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Remembrance of things past

There was more to Jackson's vision than a vivid imagination, however. If he saw movement where no one else did, if objects seemed to rotate and transmute in space it was partly because in his eyes they did. For as long as he could remember Jackson had been afflicted with hallucinatory spells. They came without warning and could be as short as an instant or as long as several minutes. In the late 1940s after years of silence even with Lee he described the affliction to Roger Wilcox. “With his eyes open wide, in a normal situation, he would suddenly begin to see all these swirling images,” Wilcox remembers Jackson telling him, “a swirling of lines and images, swirling tangles of lines. It was like real . . . He wanted to know if there was something wrong with his eyes or with his sanity.” Having done some research on visual phenomena in connection with an invention, Wilcox reassured him, “It's just a temporary malfunction in the optic nerve. It's inside your head, not in your eyes.” Jackson was relieved. “At least there's nothing wrong with my eyes,” he said. (Later, Wilcox researched the problem in medical and optical journals and concluded on the basis of Jackson's description that “It was just a temporary malfunction in the optic chiasm, triggered by a malfunction of the perceptual circuits in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex and projected onto the retina.”) The generally accepted medical term for this painless ocular disturbance is an …

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