3 ms·
I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting. My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific image
by mathewsanders 9y ago
I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting.
My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes.
It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens.
Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins.
Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)
- atom-morgan 9y agoI've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.
- stanfordkid 9y agoAgreed. Hallucinogens tend to increase synesthesia and sort of "remove the filter" on our brains imagination potential. Being sedated tends to just "turn your brain off" in my experience. To make an analogy to computer vision: fainting lowers the resolution and increases the noise in the original image, psychedelics change the decision threshold for detection of objects.
- SCHiM 9y agoHere are my experiences which seem to match what you describe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540946
- erasemus 9y agoYour first experience illustrates neatly my thoughts about the article. The 'cacophony of noises, specific images' (which you refer to) were generated by the 'fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in [your] brain' (which the article refers to). But when you woke up fully the cacophony was joined up into the 'coherent whole'. That's what consciousness is, I think: the joining of things or processes together so that they interact and new things (new patterns) can emerge. These things can now be adopted and utilized by 'the narrative' and as a result the narrative itself changes. So, though it works indirectly, consciousness is really immensely powerful. It's misleading to think of it as 'passive'. The mind may be driven by desires and fears, but without consciousness there'd be no material to work with.