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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

This is almost exactly what happened to me in 2022 and led to the authoring of my paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747

I had been having months of focal (non-tonic clonic yet) seizures that I thought were panic attacks for about 5 months

I had a massive psychiatric event in Dec 2022 and started writing that paper

I was in the bath tub the same night and saw a hallucinated blue orb for lack of better term that “felt” like it was trying to communicate that the paper was good

So very interesting! The brain is crazy and I have spent a lot of time studying it and it never ceases to amaze.

Oh and I forgot, my art style got really honed in and I was more prolific in 6 months than I had been in years, leading to my first art show in 15ish years:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzC8HoZOApQ/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng...

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This scenario is mostly the plot of the movie Phenomenon. It doesn't end well for the main character (played by John Travolta) so you might want to get checked out.

Maybe more boring, when trying to create I find I spend lots of time in a miserable morass where I feel like my "normal" brain is trying to solve creativity like it's a hard procedural problem, and progress is slow and the result is always uninspired. If I keep at it I eventually "punch through" and it's like an avalanche of sudden ideas and mental connections flow through and out of me and I get into a zone of unreal hyper productivity for a while.

Later on when reviewing what I did during those moments while in a normal brain state, I find I can't replicate, edit, or really do much to alter what I created until I can punch through again -- I have basically no ability to replicate what I just made. The level of detail, the inspiration, the raw creativity is just not my normal mode. It's just not on tap.

It also leaves me really hungry after a couple hours of doing it. I suspect there's some kind of interesting energy recruitment my body is doing in my brain, sensing it's working hard, and trying to support the emergency with sugars, or oxygen or something.

Huh. The closest (extremely weak version) of this with me is I'll try to remember something and fail to. Then, hours or even days later, the answer will pop into my head out of nowhere, as if my brain ran a background search daemon which finally returned the answer.

ha! I get that sometimes too. I suspect it's fairly common which manifests in people having great ideas in the shower or somewhere similar when their attention isn't focused.

It’s something you can train yourself to get better at. At least in my experience:

1. Get a tough problem

2. Read all the surrounding information about it. If a solution doesn’t appear then it’s distraction time

3. Go do something completely unrelated for a while. I like to tinker with something mechanical but listening to music or doing exercise both work. Anything where you can get a decent flow going works for me.

Quite often just after I have finished with the distraction I get a good idea about the original problem. It used to be about 50/50 whether this would work for me but it’s now around 80/20.

Like anything it takes practice and you need to find the right distraction for you

But, the shower is when their attention is relatively the most focused. There are few distractions in the shower, making it one of the very few times westerners are unable to choose not to "be here now."

I actually did get checked out by a series of doctors at Mount Sinai (After months of nightmare with the VA) who did a battery of tests including an ambulatory EEG, CT scan, MRI, etc. and came back with: “Basically your brain looks perfect so this is confusing.”

This was after two severe tonic colic seizures, which put me in the hospital with a half bitten tongue and dislocated shoulders.

The initial thinking was epilepsy, but after the ambulatory EEG, and absolutely no history of epilepsy or anything of approaching epilepsy, she’s basically said “everything looks healthy, I have no clue what’s going on, so call me if you feel like you’re dying again.”

I'd start with first, are you sleeping 6+ hours every night, and then go from there. The brain seems to get pushed into fits by sleep deprivation.

I’m good now.

It’s been 8 months since any issues and I’m healthier than I’ve ever been - considering thatI was a collegiate athlete 20 years ago that’s not nothing

Phenomenon was meant to be a propaganda film for Scientology, which claims that it's adherents can unlock latent mental capacity. That the main character dies in the end is supposed to represent persecution of their "religion" by the establishment.

That may be so, but what if it's actually possible?

Contact with mysterious phenomenon that seems to communicate with the witness is not unheard of and many people seem to undergo an intelligence boost afterwards, even if short lived. This is often considered a religious experience while more secular minded people might attribute it to something like a ufo experience.

