What you see during a seizure depends on where in the brain the electrical activity occurs, but visual experiences range from colorful flashing shapes to temporary blindness to complex scenes with recognizable figures. About 18% of people with focal epilepsy report visual symptoms as part of their seizures, making vision changes one of the most common sensory effects.
Not every seizure produces visual symptoms. Generalized seizures that affect the whole brain often cause a loss of consciousness where you don’t see or remember anything at all. It’s focal seizures, those starting in a specific brain region, that tend to produce the striking visual phenomena people search for.
Flashing Lights, Colors, and Simple Shapes
The most common visual seizure experience involves elementary hallucinations: flashing or flickering lights, bright colors, and simple geometric shapes like circles or spots. These typically appear when seizure activity starts in the back of the brain, where visual processing happens. The International League Against Epilepsy classifies these as “focal sensory visual seizures,” and they’re the signature symptom of occipital lobe epilepsy.
These flashes are usually multicolored, small, and circular, often appearing in one half of your visual field. They develop fast, last only seconds, and tend to follow the same pattern every time they occur. This consistency is one of the features that distinguishes seizure visuals from other conditions. People often describe them as a strobe-like effect or rapidly pulsing colored spots that seem to come from nowhere.
Complex Hallucinations and Formed Images
Some seizures produce far more elaborate visual experiences. Instead of simple shapes, you might see recognizable images: people, animals, faces, or entire scenes. These complex visual hallucinations are more strongly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy than with seizures starting in the visual cortex itself. The temporal lobe handles memory and emotion, so when seizure activity spreads into these areas and the brain’s visual association regions, the result can be vivid, dream-like imagery.
These formed hallucinations sometimes come alongside other unusual perceptual shifts, including feelings of déjà vu, where a scene feels impossibly familiar, or a sense that your surroundings aren’t quite real. The experience can feel more like being dropped into a memory or a dream than watching a light show.
Objects That Shrink, Grow, or Warp
A less common but deeply disorienting seizure experience involves distortions in how objects look. Sometimes called “Alice in Wonderland” effects, these perceptual changes can make objects appear larger than they are, smaller than they are, closer, farther away, or physically warped. Straight lines may look wavy or slanted. Surfaces that should be level can appear skewed.
These distortions happen when seizure activity affects the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting size, distance, and spatial relationships. The experience is distinct from hallucinations because you’re still seeing real objects in your environment. They just look wrong.
Losing Part or All of Your Vision
Not all seizure visuals involve seeing something extra. Some seizures cause the opposite: vision drops out. You might lose a section of your visual field, developing a temporary blind spot, or experience complete blindness lasting the duration of the seizure. This is called ictal amaurosis, and it represents a total, transient loss of vision triggered by seizure activity in the back of the brain.
In documented cases, complete blindness during a seizure typically precedes other symptoms like loss of awareness and repetitive movements, with the full episode lasting one to three minutes. Some people report remaining blind for several minutes even after the seizure itself stops. In rare cases, post-seizure visual impairment can take days to fully resolve, though most people recover much faster.
What Many People Actually See: Nothing
For a large number of people who have seizures, the honest answer to “what do you see?” is nothing, or at least nothing they can remember. Generalized tonic-clonic seizures (formerly called grand mal seizures) involve loss of consciousness. You don’t experience visual phenomena during them the way you would during a focal seizure where awareness is preserved. You simply have a gap in your experience, sometimes preceded by a brief warning aura that might include visual changes.
Even in focal seizures, if awareness is lost partway through, you may only remember the first few seconds of visual symptoms before everything goes blank. The visual aura in these cases acts as a warning signal that a larger seizure is about to follow.
How Seizure Visuals Differ From Migraine Auras
Many people who experience visual disturbances wonder whether they’re having seizures or migraines, since both can produce visual auras. The differences are consistent enough to be diagnostically useful.
Migraine auras typically involve monochromatic (black and white or single-color) patterns with zigzag or linear shapes. They spread slowly across your visual field over several minutes, tend to appear toward the edges of your vision, and often leave a lingering blind spot. Seizure visuals, by contrast, are brightly colored, appear as small circular flashing shapes, develop in seconds rather than minutes, and repeat with the same progression each time. Migraine auras rarely happen daily, while seizure-related visual episodes can recur frequently.
The speed of onset is the most practical distinguishing feature. If your visual disturbance builds gradually over five to twenty minutes, that pattern fits migraine. If it hits within seconds, is vividly colorful, and follows an identical script each time, that pattern is more consistent with seizure activity.
Why the Location in Your Brain Matters
The specific visual experience maps closely to which brain region is involved. Seizures starting in the occipital lobe, the brain’s primary visual processing center, produce the elementary hallucinations: lights, colors, and geometric patterns. When activity starts in or spreads to the temporal lobe and its associated memory and emotional processing areas, the result is complex hallucinations with formed images. Seizures affecting the regions that interpret spatial relationships produce the size and distance distortions.
This is why two people with epilepsy can describe completely different visual experiences. One person’s seizures might always begin with a cluster of flashing colored circles in the left side of their vision, while another person’s seizures produce a brief, vivid scene of a face or an animal. The consistency of each individual’s experience, the same pattern repeating nearly identically each time, is itself a hallmark of seizure activity and one of the features that helps distinguish it from other causes of visual disturbance.