nystagmus

i love trivia. i think this might be on the nerdier side of trivia, but trivia nonetheless. while watching my season 3 DVDs of "house" several weeks ago, there was an episode called "que sera sera" starring pruitt taylor vince. some of you might recognize him as the crazy guy in "identity". he is noted by his shaky eyes, though i could never really determine if that was a gimmick for him. during the "house" episode", the doctors ask him if he's feeling alright because his eyes are shaking, and he explains that he has a condition called "nystagmus". i looked him up and found out that he actually does have this conditions (which makes sense, doing that on purpose would be rough on the eye muscles).

the bit of trivia i learned (i understand that i learned it from wikipedia, so it may not be valid), is there is a "rule of thumb" approximation of one's blood alcohol content that field sobriety checks use called "horizontal gaze nystagmus". normal, sober people will develop nystagmus when looking to the extreme left and right, beyond 45° or so. the "rule of thumb" is to measure at what degree from center a person develops nystagmus and subtract the from 50°. for example, if someone starts nystagmatizing (?) at 35°... 50-35 = 15, so they have an approximate blood alcohol level of 0.15%. THAT is awesome. when i get back to the apartment, i might have to partake in some horizontal gaze nystagmus experimentation, strictly for data collection, of course.

oh, my migraine is much better, i caught it in time, but it made me think of eyes and fluttering (i have to kind of nystagmatize to read when i have a migraine to get around the spots). that reminded me of mr. vince, and that gave you this lovely post. i hope you enjoyed.