A Rough Night

I had an incredibly rough night last night. In the early morning, I woke up and had the terrible feeling that I wasn't alone. I felt someone or something was in the room with me, even in the bed with me, though I knew I was the only one there. Over the excruciating moments, I began to feel I was being haunted or even possessed by something. I woke up this morning unbelievably anxious and feeling sore in every muscle in my body. It seems last night I was the victim... of sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is an interesting, and quite terrifying, phenomenon. What happens is that you wake up while still in REM sleep. Dreams intertwine with reality and can cause such experiences as hallucinations (auditory, visual, even olfactory), emotions (such as fear and dread), inability to move (because your body paralyzes you during REM to keep you from acting out your dreams, that carries over into this semi-wakeful state), and muscle soreness. Though sleep paralysis is more common among people who already have some form of sleep disturbance, such as insomnia, it can happen to anyone. It's been theorized that many so-called experiences of the paranormal are actually cases of sleep paralysis.

There's a great documentary on sleep paralysis I highly recommend if you'd like to learn more:

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Feel free to share in the comments!

Great Demonstration of Bayes' Theorem

Bayes' theorem is an excellent tool, once you wrap your head around it. In fact, it was discovered as sort of an accident that actually horrified Bayes (and others), and was highly controversial even into the 20th century - to the point that many statisticians eschewed inverse probability and, when they used it, did so in secret.

I've blogged about  and applied it several times:

• A background on Bayes' Theorem
• Prelude to What's Bayes' Got to Do With It?
• What's Bayes' Got to Do With It?
• Bayesian Inference in a Galaxy Far Away

And I highly recommend a couple books to learn more about Bayes': The Theory that Wouldn't Die and Doing Bayesian Analysis. But this morning, I read an excellent demonstration of Bayes' theorem - what is the probability the post's author is asleep given her bedroom light is on?

I have more than 2 months of data from my Garmin Vivosmart watch showing when I fall asleep and wake up. In a previous post, I figured out the probability I am asleep at a given time using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.

This is the probability I am asleep taking into account only the time. What if we know the time and have additional evidence? How would knowing that my bedroom light is on change the probability that I am asleep?

We will walk through applying the equation for a time of 10:30 PM if we know my light is on. First, we calculate the prior probability I am asleep using the time and get an answer of 73.90%. The prior provides a good starting point for our estimate, but we can improve it by incorporating info about my light. Knowing that my light is on, we can fill in Bayes’ Equation with the relevant numbers

The knowledge that my light is on drastically changes our estimate of the probability I am asleep from over 70% to 3.42%. This shows the power of Bayes’ Rule: we were able to update our initial estimate for the situation by incorporating more information. While we might have intuitively done this anyway, thinking about it in terms of formal equations allows us to update our beliefs in a rigorous manner.

She's shared her code for these calculations in a Jupyter Notebook, which you check out here.

Psychology for Writers: Insomnia

I'm planning to write some posts on sleep deprivation in general and what that might look like, but for today, I thought I'd focus on insomnia, as I see it come up a lot in books and it's not always accurately portrayed.

The word insomnia itself simply means lack of sleep, so in that sense, many characters in books might experience insomnia - being unable to sleep well due to anxiety or excitement, for instance. But the diagnosis of insomnia refers to habitual sleeplessness, with diagnostic criteria usually specifying that the patient should have had difficulty sleeping for at least a month before it can be considered insomnia, and that it should be interfering with the person's ability to function normally (that is, if the person doesn't get much sleep but feels fine, they don't have insomnia - they might just need less sleep than the average person).

There are three ways insomnia can manifest, and patients may have one, two, or all three:

1. Difficulty initiating asleep - It's considered "normal" to fall asleep within about 15 minutes of getting into bed. For people with insomnia, it can take many minutes or even hours to fall asleep.
2. Difficulty maintaining sleep - Waking up multiple times in the night and/or waking up early (e.g., before the alarm) and being unable to go back to sleep.
3. Restless or nonrestorative sleep - Feeling tired, even after getting sleep, likely because the person was unable to go through full sleep cycles and get sufficient amount of sleep in each stage.

When I read books in which characters have insomnia, usually it manifests as #1. But a person might be able to fall asleep normally, but not be able to maintain it, waking up multiple times in the middle of the night and/or being unable to get back to sleep. Books also may portray someone with insomnia as unable to sleep at all, which is highly unlikely. A person with insomnia may be able to sleep for small spans of time, perhaps only making it into the lightest stages of sleep (the stages close to wakefulness). And someone who is severely sleep deprived is likely to fall asleep for short spans of time without meaning to - these are known as microsleeps, where the person may nod off for just a few seconds.

