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Visual hallucinations in migraine often consist of geometric zigzag patterns and can be explained by the foreign activation of specific nerve cells – edge and motion detectors. Conversely, flickering light flashes of a certain shape can overstimulate these specialized brain cells and trigger a migraine in the first place. So which stimuli should those affected avoid? And can other stimuli even have a therapeutic effect and reduce an impending sensory overload?

These questions – visual triggers, visual hallucinations, and my research on therapeutic approaches using visual stimulation for migraine – can be explained using the hip-hop music track Migraine1 by the group ArtOfficial. There are three closely interconnected problems: (1) Which neural networks cause people with migraines to be hypersensitive to specific light stimuli? (2) How do simple visual hallucinations in the form of zigzag patterns arise during a migraine? And (3), the central question: how could an acute therapy based on light stimuli be researched?

One thing is already certain: the aforementioned hip-hop music video is therapeutically completely unsuitable.

In a follow-up post next week, I’ll tackle just the first question: Why are migraine sufferers hypersensitive to certain visual stimuli? It will be a post about the receptive fields of specialized nerve cells in the visual cortex and their arrangement into what is called a cortical pinwheel map. This pinwheel map is another example of the many topographic maps in the brain—of which we’ve just gotten to know one with somatotopy, better known as the homunculus.

So, these next three posts are closely connected to the last one, even though the shift in sensory modality—from feeling (somatosensory sense) to seeing (visual sense)—might make the connection less obvious at first glance. Hence this note.

The next post on visual receptive fields will be followed by post (2) on the Hip-Hop Neuroscience Fusion, in which the close relationship between visual triggers and visual hallucinations will be explained. This series – “Visual Triggers, Hallucinations, and Therapy” – will conclude with post (3), offering a forward-looking perspective on the scientific foundations rooted in theoretical physics that play into the central clinical question raised here regarding visual therapy. As stated in the blog header under “Grey Matter”: connections between physics, neurology, and medical technology – my core theme.

Since these posts probably won’t appear in direct sequence, I’ve written this one as both an introduction and a connecting piece. I’ll link to all the subsequent posts from here once they’re online.