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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I have migraines and every once in a blue moon I get a very interesting symptom along with it. Fully awake and cognizant I simply lose the ability to read. Even Dick and Jane become nearly insurmountable. It happens even before the pain and aura arrive, I'm fully functional, just suddenly illiterate. Its the damndest thing. It's only for a few minutes but I know what it's like to be a fully grown adult with a relatively high IQ who can't read.

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I find migraines like that to be quite fun (at least from the second time, after I spoke to a doctor and learned that there was no permenant damage). In my case I totally lose my short-term memory :D

The weird thing is that after the migraine is over I can actually remember most of what happened during it, so somehow things are still finding their way into my long term memory - though it's mostly just conversations like "hey, I'm having a migraine, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes, because I'm having a migraine, it's affecting my memory, so I'm going to lie down, I think this migraine is affecting my memory" "ok dude, take a break" "woah, how did you know I need a break? I was just thinking that I should take a break, because I'm having a migraine, and it's probably affecting my memory. Did you know I get migraines that affect my memory? I should probably go lie down"...

This reminds me of an article I read a while back [1]. He had years of memories come back that he was never able to remember before the surgery.

[1] http://qz.com/511920/a-tumor-stole-every-memory-i-had-this-i...

What you and the people replying to you are describing sounds a lot like what happens when you try to read during a dream: you just can't. If you look at text while dreaming you recognize the words but they don't make any sense, and if you look away and then back at them they'll all be different. Looking out for this is one of the techniques for recognizing the dream state and getting into a lucid dream.

Perhaps your migraines sometimes trigger a waking dream state, or something functionally equivalent, where you're still seeing the real world instead of one your mind has created, but parts of your brain that are used to interpret your sensory input have switched to dream-mode.

I have something vaguely similar when my migraine-like[1] headaches are at their worst - some words just look wrong, even when I'm 100% certain the world is spelt correctly. It's an odd feeling, made especially weird as when that is happening I find Japanese kana much easier to read, which is normally something I find rather difficult.

[1] Not formally diagnosed as migraines (migraines don't typically cause a single headache that never goes away for years, but just fluctuates in intensity), but my sister has been so I suspect there is a link.

That's interesting! I have a similar but not nearly as severe symptom caused by lack of sleep - the first thing to go for me is spelling.

Weirdly I can still code easily, even keeping in my head high level module interactions and abstractions, to low level implementation details, but I'll occasionally stop, stare at a word, convinced that it's spelt wrong, google it and see its correct, and go back and stare at it - because it just feels wrong.

When I've reached this point, I know it's time to break!

This is interesting. Does it happen before every migraine, or just sometimes? Have you got yourself checked out? Hope everything is fine but that shit would scare me like hell at least the first couple times.

Almost never. Once every two years or so. But it first happened when I was 15 and I thought I was dying! Turns out it runs in my family. When I told my mom she did the whole "there's something you should know..." It was like a superhero backstory, except it sucked instead.

I have the same thing when I have migraines. Apparently it can be a symptom? It's like I can see the words but I can't make sense of what they mean.

This is exactly what happens. The strange thing is I can still do math perfectly, just not read text. I have this little "proof of work" thing I do (usually to figure out how drunk I am!) where I derive Kirchhoff's laws from Faraday's law (a hold-over from my EE degree). I can do this just fine but I can't read beyond sounding out words like a 1st grader and even when I do that, I can't tell you what the sentence meant when I'm finished. Odder still, I can write text and then can't read what I just wrote!

The longest its ever lasted was about 1.5 hours. Usually about the time the freight-train of pain arrives, everything goes back to normal. Of course then I'm in no mood to read anything anyway.

Can you recognize letters? Try adding up the letters-as-numbers in each word.

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