A person may be unaware that they fell asleep, but one tell is that they may have sudden dream-like images - this may happen, especially in a person with insomnia, for a couple of reasons:

1) The lightest stage of sleep is very similar to the stage of sleep in which we dream. In fact, if you look at brain activity of a person in the lightest stage of sleep and in dreaming sleep (REM or rapid eye movement), they'll look surprisingly similar. (Fun fact, they'll also look surprisingly similar to brain activity of a person who is awake.)

2) People with insomnia likely have a deficit of REM sleep. When a person has a deficit of REM sleep, an interesting thing happens that doesn't happen for other sleep deficits: they'll go into REM sleep more quickly and spend more time there. This phenomenon is known as "REM rebound." A person with insomnia may nod off and immediately have dream-like imagery and experiences. This, in fact, is a great explanation for people who report hearing voices, as well as for supernatural experiences; it's no coincidence that people are more likely to report seeing ghosts at night. Auditory and visual hallucinations are very similar to dreams, and are likely the result of the same processes that give us dreams.

The big question, of course, is what causes insomnia. One cause is that a person may be predisposed (genetically) to poor sleep. For instance, I recently did 23andme, and one of the things they look at in their health analysis is whether a person has genetic indicators of being restless during sleep. It makes sense, then, that some people simply don't sleep as well as others for no reason beyond what's written in their genetic code.

Of course, a person may also be genetically predisposed to other conditions that impact sleep, such as depression and anxiety. Insomnia caused by one of these conditions usually occurs because a person is unable to "turn off his/her brain" to fall asleep; instead, they may lay awake worrying or ruminating. But the direction of causality could be flipped, with insomnia causing depression. Sleep is one of the times your body replenishes important neurotransmitters. If your body isn't able to carry out those processes normally done during sleep/rest, they'll experience deficits that could manifest in a variety of conditions.

Among women, hormones can exacerbate insomnia. Many women report having insomnia during their period. (It's likely that hormones affect men's sleep as well, but unlike women, fluctuations in men's hormones are less predictable.) This is more likely to occur among women who have insomnia the rest of the time; it may simply be more severe at certain times in a woman's cycle.

Insomnia is also a symptom of post-concussive syndrome; that is, a person who had a concussion may end up experiencing insomnia. For some, this is short-term until their brain heals. For others, this is a long-term/permanent condition as a result of a head injury. (There are other symptoms of post-concussive syndrome the person may have, such as depression and tinnitus - ringing in the ears.)

Lastly, insomnia may be behavioral. Lack of good sleep hygiene could lead to insomnia. And people who have programmed themselves to be awake at night or to wake up easily at night (e.g., they care for a relative with a chronic illness and have to be awakened multiple times at night) may also end up developing insomnia as a result. However, people who have been diagnosed with insomnia and are working to deal with it tend to have the best sleep hygiene: they avoid things like reading or watching TV in bed, and often won't even have these distractions in their bedroom; they have a standard bedtime routine; and they tend to very thoughtful about what they consume, especially caffeine, close to bedtime. So if you're writing a character who has insomnia, this is one characteristic you could give them: an almost obsessive attention to sleep hygiene.

People with insomnia are also more likely to experience an unbelievably terrifying sleep disturbance: sleep paralysis. I could write a whole post (or two!) about sleep paralysis, which also explains many supernatural experiences. In the meantime, there's a documentary about it available on Netflix. I see insomnia used all the time in books; I rarely see related sleep disturbances like sleep paralysis. So if you're writing a character with insomnia, you might consider adding something like sleep paralysis in as well.

Other quirks of people with insomnia:

• They may find it difficult to sleep when they're supposed to and difficult not to sleep when they aren't supposed to, such as during the day, while watching TV, etc. 
• They tend to be better at remembering their dreams, because they often wake up after a dream, and have some time to think about/process it. 
• They may find it difficult to differentiate dream from reality, not necessarily in the moment, but after the fact. That is, they may remember something later on and be unable to tell if that actually happened or they only dreamed about it.
• They may be hesitant to tell others they have insomnia because people (usually normal sleepers, who may have a bout of insomnia every so often) will respond with remedies they use when they're unable to sleep. As a person with insomnia since I was about 8 years old - which at its worst, results in me getting only 1-2 hours of sleep a night, and typically, results in me getting 5-6 hours of sleep - I have tried just about everything, and have heard it all, from the mundane to the bizarre to the borderline inappropriate (my favorite, and you're welcome to use it in a book: a Starbucks barista who told me I needed "nature's sleeping pill, which is more of an action," followed by a gesture to make it very clear he was talking about sex). 

