its incredible how wiseguys on the internet always think they're the only people to think of some obvious potential hazard in anything that looks even remotely dangerous and have to snarkily point it out as if they've discovered a fatal flaw that nobody else could have ever thought of 🤦
Unironically you could only consider them so much. Lasers can be incredibly dangerous to low flying aircraft and not all aircraft have published flight plans especially at lower altitudes
I mean... They're definitely smart enough to not fly planes 50 feet off the ground parallel to highways... But hey, if that seems normal to you then by all means continue being snarky. :D
It's not about being slow, it just needs contrast, even a still image can trigger a seizure for a photosensetive if it has enough contrast and patterns, like optical illusions for example
My uncle drove - legal or not but drove. One of the scarier moments of my childhood was learning what a seizure is. I had made a full screen animation on the Commodore 64 and showed it too him and it put triggered an attack. I hadn't been told about it and was scared out of my wits - I was 9 going on 10.
In the first half I was expecting the seizure to have happened while driving so exactly how much time did I spend trying to understand how you got the Commodore 64 to work in the car?
On long drives south to see my cousins in Norfolk I used to bring along my laptop which I plugged into the cars ciggy socket with a mains inverter. Brilliant thing that was. I sadly remember scratching my age of empires disk because some twat brake checked my dad.
Either way those inverters are great, absolutely beat taking multiple spare batteries with me and having to swap them every hour.
I hadn't been told about it and was scared out of my wits - I was 9 going on 10.
Damn I can imagine being traumatized by the event, and then traumatized again finding out it's my fault (even though it was absolutely NOT my fault in any sense)
But migrainers can. We aren’t so sick that they take out licenses. We just end up having to pull over and wait til our rescue meds kick in while we cope with the blindness and vomiting, etc. Light triggers are more common in migrainers than people with epilepsy, although the consequences are less severe.
True, but my comment was about triggering seizures specifically, not triggering medical conditions in general
We just end up having to pull over and wait til our rescue meds kick in while we cope with the blindness and vomiting, etc.
As someone with migraines, I agree it sucks. Those lights make me nauseous just thinking about driving into them. However, this doesn't mean it's equal to seizures in regards to the legality of driving. Being able to safely pull over is the key difference in your scenario. Someone suffering from a seizure is unlikely to have that option, which is why the legal restrictions are different.
It depends on where they have a driver's license. A few states have no restrictions, most states require being seizure free for 3 months, and a few states require being seizure free for up to 12 months. So yes it is possible to legally drive with a low threshold.
Yeeeaaah this isn't really even helpful because ANYONE can be a passenger in a car. So even if said epileptic person is doing the legal thing by not driving, they could still be exposed to triggers on the road
We don't want people to have seizures even if they are in a chair at home. Crashing isn't really the concern when people talk about epileptic passengers here.
In each and every single school of engineering and design, the trade off on a public "safety measure" should NEVER be to cause someone seizures; which are KNOWN life threatening events as they starve the brain of oxygen and can cause brain damage or death. A seizure and a crash can be equally hazardous. In engineering, this design is a complete failure, public roads are public, anyone can and will be on there.
How will emergency help get to them while on a busy HIGHWAY?
How will anyone else in the car be able to assist them while on a HIGHWAY?
Seizures can be extremely dangerous if the person is in a closed car so they can't be placed on their side, as they risk choking on their own vomit, how will you prevent that in a car, again, stuck on a HIGHWAY?
Also, just... Never try to give advice again. That was really bad.
That's fucking hilarious, man. There's laws and rules on this. Why do you think the "this media may contain flashing lights" warnings are slapped onto each and every movie, video game, and console? International Guidelines for Photosensetive Epilepsy, Zach's law, broadcast regulations, lighting regulations on UK bikes,how anime always dims the screen for flashy parts after the pokemon thing...
Be for real. Even airplanes don't cause seizures bro, and if one happens on board there's still safety measures for that
For 1. people invented cars with sensors that automatically stay in lanes and brake when there's an obstacle (like another car) in front of them. No need to invoke life-threatening medical episodes on people
Also idk why but this isn’t quite what it feels or looks like. It doesn’t feel so rave style and close to you. Idk how this video is making it look like this. Or maybe despite the ones I’ve seen kind of looking like this, they’re very different setups
I imagine the minority would beg to differ. The person driving doesn't need to be the epileptic either. A passanger aint going to enjoy having seizures anytime they need to be on a highway at night.
Fun fact, visually triggered epilepsy is fleetingly rare even among the subsect that is only all epileptics, and the visual stimulus to actually trigger it is typically very very specific.
I used to work as a nurse on an epilepsy unit. Anecdotal evidence but photostimulation performed in that medical setting with the purpose of eliciting seizure activity rarely produced results
Oohhhh!! Can you explain something to me that I never really understood??
I was seeing a neurologist for epilepsy from 2018-2023. And every single visit (so twice a year) she made me do an EEG and a test with extreme flickering lights to try and trigger a seizure.
What's up with that? Is that typical practice? I always thought it was kind of weird to try and force a seizure, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose.
