Wild rails and nervous nystagmus— drjamesmcardle com — readability

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Wild rails and nervous nystagmus — drjamesmcardle.com — Readability

29/05/13 4:38 PM

drjamesmcardle.com

Wild rails and nervous nystagmus by JAMESMMCARDLE | MAY 28, 2013 Sit opposite a fellow commuter in a suburban train and you will notice that when they look out of the window that their eyes flick rapidly back and forth in an uncanny, robotic manner as they follow the passage of the surrounding scene.

Optokinetic nystagmus. Creative Commons original This characteristic pattern of eye movement is well known amongst vision researchers as opto-kinetic nystagmus. Coined in the mid-eighteenth century from the Greek nustagmos ‘nodding, drowsiness’; nystagmus can be a debilitating syndrome caused by disease or medication and it can result in nausea and dizziness because of the cross-stimulation with the vestibular system and sense of balance. Opto-kinetic nystagmus, with which we are concerned here, occurs when the whole visual scene moves, as happens when looking out of a window in a moving vehicle; indeed, the effect was once known as ‘railway nystagmus’ for this reason [see Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease: March 1923 - Volume 57 - Issue 3 - ppg 291-292 1). You can test for yourself the ways this eye-movement is semi-voluntary, and can result from attending to the moving scene, or conversely how it can be an automatic response which will cease if you turn your attention to inner thoughts or to another sensation. If the velocity of field movement increases above around 30°s–1, the eyes lag progressively behind, and maintaining steady fixation on the object is less effective, so details of the cutting which is speeding by only metres away from the train window become difficult to see clearly. During the rapid saccades in the intervals between the tracking/panning motion we are temporarily blind because they occur too fast for the retinal nerves to register, so inherently there is a freeze-frame quality to the visual effect. However fleeting, this fixation enables the individual to gather impressions, snapshots of the landscape, which may remain in shortterm memory and even be summoned up later. This is of interest to me as a photographer.

Montage of views on one trip Castlemaine to Kyneton, Central Victoria. I have been photographing from train windows for nearly ten years trying to duplicate in still images the qualities of this kind of rapid perception with the changes in concentration entailed, and the effects on attention. I regard the resulting images as containing signs of awareness and consciousness, or the suspension of it.

James McArdle (2004) The landscape in furious flight four colour inkjet print from digal camera 800mm H x 3600mm W

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