Extreme motion sick feeling after flashing lights

About 8-9 hours ago my computer went nuts for a couple of minutes and my monitor kind of flashed 8 or 10 times over the course of a couple of minutes. Unfortnately this brought on an extreme feeling of motion sicknes which I still have not shaken despite taking some meclizine. I know others here experience problems with flashing lights but does anyone know WHY this happens? As in the physiological reasons behind it?

A friend (she gets bad migraines) said the flashing would bother her but she would be over it in 10 minutes and would feel back to normal. Why is this horrid feeling still with me all these hours later? It wasn’t a prolonged or fast flash, just a blink every 10-15 seconds.

My best guess would be that the chronic vestibular issues have made you visually dependent, and therefore when your visual balance system was disabled (via loss of horizontal reference due to the flickering) your brain had only one balance system to fall back on (proprioception). Two functional balance systems at minimum are needed to maintain your internal sense of position in space, so in addition to your brain having to work harder at staying upright (and the attendant release of emergency hormones like adrenaline) the migraine mechanism was probably triggered by the sudden surge in neuronal activity. The migraine could easily leave you spaced out/sick for hours afterwards, and with only one functional balance system the brain might not know which balance system to trust (vestibular or visual) even after the visual horizon lock has been restored. Unfortunately these are all automated systems and there’s only so much the drugs can do to suppress them…

Either that or you had some kind of seizure-like activity, but I rather doubt it. :slight_smile:

Hope this helps…

Whitepines - hi, and thank you for your response. What you say makes sense, but I’m still not sure if that is the reason my horrible feelings of sickness lasted so long. Still feeling a little off today, 4 days later. Flashes from digital cameras do the same thing to me, make me sick for days. I feel if I could figure out the WHY of this I would be on the path to figuring out how to heal myself or at least it might give the doctor a clue as to what is really wrong with me. So tired of feeling unwell day after day.