Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com