Sleep well, writers! And if you don't, use it for story inspiration. 

You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured

When people find out I'm a psychologist, there are a few very predictable reactions, as predictable as the response I get when I tell people I'm originally from Kansas:

I'm of course asked if I'm analyzing them right now. I have many go-to responses for that one:

"I'm a social psychologist. I don't help people."

"I do research, so actually I'm analyzing your behavior."

"You think any self-respecting psychoanalyst would do that for free?"

But the next most common question is about dreams. I've had many people ask me if I can help them figure out the meaning of a strange dream they had. Even people who have known me for years sometimes ask me about dreams.

Dreams are pretty fascinating. It's like your own TV channel, except the shows all involve you walking around with no pants. (Or in my case, shoes - I definitely have the naked dream but probably more common is realizing I went all the way to work/school/somewhere random with no shoes.) There are certain dreams we all have. The naked dream is one example. But another common one was a recent subject of an article for the Washington Post:

We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments.

The author, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, did some digging to find out what psychologists had to say about the dream. I give her credit that the first place she looked was at the peer-reviewed literature. She was dismayed when she found nothing and expressed surprise that no psychologists had studied such a common dream. I'll be honest, I sat down and tried to figure out how I would study such a dream, and unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of objective ways to study any dream. You'd need to find people right after (or right before) they had the dream and try to measure various aspects of their lives to find any connections or explanations. But the problem with recruiting people right before is that 1) you don't know when or even if they'll have the dream and 2) you risk influencing their dreams by the simple act of studying them, perhaps causing people to have the school dream. In fact, just writing down your dreams have been shown to influence how you dream - I'm told that's the best way to get into lucid dreaming, where you are able to control the direction of a dream during the actual dream.

So with no peer reviewed literature to guide her, she asked various psychologists to offer their thoughts on the dream. Though many of the explanations crossed into the realm of psychoanalysis (see this blog post to find out what I really think about Freud and his ilk, a post that was also about dreams in which I briefly referenced the "going back to school" dream), there did seem to be a thread linking these explanations together that probably gets at the truth:

"I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students," says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. "These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve."

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, "is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer's task in 'awake life' is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure."

But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?

"Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked," Willis wrote in an email. "Since each new stress in the current day is 'new,' there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar 'achievement' stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the 'go-to' memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the 'now.'"

So the dream is really about fear of not measuring up, or of being measured and found wanting. We're concerned about failure. Though in the article, the psychoanalyst goes on to talk about manifest/latent content and how your brain is trying to shield yourself from the real truth, the neurologist's explanation is probably more accurate and certainly more supported. It's kind of the "neural-connectedness" theory of dreams. Information stored in your brain is connected through a neural network. Some connections - such the connection between dog and leash - are stronger than others - such as the connection between dog and duck-billed platypus.

The internet, however, laughs in the face of your strong-weak connection dichotomy and says, "You want to see a dog dressed as a duck-billed platypus? Boom!"

When you sleep, your brain is consolidating memories, and building up the neural network. So if a stressful time in your current life reminds you of a stressful time in school, your resting brain will forge or strengthen that connection. I think, and I think Dr. Willis would agree, that dreams are just your brain making and testing connections, causing you to see elements of these memories and bits of information while you sleep. We see common themes and threads not because your subconscious brain is sending you coded messages, but because that's how neural connectedness works.

If you have had this dream, unfortunately you're probably going to continue having this dream, especially in times of stress. Dreams can be disconcerting but they're really just your brain testing out the wiring - and that's a good thing.

Alexander Hamilton, Sleep, and Memory Consolidation

I'm currently reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow - the book on which the Broadway musical, Hamilton, is based.

I'm currently about 250 pages in, so it doesn't look like I'll finish before the end of my vacation, but I've made a good dent. In the current section, which is about Hamilton's writing habits, particularly with regard to the Federalist Papers, I found this description of Hamilton's approach to writing from William Sullivan's Public Men of the Revolution:

One who knew his habits of study said of him that when he had a serious object to accomplish, his practice was to reflect on it previously. And when he had gone through this labor, he retired to sleep, without regard to the hour of the night, and having slept six or seven hours, he rose and having taken strong coffee, seated himself at his table, where he would remain six, seven, or eight hours. And the product of his rapid pen required little correction for the press.

