Talk:Scotoma

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Images

I'm not really sure the "illustrations" of scotoma are entirely appropriate. Typically a scotoma won't appear as a black hole or a hole of any kind, as is the case with the natural blind spot as well as scotoma caused by damage to the brain, but as a region of assumptive information that is generally easy to define. The blind spot lies away from our center of vision and is thus impossible to "focus" on and determine where the edges lie, but larger scotoma and or those closer to the center of the eye can be drawn out (by the patient) with high precision when looking at a particularly difficult to "assume" pattern or moving image. Thus the whole "blurry edges" thing is a little bit silly, the shapes and colors simply continue often making it difficult to tell where it starts and ends.

One thing I can suggest as an illustration of life with scotoma would be a picture of a person with their head apparently missing, and the pattern of the wall or object behind where their head should be seemingly filling the space. It applies not only to people with scotoma but can also be done easily aiming your blind spot. 219.102.220.90 (talk) 06:28, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Compensation/Interpolation?

Is the phrase, "The visual signals that are absent in one eye are sent to the cortex by signals from the other eye" accurate? I believe that the brain does a sort of interpolation of the missing information. If the signals from the other eye were necessary to complete the picture, then it would be possible to see a black area in one eye by simply covering the other eye. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.160.115.52 (talk) 13:51, 25 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Absence of visual perception is not the same as black and therefore the illustrations are misleading. But it is difficult to represent nonperception in a still picture, just as it is difficult to represent scintillation in a still picture. Greensburger (talk) 16:05, 25 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Transient scotoma with positional hypotension?

Would the term scotoma apply to the "closing in of the world" or collapsing tunnel vision effect caused by the near-fainting experience associated (in some people) with standing up too fast? Or is there another more appropriate term? If so, what? Jornadigan (talk) 13:45, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]