Can you hallucinate sleep deprivation

Whatever failure of visual inference inhibits a person from seeing an illusion could also cause that person to hallucinate. But before I could reach this conclusion, I had to brush up on my German. Eventually, it was an unlikely source that clued me in to a possible connection: a German article in an obscure journal with no English translation to be found. Fortunately, a lab mate of mine speaks fluent German, and, in the spirit of collaboration, agreed to translate the findings for me.

In short, the study showed that when nurses working the night shift were given a test of visual perception after the first, third and seventh shifts, they repeatedly failed it.

The nurses failed this test when shown flowers blumen , a house haus or a patio chair gartenstuhl , but not when shown a face gesicht , and they eventually passed the test after catching up on sleep for a week. In order to understand these findings, we first have to dive into the BDII and what it can tell us about visual perception.

The brain must then interpret and make inferences about these signals. Incidentally, our brains are impressively good at doing this. Normal visual perception is the optimal combination of bottom-up input and top-down correction.

The BDII is a beautiful example of your brain overriding actual visual input. For these sleep deprived but otherwise healthy nurses, top-down correction had become compromised. A failed BDII test -- or failure at perceiving the inversion -- suggests defective visual perception. But does it correlate with a susceptibility to hallucinate, to see polar bears on the side of the highway or coffee stains moving moving against denim?

Were any of those nurses hallucinating? Both are used as a means to disrupt cognitive function in order to better understand normal and abnormal cognition.

But like psychosis, both psychedelics and sleep deprivation can cause hallucinations, so functional studies of the brain in any of these states can hint at the neural processes that contribute to the susceptibility to hallucinate. Functional imaging studies of a hallucinating schizophrenic brain are complicated and somewhat rare. Data from BDII tests, however, are more straightforward and surprisingly common.

It turns out, they see a hollow mask or fail to see the inversion , especially during acute states of the disease. Like the sleep deprived nurses, they are not able to perceive the illusion. And people high on cannabis?

There must be something to this: people who characteristically hallucinate fail to perceive the exact same illusion.

So do they all hallucinate in the same way? To answer this question, I searched for evidence that, given a certain task, a sleep deprived brain will look similar to a schizophrenic brain. When examined via fMRI, schizophrenic brains undergoing the BDII test showed different connectivity patterns than non-schizophrenic brains.

It was as if I was on Fear Factor, trapped in a glass case full of spiders and centipedes and all sorts of creepy-crawlies. Partway through the hour-and-a-half class, the itchiness became all I could concentrate on. The itchiness became unbearable as I scratched at my thighs under my desk. I started jiggling my legs and stamping my feet to make the itchiness go away, but nothing was working.

I felt as if there were millions of needles stabbing me in the legs and I was afraid I was going to start crying in the middle of the lecture. I got up and went into the hallway to get my legs moving. Out in the hallway, the itchiness quickly dissipated, much to my relief. I went back inside, took my seat, and assumed everything was fine. I tried to concentrate on what my professor was saying, but when I looked at her, something strange happened. Her short pixie cut began to grow.

Her brown hair lengthened out to her shoulders, then her chest, then down towards her waist, all in a matter of seconds. My eyelids no longer felt heavy as I stared at her, wide-eyed with shock.

This is impossible, I told myself. But it looked so real. I had just witnessed something magical. I looked left and right to my classmates, but they were all staring straight ahead, completely unfazed. I looked back at my professor. Her hair was short again. What just happened? I wondered. Then, a man entered the room. He walked past all of us students and headed straight for our professor. Something bad was about to happen. I could feel it. I looked to my peers, but no one seemed worried.

I felt like I should do something, anything, to stop this man, but I stayed still. I watched in horror as the man approached my professor and stabbed her in the chest.

I pushed my chair back from my desk, ready to run, but I blinked and everything was normal again. My professor, completely unharmed, continued teaching. There was no man in the room. My peers must have thought I was on something due to how bizarrely I acted.

Afterwards I couldn't stop giggling. When I asked her to encapsulate the experience, she said the urge to sleep all the time was crippling, although the visuals were pleasant.

After that it became harder and harder," she said. People and objects become very comical, and I hallucinated a lot. Cars floated, shadows hung from trees, zombies ran at me in the street. I felt like I could control the clouds, as they appeared to morph and mutate. And when I went to the supermarket the items on the shelves appeared to follow me. The shelves also felt like they were leaning in and about to fall.

Jess said she wasn't afraid of any long-term damage, although she was aware of the risks. As the president of the Australian Sleep Association, Professor Nicholas Antic, told me, sleep deprivation "can certainly be dangerous. While the health effects of sleep deprivation are well known to any conscious being on the planet, most of us don't think of them as fatal. But In a devoted Chinese soccer fan died after staying awake for 48 hours while watching the World Cup.

In the end a lack of sleep resulted in a brain hemorrhage, which caused a stroke. The first person to scientifically document a fatal case of sleep deprivation was the Russian physician and scientist Marie de Manaceine.