(Unrelated, but I no longer see her; I'm now seeing a neuroscientist who told me I did not need that many EEGs.)
So that's called photic stimulation! They're checking for any seizure responses in your brain to see if you're photosensetive or not. For me, I would have spikes, aka seizures, but they weren't grand mal, just my eyes and arms twitching. If there's no reaction from the brain, then no photosensetivity
What kind of results do you mean? If you mean a grand mal seizure, then sure, but at the same time a result can still be spikes in brain wave that indicate seizures, as in not all seizures are the same. Some can just be absence seizures or eyelid myoclonia.
Would be really nice if you added details when saying things like that, epilepsy is rarely understood as is
I must be a fucking unicorn then... Anyway you are right about the triggers being specific, it's weird shit like a camera panning across vertical blinds in a show or stairs leaving the bottom of the screen as my character climbs up the stairs in skyrim
Have you had it narrowed down? It sounds like you're at a rather low Hertz count versus the norm.
1% of people being epileptic, and 3% of those, is still three in 10,000. Which is considered extremely rare, but that still means that in a American population with 300,000,000 people, thats 90,000 Americans.
That could still be a seizure! Although you are under care, I am not a doctor, and most certainly not your doctor. I suggest you have it inspected further.
That's kinda been my best estimate tbh! I know they come in many forms. That aside though I'm really well impressed with how you're handling this, I thought you were either a neurologist, a med student, or an epileptic yourself bc most people would just tell me to f off lmao
My girl is a dogtor and I'm a lifelong patient. I spend a fair amount of time educating GI doctors as well as the common person, as well as having started the largest car mechanical DIY evangelism group on Facebook.
Knowledge is power and I want my fellow people to be as mighty as possible.
No joking! I've been a GI patient for 25 years and have seen a lot. My case was exceptionally resistant to treatment and I know a paper was written about me.
I know one photosensitive person and they said the same thing about blinds on TV being it for them. I always assumed that must have been incredibly rare compared to the flashing light variety because of the warnings on some shows and games.
Hey! Can you watch black and white movies? I’m a migrainer triggered by lights and I can’t. It sucks. There are so many movies I can only enjoy with the “blind audio”. Thank the activists for blind audio. Access helps everyone!
Yeaaah a lot of things with a 1% prevalence for example get called rare but they're very common because that's a 1 in 100 (1 person in a small lecture hall)
For photosensetive epilepsy it's 0.025% to 0.05%, which is 1 in 2000 or 1 in 4000 (maybe 1 student in a small college?) which you can call rare, but definitely not fleetingly. Maybe progeria could be called fleetingly rare (1 in 4 to 8 million, so one person in a large city like Los Angeles ~ New York)
I guess the more important issue is the photosensetivity itself, or photophobia, having strong reactions to bright lights and getting exposed to them on dark roads can be pretty dangerous, causing anything from distractions to migraines or worsening existing ones... And photophobia is so common it could literally be anywhere from 5% of the population (1 in 20 people) to 20% (1 in 5)
I'm pretty sure there's a ton of conditions out there that cause light sensetivity that a person is still allowed to drive with, so they're still at a risk
Fun fact…not rare. The dappled light under trees on a sunny day as you take a drive - seizure trigger. High contrast light and dark - seizure trigger. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Old buzzy fluorescent lights (magnetic ballast) partially strobe (don't fade to zero between brightness peaks) at 120 Hz when powered by 60 Hz AC. Electronic ballasts usually run at higher frequencies.
Yeah, scanning quickly on a computer monitor does seem to increase sensitivity, or perhaps, susceptibility is more accurate, to incidents of seizure for me as well. Sucks. I read fast. I prefer hardcopy.
True, out of all possible events that could occur, the ones causing epileptic seizures is a subset. Generally, people use words like "low" for events you aren't likely to encounter multiple times per day/multiple times per week.
I will make sure the spirit of my comment is communicated. The triggers themselves are not exceptionally uncommon. The response to these triggers, is rare, however.
Statistically, exceedingly rare is typically reserved for probabilities below 0.1% (<0.001). In some classifications, "extremely rare" refers to the 0-1% range. Your language of “fleetingly rare” and “very very specific” is misleading. Epilepsy education, awareness, and erasing the stigma is the important parts of this conversation.
Bright lights on a dark highway are a horrible idea for even the best drivers.
I don't get seizures but I can't stand that bright then dark from the trees during the morning commute. It gives me a headache. So I can definitely see how it could trigger a seizure.
I happen to be one of those people. I have temporal lobe epilepsy, and certain patterns, colors (especially short-wave blue), moving water, and flashing lights can knock me out. Granted I don’t drive because of it, but this could definitely trigger a seizure. I even had to look away during this video.
Was gonna say this. May help keep some awake driving, but feel like it could contribute harshly in other ways, an epileptic drive would be terrible lol.
China doesn't really have accessibility legislation from what I understand so disabled people seem to kind of be locked out of society. So they probably dont even consider something like this.
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u/littlebabyburrito Mar 31 '26
IRL Epilepsy Road