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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Here's my story: Three (or was it four?) day non-stop coding stint to get a robot ready for a conference. No sleep at all. Almost non-stop coding and the usual coffee+sugar+pizza binge. Got on a plane to go to the conference and continued coding in flight. Got to the hotel, checked in and decided to get some sleep. I woke up about three or four hours later. I started to hear a nearly perfect 1KHz tone as my field of view slowly (30 sec?) faded to full bright white. By this time I was sitting on the bathroom floor: I could only hear this tone and all I saw was a bright white light. Somehow I kept my cool and could, also somehow, navigate the room. Over the following few minutes the tone started to go away and my field of view returned to normal. Freaked the crap out of me. No permanent damage that I could identify. Now I keep my overnighters to just one night, only if there's absolutely not choice at all.

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Sounds like a migraine: look under "Aura" : http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/migraine-headache/DS00120/D...

I've gotten this. You can get (painless) ocular migraines.

Sounds like hypotension, a drop in blood pressure, like when you get up "too fast" sometimes from a relaxed state. Maybe hypoglycemia otherwise, or as well, especially if you hadn't eaten in a while.

Yep, same thing happened to me when I was 16 (hypotension from standing for too long). Everything faded to white, but I could still somehow navigate the space well enough to go sit down.

Or, at least, that's now I remember it now (or remember thinking about it then). It's been a long time.

I had this happen to me in similar age a few times, only with things fading to gray instead. Once blacked out totally and was later surprised to find myself having managed not to drop in place but seat myself beside the bed.

I'm sorry, but what? You're telling me you're an engineer, and your very first reaction to this was not to immediately call an ambulance?

Some engineers can have a (dangerous) tendency to want to either fix themselves or diagnose themselves.

Well, there's the part about not being able to see and hear.

I was exhausted and most-definitely not thinking straight. I pretty much collapsed into bed and probably slept ten hours. I woke up feeling just fine and just in time to present my paper.

I was younger and definitely stupider. No, I didn't go to the doctor. Dumb. Lived to tell about.

Some engineers may have been raised in an environment of distrust of doctors, or of scorn upon those who call the doctor for anything less than a confirmed broken bone or heart attack.

Edit: for such people, it would be useful if schools taught what sorts of issues are doctor worthy, and which should be ignored or dealt with by over-the-counter remedies.

>Some engineers may have been raised in an environment of distrust of doctors, or of scorn upon those who call the doctor for anything less than a confirmed broken bone or heart attack.

Are you me?

Are you me?

It's doubtful ;). One of my parents was a coach when I was young, always complaining about hypochondriac players who were "faking" their injuries just to avoid playing. This same parent still refuses to get treatment for an easily treatable ailment after years of low-level pain and annoyance.

As a result, I have an instinct to avoid doctors, and don't really know what requires a doctor and what doesn't. Despite my conscious awareness of this, I still have difficulty overriding the instinct.

I have an over-literate under-educated mother who has a home-spun German cure for everything and a grumpy mechanical engineer for a father...

...and I'm a programmer.

My parents never took me to the hospital/doctor for anything. This caused problems a couple times, but I was fortunate enough to be an otherwise healthy individual.

Pretty strong internal distrust of doctors still, partly because most doctors I've encountered don't seem to understand how to map statistics onto their mental pattern-matchers.

I go to a doctor if it might lead to something permanent, otherwise I wait it out.

I live in an environment where I find it appalling that I need to pay $150 to wait an hour to see the doctor who studies me for thirty seconds and gives me a high-price prescription for a double dose of what I can get over the counter. It's not so much "trust" as it is "should it seriously cost this much?"

I personally had a strange episode a few years ago where I just ... felt really awful. But I was lucid the entire time. Wife checked my blood sugar (not a diabetic, but she having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes years ago we have the equipment around) and it was scarily low. Kept hydrated, got some smal bits of food in me, felt better, slept the night with no problems. Called the doctor the next day, they had no interest in seeing me immediately - so they gave me an appointment a few days later. Did some blood work and ... he had no idea what was up. It's never happened again. If I'd gone to the hospital, I'd probably gotten a glucose drip and sent home with a $1,000 bill.

So I tend to keep my cool, self-diagnose, watch my kids closely when they're complaining of problems, get medical help when it's necessary. At $150 a visit, I can fix my own sniffles - I'll call the doc when it's doesn't clear up after a few weeks.

Yes, there is that factor, too. It's especially an issue when you're striving to be ramen profitable in a bootstrapped company. $150 buys a lot of ramen.

I've had similar experiences, one of them even involved low blood sugar like you.

I didn't have to test though, had a parent with periods of low blood sugar so I just ate some food and observed myself suddenly feeling drastically better.