What Hamilton was doing - and I'm certainly not downplaying his genius, or his Mozart-like ability to write without the need for revision - was taking advantage of the memory consolidation function of sleep. That is, during sleep, your brain builds neural connections and essentially transfers events and what you learned that day into long term memory. This is why one of the effects of sleep deprivation is memory issues. So Hamilton did the thinking (and some research) needed to gather his thoughts, then slept to allow them to coalesce and organize. Then he would wake up and write it all down. In fact, I just received a link to yet another study demonstrating the memory consolidation effects of sleep.

Of course, what Hamilton did was even more extraordinary when you consider that it was not yet known that sleep could do this - at least, not from scientific study. Psychology wasn't even considered a field yet; that would happen in 1870s Germany. That Hamilton fellow was pretty smart.

Inspiration, Dreams, and Why Social Psychology is Awesome

After finishing up my time on a non-profit board, my plan was to fill that extra time with things I enjoyed - including writing. Unfortunately, as is often the case with "extra" time, it quickly gets filled with tasks. So I resolve, once again, to try to spend more time writing, including writing on this blog.

Many writers have clashed on the issue of inspiration - whether one should write only when "inspired" to do so, or whether one should write regularly as a practice, whether you feel like doing so or not. Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors, had a lot of advice for aspiring writers, much of which involved writing often, regardless of "inspiration." Isaac Asimov also wrote every day, and was very prolific as a result.

I know I should apply this logic to myself and basically make myself write regularly. But as I was pondering this issue of inspiration, I started thinking about when and where I get some of my best ideas. For me - and this is especially true of fiction ideas - I tend to be most creative at night, especially after I've woken up from a strange and inspiring dream. I'd say dreams are the source of some of my best ideas. (P.S., I've blogged before about head songs that I think come from dreams, in part.)

I started doing a little research into this and found a whole literature on dreams and creativity. For instance, dreams inspired Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Because of sleep's role in memory consolidation, it makes sense that sleep can have a positive impact on certain aspects of creativity, such as insight.

REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this kind of linking (neural networking) naturally, and it's a great way to learn new things - by connecting new knowledge you need to memorize to something you already know. Just as you can connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, you can connect any concept in your brain to another. Some connections are more direct than others.

Apparently one thing your brain does during REM sleep is play six degrees of "showing up to work without your pants." Or some such.

Of course, Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists would state that these strange juxtapositions are simply your subconscious trying to work out any conflicts you're having in your life. In fact, pretty much everything goes back to this idea of the subconscious, at least for psychoanalysts.

According to these theories, within your mind are three forces vying for control: the id, which operates on the pleasure principle (i.e., that feels good, keep doing it; that feels bad, stop doing it); the superego, which operates on morality (i.e., that feels good, stop doing it; that feels bad, keep doing it); and the ego, the conscious self who is just trying to pick the right feel goods to keep doing or stop doing and the right feel bads to keep doing or stop doing.

In case you would prefer a visual representation of the id, ego, and superego (respectively); Homer's id is clearly winning

When you dream, according to these theories, there are two types of content: manifest content, which is the literal subject of the dream (e.g., showing up to work without your pants), and latent content, which is the underlying meaning of the dream (e.g., you have issues with your mother, or maybe you like exhibitionism - I don't know, I'm a social psychologist!).

Of course, the interesting thing about all this theory is that social psychologists have come up with a variety of hypotheses and theories that explain many aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Putting some kind of idea in your head below your awareness that influences behavior? Priming. Attitudes that you swear you do not hold but that guide decisions, such as whether to trust someone of a certain group? Implicit attitudes. And of course, underlying meaning in your life and nonconscious sources of influence based on past experiences, temperament, and so on? Self and identity.

See also media effects, mob mentality, and ingroup/outgroup effects, just to name a few forces that influence you without you even realizing it. (Note: social psychologists prefer the term 'nonconscious,' rather than the psychoanalyst-laden term 'subconscious.')

Why do we need these little snippets of theory and hypothesis if Freud's and other psychoanalysts' theories can sum much of this up, in a neat, Oedipus-complex-themed package? After all, parsimony is an important aspect of science - the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, in the absence of evidence to support one over the other.

