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Comment by asimpleusecase | Hacker News Reader

People who engage in ultra running - that extends beyond 24 hours- often find their limits in hallucination before their body just won’t run any further. I suspect you will find a similar effect with extended sleep depravation.

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As an ex-ultra runner I can attest to this, but they are usually awesome. However, I did notice that the more races/backyard races/years of training reduced the feelings of mind fog and wild hallucinations dramatically and recovery time decreased. This was the case with the group members I trained with as well. So, it would be interesting to know if the study included veterans or newcomers, or how many marathons the participants had under their belt.

I've done marathons and numerous sleep deprivation/caloric deprevation events and never got to hallucinations, only micro-naps which, on occasion, resulted in my waking up with a mouthful of gravel.

...So whats your tip to achieving these awesome hallucinations, and how do I get there! ;-)

don't fall asleep. You don't even need to run to achieve them -- about 42 hours should be enough to experience them without any exercise at all. The only trick is every time you get tired -- push through it and wake yourself up with movement or music. After pushing through the exhaustion you'll get a 'second wind' of awareness -- and a third and so on, as those later exhaustions occur.

The goal isn't to be at 100% awareness during these moments -- it's to not micro-nap and relieve the lack of sleep.

I remember once playing a game of go with a friend after 40 hours of no sleep (drug-free), and seeing purple electricity radiating across the stones and outlining the boundaries of their activities against one another. Walking down the hallway I experienced that recession of reality like when Frodo first encounters the Nazgûl in the forest and the path pulls away from him.

Lack of sleep is incredibly psychedelic. Take this from someone who has done many -- and good luck ;)

What's the long term sequences of this body abuse?

24 hours of running, crappy nutrition, really just completely depleted, and keep going. lol.

Did you ever experience feelings or have thoughts that were overwhelmingly lovely? Like only you can see the true beauty of the path you are on? I dabble in combining sleep deprivation with multi day fasting. Dream processes start to kick in, and sometimes the copying from the brain’s 1 day RAM to the brain’s long storage happens while awake. This process is only supposed to happen during REM sleep, but when it happens in awake real-time it feels like a spiritual experience. You look at a bird and all the sudden that bird is integrated with all prior knowledge in a way that makes it feel like a religious vision. This brain race condition feels like being one with the great spirit or something.

Unfortunately not. It's a very strange feeling. You are awake but your brain is so depleted that you can't make sense, you see things that you would normally know would not be real but because you are so out of it you don't realize for a couple minutes that trees really can't talk. I have heard of other runners who have very spriritual experiences though.

> I suspect you will find a similar effect with extended sleep depravation.

Early into my investment banking career, I once worked about 130 hours in a single week and started hallucinating in the office, hearing voices as if my relatives were speaking random sentences to me

Sample size of one, but I can definitely attest to the effect

That's nuts. I had to do 100-hour weeks a few times in my career, and felt that any time above that had zero or even negative productivity.

Is it really necessary to do so many slide decks in order for IB to be as productive?

That was basically my worst experience ever over the course of 7 years and I have never personally met anyone who's worked more ours in one week (lol?) but yeah, any "meaty" meeting is likely to generate a few hundred slides if you include all of the revisions, so it gets out of hand fast. I probably had 5-10 100-hour weeks in any given year, but 70-80 hour weeks would be pretty normal. (I probably also had 4-5 40-hour weeks in any given year, but you usually everyone keeps those on the DL...)

Shit compounds when there's a deadweight on the team, or a managing director that doesn't know what they want / has poor planning, or everyone's busy on other projects or the situation is actually complex. In that particular case, it was a combination of a deadweight analyst on a very lean team (I was the only associate, no VP, one very senior director trying to make MD and 2 other super senior MDs... for a $2B M&A deal), poor planning and an actually complex situation (crossborder, post-bankruptcy former public company with public debt still outstanding, multiple tax jurisdictions, CFIUS issues, you name it) leading up to a board meeting on Friday (to which I took a flight to deliver the books, which added to the hours...)

I'm from Texas but went to college in Michigan. I used to sometimes drive it straight through (20 hours, with stops every 6 hours for fuel, food and toilet). The times I'd stop were because I'd start hallucinating, not because I couldn't stay awake. Was always super annoying having to stop since I'd invariably be 1-2 hours from my parents place.

At 20 hours? I used to do that regularly. Wake up at 6 am, work, party til 2 am on a Friday. I've never heard of anyone hallucinating in that short of a time. That only happens when you're up for like 3 days straight.

Staring at the road, especially at night, for that long doesn't help. I drove 16ish hours from Denver to Fargo with minimal breaks recently. Got to Jamestown, ND (not far from Fargo) and had to pull over because it was starting to get weird.

Driving requires constant mental engagement. I find driving for 8 hours to be more tiring than a day of work.

> I've never heard of anyone hallucinating in that short of a time.

Do you mean besides intentionally because of the effects of drugs and/or alcohol?

(Before people come for me: I’m not saying alcohol causes hallucinations, more that it affects perception and makes it very difficult to figure out if you’re tired enough to hallucinate)

> “I've never heard of anyone hallucinating in that short of a time.”

Did you… read the comment you’re replying to? Or just skip straight to writing the one-upper reply?

I’m super curious. Can you explain what you mean by hallucinations?

Normally I'd have the sense that I was seeing things in my periphery that weren't there. It was almost like having the fear that a deer was running into the road, except the deer was never there. It was distracting enough to be dangerous.

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