pretty sure those patterns are a result of mechanical activations of the receptors in your retina randomly stimulating your visual cortex and activating the geometric primitives it uses to construct your visual perception
a very similar thing happens when you trip
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RT @halvorz
all i want from neuroscience is the ability to record the pretty patterns i see when i rub my eyes
https://twitter.com/halvorz/status/1385951475482902533
if this is the case, in theory we could generate those same visuals by identifying the neural activation patterns of the vortex when your eyes are rubbed, and simulating the effect they should have on your perceptive plane
unfortunately this is basically impossible
at least, w/o smth close to full-brain emulation
w/ our current methods of non-invasive brain activity detection, we can't get anything close to a high-enough resolution model to make this happen
if we could fully reconstruct & simulate the visual correct itself, then perhaps
however, our current connectome reconstruction techniques are nowhere near sophisticated enough to enable this, either
perhaps in 10-15 years we'll be closer to making this approach viable
but then there will still be computational challenges to actually running the simulation
my point being that if you're willing to wait we can do this
but you'd probably be better off paying artists to rub their eyes, take drugs, and draw the pretty patterns they see
maybe even run their outputs though a style transfer ML model to get a useful average