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I have had visual migraines since I was a child and it has always been a quest of mine to find out where they fit in.  As if by putting them in a category with other senses or neural functions I would be able to just get rid of them.  But recently I have begun to think of it in the exact opposite way. The last line of the article you posted struck a cord with me:

 

“In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.”

 

Or as you put it they are “visions of the brain” not just from it.  Auras no longer seem to be simply a neurological error; they are a constant reminder that even our own brains are so far beyond our understanding.  We try and put all of these different functions into their own category and file them away, but I think it is much more interesting to think of it all without boundaries. Action potentials are the basis of it all.  Our neurons are firing and creating a whole world for us.  That is why I dislike the analogy of action potentials as a battery.  To place those two things side by side makes us think that neurons are nothing more then a wire and the action potentials as nothing but electricity running through it. But there are so many neurons functioning so seamlessly to form our world, that a battery degrades them. It is the errors like auras that remind me how constructed the whole world around us is, and how well our brains do their job (normally).