Der Schreckblitz

Auditory-visual synaesthesia in a patient with basilar migraine

“…They were reported to fill the centre of her visual fields, featuring coloured symmetrical geometric patterns with varying degrees of detail and displaying pulsing movements synchronous to the ringing of the alarm clock. Except for the considerably longer duration, all phenomenal characteristics of her visual hallucinations agreed with previous descriptions of the sound-induced photisms reported by normal subjects during the awakening from sleep [1,2,5]. However, both the duration of the subject's three episodes of auditory-visual synaesthesia, which is in the lower range of the distribution of the duration of other visual aura symptoms in migraine [11], and their strict association with a migraine headache that followed after the patient's awakening, support the notion that her sound-induced visual hallucinations were aura symptoms of (basilar?)…”