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  • BDD Moderators: Keif’ Richards

Why in anyway would sleep deprivation HEIGHTEN your senses

forbiddenlife5

forbiddenlife5

Bluelighter
Joined
Feb 26, 2011
Messages
116
Everyone i know who was addicted to meth or cocaine at some point or another, complains that their vision is really enhanced and that they can hear things and noises from far away and sense when someone is near them etc etc, i thought at first they were lying but personally having experienced it, its true! It seems after being up for around 48 hours and using a drug like meth/cocaine you slowly start to hear things that are normally hard to hear, you see things you normally wouldn't notice sober, if anything shouldn't sleep deprivation make everything look small and blurry and make you deaf instead of full blown seeing microscopic molecules floating around etc etc
 
It's almost as if they were hearing and seeing things that weren't there. ;).

A large part of this is amphetamine psychosis and hearing sounds that aren't actually there.
 
^ This. I can say from personal experience that sleep deprivation minus amphetamines and your senses and cognitive abilities are pretty noticeable decreased.
 
Seeing is believing ;) to say that your senses are heighten is the same as saying that going without sleep for a week attracts spiders, it is easy to believe that it is true at the moment, but if you are able to look back and have some common sense, you should easily see that it is just you who are losing your mind, a thousand cells a minute.
 
it doesn't heighten your senses you just think it does because you're strung out and going crazy. get some freakin sleep man you'll feel better afterwards. the fact that they can "see or hear" things "better" after binging on coke or meth or whatever just means they're going crazy from being up for so long. the reality is that their brain is just making shit up and there isn't anything special to see or hear aside from the normal stuff. as for seeing 'microscopic molecules floating around' you REALLY NEED SOME SLEEP. you are just having visual hallucinations from being up for so long.

sleep deprivation DOESN'T heighten any of your senses and is really bad for you. go to sleep.
 
I dunno. I think you can become a little more sensitive to some external stimuli when you're sleep deprived, though it's not that your senses are genuinely heightened as such. I have a theory it's to do with the fact that normally your brain will filter out lots of stimuli it considers extraneous so they're not presented to the conscious mind, but when sleep deprived it is possibly less efficient at doing the filtering, allowing more in the way of random 'noise' to come to the surface. It's to do with diminished focus and a lowering of the threshold below which external stimuli would ordinarily escape attention.

This could of course be complete bullshit and I have no evidence whatsoever to support that theory but it makes sense to me and would seem to explain some of my own experiences where I've been startled by little things I'd ordinarily be unaware of that are objectively present, not delusional.
 
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Sepher said:
I dunno. I think you can become a little more sensitive to some external stimuli when you're sleep deprived, though it's not that your senses are genuinely heightened as such. I have a theory it's to do with the fact that normally your brain will filter out lots of stimuli it considers extraneous so they're not presented to the conscious mind, but when sleep deprived it is possibly less efficient at doing the filtering, allowing more in the way of random 'noise' to come to the surface. It's to do with diminished focus and a lowering of the threshold below which external stimuli would ordinarily escape attention.

This could of course be complete bullshit and I have no evidence whatsoever to support that theory but it makes sense to me and would seem to explain some of my own experiences where I've been startled by little things I'd ordinarily be unaware of that are objectively present, not delusional.
Click to expand...

Lol well i'm sober and have been for awhile and i still believe Vict sl
 
Though I have never gone on a meth/coke binge for days on end, I have had many over-nighters with the help of adderall and I can vouch for the fact that vision is definitely heightened. Colors become much more pronounced and vivid. As for one's sense of sound being enhanced - the jury is still out. You definitely do hear more things coming from say people walking around you but I don't know how much of what you hear is actually what was being said or if it is simply your brain hearing a couple words and filling in the blanks.

As for an explanation of this, the way I understand it is that it is basically a serotonin storm in your brain. When we sleep our brains use a lot of l-tryptaphan (sp?) which is metabolized into serotonin. When we don't sleep that excess l-tryptaphan is still converted and instead plays hell with our visual and auditory complexes. This serotonin storm is why when you get no sleep/ very little sleep you will often notice your first few hours of the day have a kind of glow to them, with an odd sense of euphoria. It is also why if you sleep for say 12 hours, you wake up feeling even more tired than yoy were when you went to bed - a serotonin deficiency.

I know I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle here and I welcome more input. I can back up a lot of what I said about serotonin's role in the effects of sleep deprivation.
 
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