Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self.

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_...

So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the degree that she perceived her own past experiences forming into intuitions that were so foreign that she interpreted them as others' voices?

View on HN

I find an important take-away of that CO story was "The handwriting was nothing like mine. I pulled up my old lease and the writing on the notes is identical to the landlords'!" That suspicion went away as soon as he got his head on straight.

Which is, we're really good at crafting narratives and conforming our perceptions to fit them, whether or not our brain is working right, and bystanders should probably not take the narrative at face value.

I Suffered CO2 poisoning for months. This explanation is believable.

My sense of time was screwed up.

It got to the point I would often joke about being casualty challenged. (When more lucid)

Hallucinations started up from this. A constant sense of doom became the norm.

So yea, confused timeline, hallucinations and, and a sense of going to die can make some interesting and unpleasant mental games.

FYI, and sorry for the pedantry, but it's CO (carbon monoxide) poisoning. CO2 (carbdon dioxide) poisoning is also a thing but very hard to do in a domestic scenario, and especially hard to do without noticing because you'd feel very out of breath (too much CO2 in your lungs is exactly what makes you want to take breaths in regular breathing).

I attended a seminar on geoengineering and carbon capture and storage this semester.

At some cost we could capture the CO2 that comes out of a power plant, clean it, compress it to 1500 psi or so, then inject into the ground somewhere. Engineers get bonus points when they use the CO2 to flush out extra oil, since CO2 mixes so well with oil. (Roughnecks have been pumping CO2 out of the ground in Texas and using it for oil recovery since the 1970s.)

Turns out a CO2 pipeline is more dangerous than a methane pipeline. Methane can burn, but it rises, so the danger is in a limited area. CO2 on the otherhand will sink downhill and accumulate in places and quickly suffocate people.

I remember reading about the sudden death of a few hundred people in a coastal village way back when, and it looked like the lake belched a CO2 pocket and suffocated everyone.

Terrifying, you're suddenly out of breath but don't know why, and then you die without knowing you'd be okay if you stood on a roof or tree.

Is scary. Kids were super hard to wake up though this. Like 2 hours to get them alert on bad days.

Guy from gas company made it clear no one would be waking up in a matter of days

It was a village next to an inland lake[1] in Cameroon in 1986. Thousands died.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster

Definitely hard to do at home, but it's not all that easy to notice in certain settings. For instance, indoor and greenhouse agriculture where pumping CO2 into the room is routinely done.

I'm not sure that I've experienced CO2 poisoning per se, but definitely higher-than-safe levels of it. We were installing new air quality sensors at an indoor farming facility when we (eventually) discovered the existing CO2 alarms were malfunctioning. The symptoms came on fast and immediately affected my ability to think. The first sensors we installed reported something like ~6000ppm, which we assumed to be a calibration error because no way people had been working at those levels. Didn't even occur to us it was accurate. A few minutes later I remember just staring at another sensor unable to decide which way to install the battery.

We didn't even realize something was wrong until I went outside for a few minutes.

EDIT: grammar

This is an amazing story. You might find videos of low blood O2 (for example, at altitude or in a hypobaric altitude chamber) kind of interesting as they illustrate exactly that kind of dramatic cognitive decline.

> very hard to do in a domestic scenario, and especially hard to do without noticing

Life- or health-threatening CO2 poisoning, maybe, but low-level cognitive impairment due to elevated CO2 is extremely common in indoor environments.

Specifically was carbon monoxide. AND Natural gas. Large quantity of both for 3 months.

Unfortunately medical literature for long term natural gas exposure is limited since people tend to explode.

Rental company kept making excuses for smell. Claimed it was not gas.

After 3 months of total health meltdown I called gas company. Their alarms went off at road. Started screaming at us to get away. Guy was amazed any of us were still alive.

As it is, me and at least one kid have permanent changes from it. She’s was gifted, now is borderline special needs.

No one on this thread is talking about the simplest explanation: that unseen entities were communicating with this woman. Of course this explanation flies in the face of scientific naturalism. But it’s good to question beliefs based on new evidence. Research by Ian Stevenson and Dean Radin is compelling in pointing to a pan psychic reality.

It being the first that comes to mind doesn't make it the simplest, because its implications must be considered as part of the explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com