I recognize that. However my perspective is that it was 100% in my head and I’m not unique or special or chosen or whatever nonsense fallacies that typically come with these experiences

Not some exogenous event or mystical miracle or whatever it was just pure chemistry and electricity.

I am definitely not saying any of those interpretations of the event are correct (I'm a skeptic) but I do find it interesting that some people do seem to have a period of increased focus and productivity afterwards.

> I know it was in my head

This awareness is technically called "insight", as in "insight into the weirdness of your beliefs". Generally, people suffering from psychosis don't have insight. They genuinely believe they're experiencing real things. So in this way at least it seems like you're healthy.

That being said, there's a wide range of psychotic episodes, and feelings of uniqueness, specialness, or being chosen aren't always present.

Sounds like a manic episode. Symptoms include extreme grandiosity and hallucinations. Often a manic person will believe he is God, is in contact with God, or has a special part to play in history.

Although it sounds somewhat similar to manic episodes keep in mind that they come with a depressive crash afterwards.

The brain is more complex than a mere mental condition which we still don’t fully understand.

Not always. Unipolar mania used to be in previous revisions of the DSM and bipolar type 1 can exhibit as mania without intervening depression.

There are "nervous breakdowns" which only happen once. Many historical figures have had them.

But on your larger point about fuzzy diagnoses I agree with you. In my experience, diseases like schizophrenia are better understood as a large number of unique diseases under a single heading. Saying "I have schizophrenia" is like saying "I own a dog". While an accurate statement, there are many different kinds of dogs, and their behavior varies widely. Schizophrenia is the same.

If you've spent time with groups of people with schizophrenia, you'll see that there's an extremely wide range of outcomes. I think the wide range of outcomes may be explained by there being a number of different diseases.

God, Government, and Aliens: the schizo trinity

And talking donkeys if you're Muhammad! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%CA%BDf%C5%ABr

These days it's definitely atheists which are the most schizo w.r.t. searching for, or at least ruminating about, aliens, despite all evidence against it. Another very schizo atheist topic is AI (basilisks etc).

Could be their affinity for strong weed.

Having been through manic episodes, I concur.

So you consider it a flash of genius because it led you to produce a paper that trivializes the relevance of scarcity (to greatly simplify)?

Without commenting on the merit of the thesis, people get flashes of insight all the time that seem totally genius to them. Regardless of what you wrote, I would wait until it's actually validated by further scientific consensus before calling that any kind of vindication of the phenomenon of sudden genius.

And your other example is that ... you produced art? As in, the famously capricious, easily duped community? That may not be the slam dunk you think it is.

With that said, you definitely were productive in some sense, and I don't mean to trivialize that in anyway -- it's certainly more than I accomplished over the same time! It's just ... "genius" is a stretch. By the same token, I could claim I unconvered something major with my "fish would be bad swimming instructors" idea:

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2023/05/chatgpt4-refines-m...

It said the paper you hadn't written yet would be good? Or it said it in a sense of encouragement to go through with or publish it?

My interpretation is it was a Culture drone trying to influence you to influence humanity into joining the fold by returning to traditional human social structures of community, cooperation & sharing.

Basically what I felt was that draft 1 was on the right track - which had the core of my argument

What I have linked is draft 3

I expect that I’ll have a proper falsifiable theory on paper by the end of the year (Is my hope)

My best guess based on what I know of the brain is that there was likely some amplified activation of memories linked to a heavy period of intentional visualizing (I’m a very visual thinker) cascading around my visual cortex as I was in a resting state

Have you written about your experience or contacted any researchers? I'd assume some scientist somewhere would love to know more.

I haven’t cause I don’t really think there’s anything there other than artifacts of brain activity.

The machine elves desperately trying to contact humanity: "That's it, no more revealing ourselves to rational people. We need to go back to concentrating on the hippies."

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