Photosensitivity vs. Visual Overload

Kyoko closes her eyes to mitigate her sensory overload. There’s an interesting point here, and it’s just obscure enough that if someone does notice, it would be easy to think it’s a mistake on my part. To avoid that, and because it brings up some interesting details, I thought I’d write up a discussion of the topic.

Because having your eyes closed does not reliably help with photosensitivity. In fact, it typically makes it worse if the light is bright; photosensitivity tests are done with the eyes closed, to evoke a stronger response. The leading hypothesis is that by diffusing the light, you’re effectively making it hit more of the retina’s surface area. Because light isn’t fully blocked by the eyelids, something you can easily test and confirm if you haven’t before, and so the diffuse light is still getting through and activating more neurons on the same flickering pattern.

My issues are not the same as photosensitive epilepsy; I do exhibit what I would call photosensitivity, but it’s more related to visual processing and migraines. It’s not quite photophobia, although that happens with my migraines too. This is more specifically an issue with flashing or inconsistent lights giving me miserable headaches (this combined with the tendency towards fainting and convulsions made the diagnostic process a mess trying to rule out epilepsy). So keeping that distinction in mind, I can say that this finding matches my experience. Having both eyes closed while, say, riding in a car towards the sunset through trees (this hit me really hard growing up, and probably contributed a surprising amount to my serious, lifelong health problems) is awful. It makes the flashing pattern feel more intense, my head hurts, and I feel like I’m going to throw up from both pain and motion sickness. Having both eyes open also hurts, because of the flashing and because it was too bright for my eyes and hitting that photophobia.

The best solution I had was actually to have one eye closed, one eye open as little as I could manage, and focus as much as possible on that slit of vision, letting the other eye take the brunt of the misery. Trade off occasionally, but it’s not having both closed. This seems to line up with current research.

And so with that in mind, it might seem odd that Kyoko closes her eyes in the car. If you happen to know this detail, then it seems like that would be making things worse rather than better, and she would definitely know that. So what gives?

Well…it’s not photosensitivity she’s mitigating. Not exactly. When she tells Saori she has something close enough to photosensitive epilepsy to use that as a model, this is part of what she means. Because she does have actual photosensitive seizures; there are patterns and qualities of light that will make her miserable or cause her to seize. For those situations, she typically wouldn’t close her eyes. This is part of why she makes a point of carrying blindfolds and eyepatches on her person. Closing your eyes often won’t help, but a good blindfold (I use a sleep mask) or eyepatch will block the light completely, and that does help a great deal. When she’s trying to cope specifically with that, she would use those instead.

But this isn’t that. Most of the time, riding in the car isn’t going to provoke photosensitivity for her. It’s more about visual processing, taking in information and making it into meaning. This is the part I tend to focus on, because this part I do have direct, personal experience of, and I feel that makes me better able to depict it. So I can comment with fair confidence on this part.

When I’m trying to process visual information, it’s slow, halting, and often unpleasant. This is a known thing related to the autism patterns I exhibit. Visual processing is impaired for me, in some areas to the point of clinical developmental impairment. My hand-eye coordination, ability to picture something being rotated, a bunch of things related to processing visual information are limited. I get overloaded easily if I’m trying to do too much of this.

And Kyoko does have this happening. Her sensory input is extensive enough that she’s simply getting too much information to handle. This is something I notice often, while moving; usually I can manage it walking, but managing anything faster than I can run is out of the question for me. I can’t even ride a bicycle, let alone drive. And a lot of it is because of this, because there’s too much visual information that I have to actively attend to in a short time. I can’t do that, and so my brain overloads, I dissociate in a way that almost resembles an absence seizure, and fall.

This, then, can be mitigated by closing her eyes. She can simply decline to receive clear information. If she were watching, she would be trying to understand what she was seeing, and that’s the part that sucks. But it’s very hard to suppress that impulse.

And if you do suppress the efforts to interpret things, it’s not a whole lot better in some ways. When I watch the tree branches in the wind, and I just stop seeing them as tree branches, it gets…weird. I keep flickering back and forth between seeing branches moving in the foreground against the backdrop of sky, and sky being the focus of the view, obstructed by branches. I try to see and understand all of the relative movements of leaves and branches, and that’s simply too much information. This tends to leave me dazed and if I do it for too long I get a headache.

I think in some ways it’s not exactly that I can’t handle visual information. It’s that I can’t instantly tell which parts of the visual are important. That’s not the only part of the problem, of course, but this is the feeling that makes me fall when I try to ride a bike, this is the attitude that gets me high just from watching trees. And closing my eyes keeps this from happening almost entirely. There’s no information to overanalyze, and I don’t have to keep myself focused on what’s in the car rather than try to keep up with the rapidly changing environment outside. I do this a lot.

This, then, is why I wanted to clarify the distinction. This isn’t a detail that I’m unaware of. It’s more that photosensitivity is an incomplete description because she finds that going into this whole discussion isn’t usually helpful. She has tools for the photosensitivity, but the more routine problem is to do with visual information and processing rather than epileptic seizures. She tends to get overstimulated rapidly and severely under a wide range of conditions, especially if she’s already tired or stressed. This kind of overstimulation can eventually make her seize without involving specifically photosensitivity, but that’s a topic for another essay.

So she carries eyepatches to limit her visual field, earplugs for when the noise of the world starts to be similarly overwhelming, and she keeps her eyes closed when there’s a lot of change and movement happening in her environment that would be a strain to keep up with. She also, separately, carries a blindfold to completely block light when it’s impossible to avoid the flashing patterns associated with photosensitive epileptic seizures. It’s pretty unlikely that most people will recognize the incongruence to begin with, but I thought I’d clarify because it’s also a good example of my thought process while writing.