I don't think we're that far past doctors just being quacks throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall. They don't seem to be able to, in any given single case, observe/detect/test for much unless there's an associated infection or physical injury.

As primitive as modern medicine still really is, I think it is important to remember that it is not like engineers with no medical training are actually going to do any better. Yes, you figured out that you had low blood sugar. Doctors would have as well. If that weren't the case, we'd sack all the doctors and hire engineers to fill the hospitals instead.

Put it this way: your average highschool geek can program a little. If they put their back into it, it is not unheard of for them to engineer solutions to whatever it is that they are trying to achieve (they are after all rather bright.) On particularly rare occasions, the untrained highschooler can teach himself enough to rival seasoned software developers in a very narrow segment of the field, but will quickly be out of his depth again if the situation changes.

I would say the gap between highschool geek and seasoned software developer is somewhat comparable to the gap between engineer and medical doctor (if anything, the comparison gives doctors too little credit.) The difference really is that you are playing with your own health, not some relatively speaking inconsequential software.

(This all said, the cost problem is of course very real.)

Why does everyone always reduce everything I say on here to a simplistic strawman?

I didn't say untrained engineer > doctor

I said, untrained engineer > most sundry health problems, doctor > untrained engineer for everything else.

Stop wasting peoples' time with strawmen and be more charitable to their intellect.

>I don't think we're that far past doctors just being quacks throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall. They don't seem to be able to, in any given single case, observe/detect/test for much unless there's an associated infection or physical injury.

>be more charitable to their intellect.

Uh.. ok.

I said test for, that doesn't mean their internal pattern matchers aren't good enough for figuring out most things.

> I live in an environment where I find it appalling that I need to pay $150 to wait an hour to see the doctor who studies me for thirty seconds and gives me a high-price prescription for a double dose of what I can get over the counter. It's not so much "trust" as it is "should it seriously cost this much?"

This is a rather specious argument.

If one of the many freelancers on this board were called in to consult on a seemingly intricate technical issue, and they end up just changing a few characters in the source (change a '=' to '==' or correct a typo, for instance) which fixes the problem, would the client be justified in thinking "He changed only 2-3 bytes in the source! Should it seriously cost this much?" on being charged the full engagement rate?

It is a classic case of "knowing where to tap". [1]

[1] http://p4b.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/knowing-where-to-tap.html

In my comment, I "know where to tap" and I know what to buy for much less money to get the job done. If I can figure it out, why do I need to hire someone else to do it? "Because," says the medical community, "you should always let your doctor treat you so that he has a complete picture of your health."

You call me in on a technical issue that I see you could have handled on your own with a modicum of intelligence and research, I'm certainly going to charge you for it.

If you don't trust doctors, why would you trust schools? Admittedly in each case you'd hopefully see their claims as input worth considering.

I don't mean "trust" in the sense of "willingness to incorporate input into one's rational model of the world," but rather in the sense of "deep-seated instinctive aversion that is difficult to change." One can consciously consider the word of a doctor as highly valuable input, while simultaneously having a visceral distrust of the abstract concept of doctors that is beyond their immediate control.

It does not follow that this instinctively learned distrust must necessarily extend to schools, though perhaps if a particular person's distrust of doctors originates in a general distaste for authority, it is possible.

I do expect it to come down to distrust of authority, but maybe that's too optimistic.

This is an exact description of what happens right before you pass out(faint). If you are unsure of the cause I would see a doctor.

In the final stage the field of vision gradually fades to black from the edges in.

That has happened to me before, exactly the same tone although I had the sensation of running in a desert before awaking on the floor.

From your mention of the bathroom floor, I can only assume you were urinating while standing, which is a very common trigger for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response. For more specific definition see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micturition_syncope

Not a big deal really, but as always might want to get it checked out to rule out more serious conditions.

I've had a syncope like that before when I was younger.

I had the flu at the time, and one morning I immediately got out of bed and went to the bathroom. On the way back to my room, I started to feel dizzy and noticed my eyesight fading. First it seemed to go black and white, then to tunnel-vision, as if I could only see what was directly in front of me. My hearing faded as well - I was on the verge of collapsing (unbeknownst to me) and I could hear my family shouting out as if I was listening to them through a poor AM radio signal and speaker. My father grabbed me before I collapsed and hit my head on the corner of a desk.

After going to the doctor, we determined the causes:

* Standing up too quickly (jumping straight out of bed)

* Low blood pressure

* Possible dehydration

* Going to the bathroom

The trick to prevent passing out when you start feeling dizzy is to get blood flowing back into your head. The easiest way to do that is lie on your back and lift your feet high in the air. And of course, keep hydrated and avoid standing too quickly.

I've done a lot of over-nighters and more (3.5 hours in a week in the Army) and never, ever experienced something like that.

I'm not a doctor, but you were either dreaming or having a stroke in my mind.

