes
--
Nick Medford
