Long before Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots covered museum walls, enormous pumpkins and mirrored rooms around the world, she was experiencing dots herself.
Beginning in childhood, Kusama described unusual visual phenomena including “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots.” She also described patterns persisting after she looked away, objects surrounded by auras and visual configurations that flickered and moved through her perception.
In February 2026, researchers Lana Liquard, Richard Ho and Enrique Carrazana published Yayoi Kusama’s Art and Its Clinical Relevance to Neurovisual Phenomena in the medical journal Cureus. The researchers examined Kusama’s own accounts of how she perceived the world alongside the paintings and installations she created, identifying parallels with a range of neurological visual phenomena including visual snow, palinopsia, photophobia, nyctalopia and alterations in the perception of size, distance and space.
Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS) is a neurological condition most notably characterized by persistent tiny flickering dots or static across the visual field. People with VSS can also experience additional visual and non-visual symptoms, including palinopsia, photophobia, nyctalopia.
The researchers emphasized that Kusama was never formally diagnosed with Visual Snow Syndrome or the other neurovisual syndromes discussed in their paper. The purpose of the paper was not to diagnose Kusama. Instead, the researchers explored how her descriptions and artwork could serve as visual analogies for experiences that are often extremely difficult for patients to describe.
The authors propose that her art can help bridge the gap between subjective visual perception and clinical understanding, giving healthcare professionals another way to conceptualize experiences that may be difficult to communicate through words alone. They even suggest that future research could investigate whether curated visual libraries inspired by imagery like Kusama’s might one day help patients describe their symptoms in clinical settings.
Before the Dots Became Art
Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, Japan, where unusual sensory experiences began early in her life.
One of her most striking childhood experiences involved looking at a red flower pattern on a tablecloth.
“I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls.
The researchers connected experiences like this with palinopsia, a neurological phenomenon in which an image or visual impression persists after the original stimulus is no longer being viewed.
Kusama also described gazing at the flower pattern and then seeing the same motif covering the entire room and her body. The researchers classify that phenomenon as perseverative imagery, or repetitive pattern superimposition.
Palinopsia: Infinity Nets and Dots Obsession
For palinopsia, the researchers point to two of Kusama’s best-known bodies of work: the Infinity Nets series (1959) and Dots Obsession (1996).
Her Infinity Nets consist of countless small loops repeated across large canvases. The pattern seems capable of continuing indefinitely beyond the edges of the painting. The researchers describe these repeated forms as visually analogous to the persistence and recurrence associated with palinopsia.
Decades later, Kusama carried repetition into an entire physical environment with Dots Obsession. Polka dots cover the walls, floor and ceiling, surrounding the viewer with a pattern that seems to persist everywhere the eye turns. The researchers again relate this visual recurrence to the persistent visual echoes of palinopsia.
Visual Snow: Let’s Survive Forever
The researchers define visual snow as faint flickering specks throughout the visual field. Alongside that definition, they highlight Kusama’s description of seeing lights, auras and dense fields of dots that seemed to engulf ceilings, walls and even her own body.
The representative artwork they identify for visual snow is Infinity Mirrored Room – Let’s Survive Forever (2017).
Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms use lights, mirrors and repeated reflections to create the impression that individual points of light continue infinitely in every direction. Within these environments, the viewer can become surrounded by shimmering and flickering specks with no obvious visual boundary.
The researchers compare this immersive effect with the persistent flickering specks associated with visual snow.
For someone who has never experienced VSS, hearing that another person sees persistent flickering dots across their visual field can be difficult to imagine. Kusama created environments in which dots, lights and visual repetition become impossible to ignore.
Photophobia: The Infinity Mirror Rooms
The paper also connects Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms with photophobia, defined as sensitivity to light stimuli.
For this comparison, the researchers highlight Kusama’s statement that “repetitive vision and accumulation” came from experiences she had lived with since childhood. The representative work identified in their table is the Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibited at Tate Modern in 2022.
The bright lights and visually intense environments of these installations provide another way of thinking about how light itself can become an unusually prominent part of someone’s visual experience.
Size and Distance
Kusama’s work also fascinated the researchers because her visual language went beyond dots, lights and repetition. They considered experiences involving the apparent size and distance of objects.
For micropsia and macropsia, conditions in which objects can appear unusually small or large, the researchers discuss Kusama’s use of pumpkins or flowers at dramatically different scales as a visual analogy for unstable perceptions of size and space.
Making an Invisible Experience Visible
One of the difficulties of living with Visual Snow Syndrome or another neurovisual condition is that another person cannot directly see what you see.
They cannot see the static filling your visual field. They cannot experience an afterimage or understand exactly what unusual flickering, light sensitivity or visual distortion looks like simply through words. The researchers note that these symptoms can fall outside ordinary visual vocabulary. Clinicians may sometimes rely on patients’ drawings to better understand what they are attempting to describe.
Yayoi Kusama recently passed away in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97.
Research examining visual experiences adds another dimension, bringing together art, neuroscience and the lived reality of seeing the world differently.