That hasn't happened to me recently but it used to happen to me when I was a teenager, I'd wake up and be unable to see for a few minutes (although no hearing problems). It happened every few months. For me it was never related to too much / too little sleep.

My instinct would have been to head straight to a doctor.

I was afraid your story was one of a stroke. we should have a good thread on sleep deprivation. (e.g. someone should submit a story.)

visual hallucations are pretty standard after a certain period of time that isn't even so long. (i.e. I would get them around, say, the 28 hour mark from when I last woke up and started staying up by pulling an all-nighter. So if I get up at 7 every day but then simply not go to sleep one night but try to start the next day - by 11 AM it's hard not to hallucinate. In case you get up later the following is equivalent: If you get up at 11 every morning after calling it a night at 3 am or so, then if one night you don't sleep at all then working past 11 am and on by 3 PM you will be very out of it and may easily hallucinate.)

I'm very skeptical whether there is any amount of productivity to be had what-so-ever as for me, personally, it would easily take me 2 minutes to do 30 seconds of (any kind of) work at the end of that time, even moving a box from one place to another or whatever. So I'm very skeptical how a 3-4 hour nap at 22 hour mark could possibly not make up for lost time after waking up.

going on 3 hours of sleep each night for several days (e.g. 2-3) is possible and easy.

like I said, it would make an interesting thread and someone should submit a story on this subject (sleep deprivation and whether it's even worth working after a certain time mark).

as for your story, it sounds like a simple dream/waking dream. it's really hard to tell dream and non-dream apart under conditions of sleep deprivation.

For all I know this was a mini-stroke of sorts. I wish I had gone to the doctor but I was younger and much stupider than I am today. After I regained my senses (meaning sensory abilities) I slept and woke up on time to present my paper. Years later my though is always the same: What a dumb-shit! Things you do when you are young and stupid.

Try this series by Steve Pavlina http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

There doesn't seem to be a sharp line between sleep and wakefulness. I once fell asleep while driving and was awakened by something I saw. It's an odd sensation to be woken up by something you see instead of by something you hear or feel. I had fallen asleep with my eyes open but was staying upright in the driver's seat, maintaining my speed and staying on the road. It was an extremely frightening experience, because I was very keenly aware of not being conscious a few seconds earlier, and having no sense of how much time had passed. I couldn't even remember what I saw, because duh, I was unconscious when I saw it. It freaked me out so much that even fifteen years later I think about it every time I get the slightest bit sleepy behind the wheel.

A few times in extreme states of sleep-deprivation, I've been lying down or slouched on the couch and realized, after being startled into getting up suddenly, that my memory of what I had been thinking about was fading away just like a dream. My eyes were open the whole time, and unlike when I was driving, I was conscious of seeing and having a consciously driven train of thought. Yet in some way I was asleep, so my mind let my memories slip away as if they were dreams.

we need to have a thread about this.

Ducks and dolphins routinely sleep one hemisphere at a time. It doesn't seem improbable that humans might also from time to time.

So, this is maybe a silly question, but methodologically, how did researchers establish that? Did they actually somehow attach and keep EEG contacts on an animal that moves around and lives submerged in salt water? 'Cuz that sounds awesome.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1333/can-one-side-o...

> I had fallen asleep with my eyes open but was staying upright in the driver's seat, maintaining my speed and staying on the road. It was an extremely frightening experience, because I was very keenly aware of not being conscious a few seconds earlier, and having no sense of how much time had passed.

I don't know your specific story, but this is not to be confused with the hypnotic state that one usually enters when doing something routinely (e.g daily commute) and the brain simply drops the irrelevant information before it reaches you consciousness. Then something unusual happens that crosses the relevancy engine (a pattern, a sound, anything) and the brain plugs itself back into conscious mode just in case the situation might ever so slightly require highly cognitive decision-making functions. In those cases consciousness can drift away and think about what you'll be having for dinner or some project you're working on. When consciousness snaps back into the driver role you'll have no idea of how much time has elapsed or even which road you took.

This will surely differ from person to person.

My experience with all nighters is decent productivity through most of the night, extreme tiredness and the low productivity phase around 20-24 hours in (5-9 am, typically), then what I thought of as the circadian rhythm would kick in and "wake me up" again and I would be fine and almost normal productivity through the day, typically until a second tiredness crash after 30-32 hours (3 to 5 pm).

The nap-sleep around 5 to 9 am would restore some productivity during next day and ease off the second crash, but it never got me back to 100%.

When I was 19 or 20 I once stayed up 66 hours straight to see if I could (not the greatest of ideas, I know) and while I won't claim I was perfectly fine I did not hallucinate. I actually drove for an hour and a half about 60 hours in and managed alright (spectacularly bad idea I'm ashamed of nowadays, please don't do this).

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