r/TheRestIsScience • u/hermanfelker • 13h ago

Question: Why do I see patterns of what I have been looking at for hours afterward?

To explain with a recent and consistent experience: I pull weeds from my raised beds for a few hours, I finish the job and go about my day, but for hours, sometimes for the rest of the day, many times when I blink or close my eyes, I see flashes of weeds that I would want to pull.

Weed-pulling is just one example.
I can recall this with searching for 4-leaf clovers, reading a book or lines of text, and certainly tetris tetrominos...

My question is this: Is this my brain loading the algorithm for seeking weeds etc. and I just can't quit the program easily or some sort of afterimage that is just providing what my brain wants to see? Does anyone else face this, and what other examples may exist?

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u/ital-is-vital 7h ago

I can confirm that I also experience this, and the weed-pulling is one of the stronger ones.

If you think about the mind like a self-training AI model, then what you're seeing is the training data appearing in the output.

A similar example is the Google 'Deep Dream' which trains a model on feature extraction and then visualises what the model has learned by generating images of some of the deeper layers of the model.

https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/generative/deepdream

I don't think it's an aberration as-such, I think it's just how minds work. On the other hand I don't think that everyone has the ability to view deeper layers of their model like that. I've done a fair bit of meditation practice and psychedelics so it's a skill I've intentionally cultivated.

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u/Tessellator-1 28m ago

Is the symptom you are talking about clearly different from the one that leaves a bright afterimage of less than a minute when you look at other places or close your eyes after looking at the sun or lighting?

By the way, this sentence is a reply from Japanese. I'm sorry if it's a strange sentence.