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Comment by orasis | Hacker News Reader

I experienced the same thing with my startup. My vocabulary started to deteriorate, my memory was shit, and it was taking me longer to calculate tips.

This is very alarming for a previously "smart" person.

I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.

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I just wanted to chime in here that I am a developer and also feel I am prone to memory loss (I forget about features I've spent weeks working on), and vocabulary issues which I feel may be a result of my brain being in "programming mode". Extremely frequently will I reverse my words, eg, "Can you food on this salt?". English is my first language.

Were you getting less sleep than normal? I have a theory (which is supported by a few papers I've read) that an extended period of reduced sleeping time can cause what we might call "brain damage".

Haven't looked into it a lot, but it reminds me of the concept of sleep debt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_debt

Agreed, and that article doesn't even mention this relatively recent finding, which I think offers even stronger evidence of the importance of sleep:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-perchance-reveals-brai...

I was typically sleeping 7+ hours per night, but the stress from the day was giving me scrambled restless dreams. Nowadays I sleep 10+ hours per night.

>I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.

I wouldn't mind doing that, but that sounds like you'd need a decent amount of cash to do.

I'm a huge Splinter Cell fan, and I remember loving Chaos Theory. I am sorry for the shit he had to go through. I feel like this as well actually. It takes longer to calculate simple math and I'm having issues remembering stuff.

This image did not help at all: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAqwcQdUkAAsz_G.jpg

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