Err...has this ever happened to anyone else?

[Simonster]

The other day, I was pretty sleep deprived (I'd gotten slightly more than 5 hours of sleep in the past two nights) and I'd been taking modafinil (brand name Provigil; prescribed for narcolepsy and shift work related sleep disorder; in practice, provides a sensation of wakefulness with little actual stimulation) to fight away the sleepiness. Because of the Provigil, I didn't feel at all drowsy, and my ability to pay attention to things was normal. I did feel some of the secondary effects of tiredness: astereognosis (the inability to recognize objects by touch), some headaches, and some minor problems with memory. All of these happen to me ordinarily when sleep-deprived. Despite my fatigue, I still decided to make my way to a party at a friend's house. On my way there, I had no problems at all driving...definitely did not feel like falling asleep at the wheel, and remembered exactly where the house was, even though I'd only driven there once before several months ago. It's pretty safe to say that at this point, my mental functioning was normal. Fast forward to about half an hour after I arrived at the party. I drank a couple of beers and take a few hits from the hookah. At this point, I wasn't really feeling anything. Then, someone packed a bowl. I took maybe five good-sized tokes. (I know, in retrospect, my experience proves this was a horrible idea...but still...it seemed like it'd be fun...) Fast forward to a few minutes later. I'm walking around my friend's basement with an enormous grin on my face, convinced that EVERYTHING is one big lucid dream. None of it's real. None of it matters. It's like I can do anything I want. No one is real. It's as if I've seen God... This is when I realize the problem. There are other similarities to a dream, too. I've lost my memory. Well, it's not exactly lost, just intensely distorted. Every time I remember something, I feel like I'm remembering it in a dream....it's almost as if I'm making it up on the fly. (Apparently, the clinical diagnosis for this is source amnesia, or more specifically, memory distrust syndrome.) My memories lack context. I can't tell the difference between last week, last month, and last year. It's as if my memories were stored in a book, and the pages are still there, but someone's ripped out the index. At this point, I'm completely terrified, thinking that I'm actually erasing these memories, or making them worse by recalling them. Worried that as soon as I remember something I'll remember it distorted forever, I finally end up going to sleep. The next day, I had most of my life up to the last week under control. It all came back after another night of sleep, although whether it was the sleep or the drugs wearing off I don't know. Anyway, I'm wondering if any of you have noticed anything like this, perhaps under different circumstances. The feeling of dreaming while awake (although not actually hallucinating!) was certainly an interesting experience, and I hope I haven't lost too many brain cells because of it...I wonder what insight it gives into the interaction between sleep and memory. </drug induced rant>

[Leo Volont]

What you experienced is to be considered only in the context of mixing some very powerful drugs. You shouldn't pretend that there is any normal parallel or application in any this damaging experience of yours. and, yes, you are lucky that most of my mental functions seemed to have returned. Also, although the recreational drugs are liable for a great deal of the blame, we should also consider the prescription drugs. We should all realize that these drugs are not often very healthy. There are billions of dollars of profits involved in the advancement of these pharmaceuticals, and so we might well suspect that the greater motive in supplying such drugs to the general public has more to do with making money than in providing for the health and wellbeing of the consumers involved. One needs only examine the record of the very popular anti-depressant family of drugs -- marginally effective for what they are intended to do while having the most wicked sideeffects, and having withdraw symptoms so daunting as to discourage anybody lightly deciding that they had enough of paying so much for absolutely so little. Indeed, these legal drugs may be the more dangerous.

[Simonster]

Oh, I know that they're drug effects, but I also believe that there are normal parallels. There's nothing a drug does that doesn't happen normally within the brain. Amphetamines induce release of dopamine. LSD selectively activates the 5-HT2 receptor, and even more specifically, psychedelic activity is caused by activation of the 5-HT2A receptor (although no one's quite sure what the purpose of this receptor is). The THC in marijuana activates CB1 and CB2 receptors, mimicking the effect of the the body's endogenous peptide neurotransmitter anandamide. Modafinil, it is hypothesized, selectively stimulates orexin neurons. Recreationally, the most interesting drugs activate receptors that wouldn't normally be activated (such as the psychedelics), while the drugs that produce the most pleasure and addiction stimulate the dopaminergic pathway from the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens (as amphetamine and cocaine do directly, and nicotine, heroin, and other opiates do indirectly). Drugs are very crude ways of altering the human brain. They don't affect single parts or small areas; they affect entire systems, or sets of systems. These systems have to have already existed to produce these effects. Whether this experience was "damaging" I don't know, as I think I made clear in my post. Mescaline can produce some pretty intense experiences, but recent studies tell us that it causes no brain damage whatsoever. Complete sleep deprivation over a long enough period causes immense distortions in perception, personality, and speech, but once you sleep, there's no damage. Any damage this experience produced is likely more a result of elevated blood pressure and heart rate than direct neural stimulation. And as to the effects of antidepressants, yes, there are some studies out there that say the effect is 80% placebo. But really, fluoxetine (Prozac) has very few side effects. Whether it's placebo or not, it works for a lot of people out there. I have friends who take antidepressants, and when I tell them there are studies like these out there, they don't believe me. Also, Prozac doesn't have the same withdrawal side effects as nearly all of the other antidepressants in the SSRI family, for reasons I can explain to you if you're actually interested. </neuroscience> But really, none of this has anything to do with my original comment. I would hypothesize that the greatest effect came not from a drug, but from sleep deprivation. There lies my interest. I've taken all of these drugs before, and taken modafinil and marijuana, the two drugs that I would hypothesize would be the most unpredictable in combination, together, all to no unexpected effect. Sleep is thought by almost all scientists to play a role in the consolidation of memory, and anandamide (again, the body's natural analogue to the active component of marijuana) appears to play a role in the modulation of sleep and memory. To me, this experience produces some interesting questions about the interaction between sleep and memory, and the way memory is consolidated. At the very least, it seems to confirm the theory that nondeclarative, semantic, and episodic memory are completely independent systems. I'd assume that most of you have felt the way I did, but only in dreams. Perhaps as neuroscience continues its progress toward understanding the function of sleep, exactly how this interaction takes place will become clearer.