So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain • Hacker News Board

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#291

Post by marcodave » Sun, May 02, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #115

74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #94

I don't find his explanation convincing. He totally overworked for a long time, probably didn't exercise at all, didn't do anything at all - this by itself is likely already a symptom of an underlying issue. No sane person will spend all the time working if there is a choice. Maybe he was distracting himself from a depression or some trauma. To narrow the cause of his experience down to Glucose seems like quite a sim…

I might not be sane (how would I know fully?), but there are several times in my life when I beyond-willingly worked 75-90 hours per week for months on end. I did it to ship a game, and two other internal products at other companies. Those periods look a lot like working, sleeping, eating, and walking among the areas where those activities happen. I loved my life in those periods and had plenty of freedom to choose t…

how old were you at the time? if you were in your late teens-20s your body might have been strong enough to sustain the pace.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#292

Post by GordonS » Sun, May 02, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

krasi0 wrote: post #285

GordonS wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't my intention to doubt Tinker, only to continue discourse here, but I was going to say something similar. I have reactive hypoglycemia and it is very, very obvious when my blood sugars are too low - it really is an absolutely horrible thing. At first I start to feel a little bit "stupid", like my brain isn't functioning properly, and is working in slow motion. Talking is more difficult. Next I start to feel a…

So what is a good and healthy way to address the situation aside from eating something? Using an insulin pump?

Insulin lowers blood sugar, rather than raising it. For T1s, I would imagine an insulin pump would help prevent mistakes where you misjudge how much insulin you need - but I'm not a T1, so can't comment on real-world effectiveness.

In my particular situation, the best way to manage things has been to go keto - any more than around 5g of carbs causes me to have a hypo, presumably because my body over-compensates and releases too much insulin. I switched to keto a few years back, and my life has been so much easier since then - I went from having a hypo multiple times a day, to very rarely. It's been several months since my last one.

If I hypo (or in the more general case when a T1 takes too much insulin by mistake and hypos), the "healthier" option is to use glucose tablets or a glucogel tube (a measured dose of glycogen, often carried by T1s).

But when you're having a hypo, you don't always think clearly - it's fine if you catch it early enough, but otherwise it really is like you're under a magical compulsion to eat as much sugar as you can; I'm not sure there is another experience I can relate it to. And once you eat some carbs, it's 10-15 minutes before you even start to feel better - believe me, you can eat an obscene amount in that time!

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#293

Post by hprotagonist » Sun, May 02, 2021, 12:51 PM UTC

mjgs wrote: post #276

hprotagonist wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to go all sophomoric on you; that sure depends on what you think “real” means! (you might like listening to the mcgurk effect, or shepard tones)

Real as in generated by the external world, rather than generated by the brain.

what’s the difference? where does “external” start and “brain” end?

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#294

Post by obsequiosity » Sun, May 02, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

lsiebert wrote: post #111

The truth is all mental illnesses are real, we are finding more and more underlying evidence of the neurological underpinnings of mental disorders (including with FND) using functional neuro-imaging techniques. And yet these debilitating illnesses are too often stigmatized because their effects are often invisible to the outside observer. This person was let go because they talked about their mental illness with thei…

One unfortunate problem is how easy it is for employees and employers alike to contrive a situation, with respect to mental illness, to force a desired outcome.

For the employee, good luck proving that management was complicit or negligent in the formation and continuation of a hostile working environment. At-will employment means it's your word against theirs in a wrongful termination suit, assuming someone mentally ill even has the resources and conviction to pursue a legal remedy. And ADA-related laws and protections, even if they can apply to someone with an "invisible disability", are difficult to invoke without social fallout. It's a catch-22.

For employers, how can you discern and remove a truly disgruntled, incompetent, malingering or indolent employee (from management's perspective) in an efficient manner, when perhaps the first-principle reason for those employee's shortcomings are related to mental illness?

ADA ought not to be intertwined with employment, rather there needs to be a more sophisticated social safety net and support programs for people with mental illness, instead of burdening employers with some of the responsibility which they have no business-rational reason to respectfully abide by.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#295

Post by hirako2000 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #228

hirako2000 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you recovered entirely by now? How long did the symptoms last for to get back to normal, did you take other measures to recover or just giving some time and less stress did it for you?

