It's a funny thing that happens...

This post is about a funny thing that happens to people. It's happened to me twice.

It's funny for two reasons.

The first is that both times it's happened I've found myself in the bathroom with my pants down.  The first time it happened included a bit of slapstick when I fell into the nearby tub.


The second reason is why it happens. I'll get to that later.

For now, here's a general overview of both incidents:

Incident 1: I'm in the bathroom with my pants down. One second I'm in the middle of a routine urination and the next second I'm in the tub. The next second after that my girlfriend is helping her boyfriend, who is mumbling and moving incoherently, to the nearest bed. 30 minutes later I feel as if nothing happened at all.

Incident 2: I'm in the bathroom with my pants down. Because of my first experience I'm able notice what's about to happen and manage to move to the bed just before full onset. After the onset, my girlfriend attempts to talk to her boyfriend, who only responds by telling her that he needs to find out what these white triangles want. 30 minutes later, I feel as if nothing happened at all.

So, what's going on here? The short answer is that there's a quirk in the human nervous system which I've accidentally discovered twice.

Here's how it works:

The Vagus Nerve is a cranial nerve which is wired up in such a way that if you cough and urinate vigorously enough, you will wind up overstimulating it. This results in a series of automagic neural reactions which ends in the blood pressure in your brain suddenly dropping way below it's normal level. And, when your brain doesn't have enough blood , it also doesn't work. Technically, this is called "fainting." (Pee + Cough = Faint. Now that's funny!)

One of the interesting things about experiencing that your brain's not working is what it reveals about your brain when it is working. For reasons I don't know, the effects were different in each case.

In Incident 1, I completely passed out, for about ten seconds, according to my girlfriend. [1]

After coming to (or partially coming to, at least) I was, as you might expect, a bit confused. The first thing I was confused about was that I was in a tub, my pants around my ankles, and no idea how I got there. The second thing I was confused about was that as I attempted to get out of the tub [2] my muscles didn't seem to work the way they should.

I was able to think but there was a disconnect between my body and my mind. I tried to speak, but only mumbling came out. After my girlfriend helped me out of the tub, I tried to walk but only managed to stumble towards a direction.

On the way I noticed how dim my consciousness was in addition to the bizarre mind-body disconnect and thought, for a moment, that I was about to die. There was no panic, only immediate acceptance of the situation, and my only real concern was to make it to the bed, as it would have been more comfortable to wait for death there than on  the cold floor. The strangest part of it was my "oh, well" attitude towards dying.

This last part demonstrates how thinking is a gestalt which is the result of the integration of many different smaller processes. What we experience as the "sound" of our thoughts is the surface result of a bunch of little functions working to eventually create that thought.

Normally, I wouldn't be so relaxed about the sudden possibility of dying. Some brain function which is responsible for evaluation probably went offline.

Incident 2 began in the usual way, in the bathroom with my pants down. This time I caught the dimming of my senses and quickly moved to my bed to ride it out.  I didn't completely pass out and as a result what happened next was certainly worth the experience.

Soon after I hit the bed I found myself in a formless darkness with white triangles zooming all around. Three of them were growing larger and eventually I came to understand that they were approaching me. Then I came to understand that one of them wanted to talk to me and was attempting to communicate. Immediately after I remember my girlfriend asked me if I thought I needed to go to the hospital and I told her "I need to find out what these white triangles want." My understanding that I was speaking to someone in a separate world that I couldn't understand at the moment, and that this dark realm with zooming and rotating triangles was the "real" world which exists underneath that other world. I started to come to after that.

What this experience demonstrates is that consciousness is a gestalt of several different brain functions integrated into our perception of reality. If certain brain functions responsible for the construction of reality go offline, then whatever it's responsible for disappears from "reality".  If it goes wonky, whatever it's responsible for also goes wonky. It's the same principle that if you don't have eyes, your reality will have no visual information.

Here's some examples:

There are some people who can't perceive motion. For them things just move from one position to another and things which have continuous motion, like the tea pouring from a pot, look frozen in space.

There are some people who can't understand the meaning of words. For these people spoken words, even in a language they previously understood, sound like words of a foreign language or just gibberish.

There are some people who can't recognize faces. They can identify the "face" but not individual ones. For them, it seems like everyone is wearing the same mask. They identify people by other unique attributes: hairstyle, gait, voice, etc.

In my case, quite a bit went offline. Some of them were the ones responsible for time, space, and rational thought.  The world which I experienced in that short moment of delirium was nothing like my ordinary perception of reality.

Stay Frosty.

FOOTNOTES

[1] You know, its a times like this I'm glad my girlfriend is a nurse. On the way down I took out a reasonably solid stack of shelves and I have no memory of it. The only way I know it is because my girlfriend told me and I could see the carnage I left behind after the incident was over.

[2] I probably should have pulled my pants up first, but the concept of sequence was completely lost on me at this point.