The condition only got a name a few years ago: visual snow. For years before that, doctors told people they were imagining things. Dave Ames felt the condition come on suddenly a couple of years ago. He was first puzzled, then irritated, then terrified. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video “It went on for months," Mr Ames said. "I had computer monitors replaced but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was going on.

“I remember being in meetings, looking at a wall, seeing dots. I’d ask other people if they could see them. They’d say ‘you’re an idiot, there’s nothing there'. “A couple of months later I was working at home, and I saw the screen go black. Then I went outside, and it was like everything was covered in snow, like an out-of-tune TV set.” Mr Ames rushed to the hospital, but doctors did not know how to help him. Nor did the many specialists he saw over the next few years. Visual Snow causes dots like static to appear on everything you see. Credit:Stephen Kiprilis “All I was given from the medical profession was expenses. I’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars on tests and yet had no real answer. I almost gave up in a lot of ways – but I knew I had it,” he says.

Eventually, after much Googling, Mr Ames stumbled on Professor Owen White, one of the leaders of a lab at Monash University studying similar conditions. Ah yes, said Professor White, after asking Mr Ames about his symptoms. You have visual snow. Then he asked him to do something unusual – to look at a field covered in dots and stars with instructions to only look at the stars. A computer monitored Mr Ames’ eyes. Professor White is one of the few people in world researching the illness, which was only described as a separate syndrome in 1995. Until then, scientists told patients they were suffering the after-effects of hallucinations brought on by drugs such as LSD, or – because the condition does not have symptoms that show up on any other test and the eyes are perfectly normal – that they were simply imagining it.

Professor White has made major strides in understanding the condition – that's where the test comes in. While Mr Ames was trying to look at the stars, his eyes kept wandering onto the dots – a sign, says Professor White, that his brain struggled to filter out things it did not want to look at. This, Professor White believes, is the root of what causes visual snow. The brain normally filters out much of what our eyeballs see – blood cells pumping through the veins that run through the eye, for example. Mr Ames's brain has, for some reason, lost its filtering ability. He is seeing the world exactly as his eyeball sees it, Professor White believes. So what causes the perceived "static"?

"Spontaneous activity in nerve cells ... that would normally be suppressed", says Professor White. Electrically, his brain looks like the surface of the ocean, with lots of choppy waves and rip-currents. Normal brains can suppress that activity, make everything flat and level. “Everyone was being told they were crazy. But when you spend time with these people, it becomes clear they’re not crazy,” says Professor White. Just having a diagnosis is an enormous relief, Mr Ames says. Sadly, with so few researchers working on the condition, a cure is still a long way away. A lab at Monash University's new department of neuroscience, which opens on Thursday, will be devoted to the study of visual snow and similar conditions and will go some way to helping.

A study on people with the condition, led by PhD student Paige Foletta will try to clarify just what is going wrong in their brains. Professor White has plans to try to train patients to boost their own filtering systems. But there’s a long road ahead. So all Mr Ames can do for now is learn to peer through the snow. “If it did not get any worse, I’d be happy. If it just stayed at this level.” People interested in Ms Foletta's study are encouraged to email visual.snow@monash.edu