I took lexapro (anti depression drug, ssri class drug). It took about 1 month to be mostly functional again and about six months to be back to normal. I took all the pressure off, stopped coding but continued university. I still finished the semester with excellent grades - but it was business school. Never experienced anything like that ever again. I work hard, usually 7 days a week, but I'm careful not to push past…

Thanks for sharing the details. Glad you made it through pretty fast, sounds like a valuable experience to know your limits.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#296

Post by mjgs » Sun, May 02, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #293

mjgs wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real as in generated by the external world, rather than generated by the brain.

what’s the difference? where does “external” start and “brain” end?

Unfortunately if the brain has been trained to create fake sounds, then that becomes really difficult to determine.

But conceptually there is an thing which is the brain and there are things that are external to the brain.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#297

Post by slazaro » Mon, May 03, 2021, 12:21 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #262

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you still experience yourself as a wolf with paws and wind in your fur?

No, but I have developed a different issue with disassociation. If I’m outside under bright sunlight in an open area, I can sometimes see trees starting to become pixelated. I slowly find myself thinking in a character in a video game. This is somewhat dangerous. Actions in a video game generally has few meaningful little consequences. In the real world, death has a annoying tendency to be rather permanent.

This will sound very stupid or like a joke, but I'm not joking: Maybe if you play (almost) exclusively games with permadeath, where the consequences of dying are bigger, could at least hard-wire some kind of survival instinct in your head in case you get lost in this surreal feeling? In the worst case scenario you played some good games.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#298

Post by xadhominemx » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

wittyreference wrote: post #169

vegardx wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seizures during a manic or hypomanic episode is very common, it's often what lands undiagnosed people in hospital to begin with. Lamotrigine and Lithium was primarily used to treat epilepsy, now they're also used to treat mood disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well. The problem is often that there are compounding issues. There's nothing that stops you from having TIA at the same time. People often…

Do you have any sort of citation for this? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’d really like to read more. My understanding of the med lit is that bipolar and epilepsy aren’t particularly associated, and pure BD in particular is a rarity - when epileptic patients were assessed for BD symptoms, they were mostly only found in the confusional states pre- and post-seizure, which isn’t BD at all. At least in my hospital, the m…

Unrelated but have you seen our friend TedPetrou recently? He seems to have gone quiet.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#299

Post by rraihansaputra » Tue, May 04, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

aetherspawn wrote: post #9

I have had something similar to this (heavy fog and inability to continue creative work) and I use coffee, bulk vitamins and regular walks with music to work through it. I also started eating more fresh food and less frozen food, even if it meant eating-out fresh, because it was much worse when I was reheating a lot of tasteless frozen food. But no matter how hard I try, I have focused my career into an area that req…

Just echoing the other comments on this tree; hits very close to home. I admit I might have some other triggers, but it's just been so persistent from growing up until now, and it's getting worse the moment I switched my work to mostly developing/programming instead of talking to people.

Re: So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

#300

Post by kayodelycaon » Tue, May 04, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

slazaro wrote: post #297

kayodelycaon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I have developed a different issue with disassociation. If I’m outside under bright sunlight in an open area, I can sometimes see trees starting to become pixelated. I slowly find myself thinking in a character in a video game. This is somewhat dangerous. Actions in a video game generally has few meaningful little consequences. In the real world, death has a annoying tendency to be rather permanent.

This will sound very stupid or like a joke, but I'm not joking: Maybe if you play (almost) exclusively games with permadeath, where the consequences of dying are bigger, could at least hard-wire some kind of survival instinct in your head in case you get lost in this surreal feeling? In the worst case scenario you played some good games.

I don't think it's stupid or a joke. It's actually a pretty interesting suggestion that may work pretty well under different circumstances. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to focus on video games for a long time. What little energy left after work goes into the continuous maintenance that is life (showering, eating, cleaning). Sometimes I have enough focus left to sacrifice one of those to write stories.