Taking some time to reflect on and consider my own thinking behavior has been interesting. Just like exploring any other system, subjecting myself to sleep stress (in order to meet aggressive deadlines) has allowed me to see what happens when certain things fail, revealing functional boundaries.
I see it as kind of analogous to when you starve a circuit/device of power - it behaves in unexpected ways, revealing implementation details.
Some examples that I remember: after a particularly long all nighter (I was a freshman in college and wanted to try it while I could still do it by choice and not necessity) I was editing an article I was writing for the school magazine. I was starting to fade and realized that I couldn't read and comprehend well-formed, meaningful sentences that I had just written.
I've noticed that when sleep deprived I notice different things and have a more diverse set of emergent thoughts/recall events. For example, today I noticed the plug for an electric oven at a restaurant I have not only been to at least 100 times, but have worked at for months. I randomly remembered the lyrics to China's five-year-plan song walking home from class. I will suddenly remember and think fragments in Spanish, despite not touching it for years.
Truly, it appears the nature of effective cognition is restricting all of the many responses to stimuli to those that are useful and relevant, and I think the parts of the brain that do that may have 'fallen asleep' in all those instances.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
>I've noticed that when sleep deprived I notice different things and have a more diverse set of emergent thoughts/recall events.
Focus and sleep are clearly related. When my sleep apnea goes untreated, I feel like I suffer from ADHD. In fact, I was certain I had it until I received treatment for SA. Its incredible what poor sleep can do to us. The list of things that go wrong with poor sleep is pretty long.
If you're getting this often, I would get checked for SA.
A relative of mine had tinnitus which was cured by hearing aids; the theory offered there was that tinnitus was effectively the brain turning the automatic gain control on hearing up too far.
Tinnitus may be like phantom limb: when receiving no input from a group of sensors, the system fills in for the missing information. It's like a microphone with compression: when the speaker stops talking, white noise becomes louder. Your neural system does a lot of filling in for missing sensations, most obviously in tests of what happens when bits of spoken words are removed from a recording: people perceive that the bits were in the recording by triangulating from other information that the bits had been said. Similarly, when hearing loss prevents certain frequencies to be signaled by your sound sensors, the system fills in for the lack of signal in that range. There is still research and some doubt about this theory of what is going on: https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/tinnitus
I see it as kind of analogous to when you starve a circuit/device of power - it behaves in unexpected ways, revealing implementation details.
Some examples that I remember: after a particularly long all nighter (I was a freshman in college and wanted to try it while I could still do it by choice and not necessity) I was editing an article I was writing for the school magazine. I was starting to fade and realized that I couldn't read and comprehend well-formed, meaningful sentences that I had just written.
I've noticed that when sleep deprived I notice different things and have a more diverse set of emergent thoughts/recall events. For example, today I noticed the plug for an electric oven at a restaurant I have not only been to at least 100 times, but have worked at for months. I randomly remembered the lyrics to China's five-year-plan song walking home from class. I will suddenly remember and think fragments in Spanish, despite not touching it for years.
Truly, it appears the nature of effective cognition is restricting all of the many responses to stimuli to those that are useful and relevant, and I think the parts of the brain that do that may have 'fallen asleep' in all those instances.