But that's the thing - the various social psychological theories outlined above have just that: evidence. Specifically empirical evidence, which is pretty important for science, something I've also blogged about before. In fact, psychoanalytic theories lack the basic ingredients that make them at all scientific: the ability to test these concepts (we call this 'testability') and, if they are false, demonstrate that (we call this 'falsifiability'). If there really are subconscious forces operating in your brain, trying to give you glimpses of what's really bothering you (latent content) but hiding behind symbolism (manifest content), how would we even begin to test this? After all, they're subconscious. But for social psychological theories, such as priming, we may know what evidence we would observe if priming happened and what we would observe if it isn't happening.

One of the key differences is whether the hypothesis/theory is nomothetic (describes a general pattern) or idiographic (describes a specific pattern, usually within a particular person). There are ways to test idiographic hypotheses, but it is more difficult than if you can generate a hypothesis that should apply to a group of people receiving the same intervention. You would just test to see if the group of people responded the way you expected.

These various social psychological theories lack a couple of things - 1) there isn't a unified theory that sums all this up in a neat little package and 2) other than the various findings outlined above in regard to sleep/dreams, there isn't really a good hypothesis/theory for the purpose of dreams. What you read above is descriptive with regard to sleep and dreams, but not predictive; that is, we haven't identified some key cause that would allow us to understand why we dream what we do and perhaps predict what people will dream, based on knowledge of the important variables. We don't even know what those variables are.

As I mentioned in my previous post linked above, scientific findings are tentative, pending better evidence and methodology. We may not completely understand dreams now, but perhaps will be able to in the future, as we expand on technology for studying the living, working brain.

For the time being, though, I'll be happy to take whatever inspiration my dreaming brain sends my way. But please, no more going back to high school dreams.

Dreamily yours,
~Sara

Trivial Only Post: Journal Entry From the Past

I was cleaning today and discovered an old journal from 10 years ago.  I came across this entry, dated June 17, 2005.  Based on the time period, I was probably in one of my worst bouts with insomnia of my life, so I blame the goofiness of this entry on severe sleep deprivation.  Here it is, in its unedited glory:

I'm sitting in my apartment playing Space Invaders and I started to wonder: Just who are these invaders from space?  Why do they attack us?  Are they after our natural resources?

And another thing, why do we just sit back and wait for them to come to us?  Why don't we go find their planet, go down there, and invade them?  I mean, they can't be far away.  With how slow they move, they have to be close by or it would take them a hundred years to get to us.  And by then, what's the point?

And hey, what's with the single tank waiting?  Give me 10 tanks with some more of those fort/armor things, and I'll wipe out their entire species.  It only takes one shot to take them down, and I, apparently, have been gifted with extra lives.  Like a cat.  A cat soldier.  So, I'm good.

On Head Songs, Ear Worms, and Air Guitar

For quite a while, I've been posting on Facebook many mornings what I like to call "head songs", songs I wake up with in my head. I started wondering about what might cause these head songs, and did a bit of research.

You may have heard the term "ear worm", which seems very similar to what I describe above. A somewhat recent TedEd talk describes just this phenomenon. According to this video, ear worms are bits of a melody, often just a small part of a melody, as opposed to the complete song that get "stuck" in your head. Usually, the ear worm is only the melody, without any harmony lines. Though many believe modern technology, and the ease with which we can hear music as a result, is to blame for ear worms, the video states that this concept has been around since before the invention of the phonograph.

But what actually causes ear worms? Or more specifically, what causes a particular ear worm - why do we suddenly get a certain song stuck in our head? The video linked above, as well as an older story on NPR, shares that, though we don't completely understand the causes, psychologists believe memory triggers, emotional states, and anxiety may be to blame.

As I've blogged before, memory and emotions are strongly linked in the brain, due in part to the close proximity of the amygdala (involved in emotion) and the hippocampus (involved in transferring memories from short-term to long-term). In that previous post, I talked specifically about the connections of memory and emotions to scents. But what about auditory experiences?

You probably won't be surprised to learn that the auditory cortex is close by to the systems above. In fact, the auditory cortex is basically the olfactory cortex's next-door neighbor.

"Howdy, neighbor, mind turning that music down?" "Only if you stop burning that disgusting incense."

All of these systems connect to the higher parts of the brain (the systems that evolved last and differentiate humans from other animals) through a path known as the somatosensory cortex. This is where higher reasoning skills come in. Rather than simply being flooded with random sights, sounds, smells, etc., we can think rationally about these occurrences, understand connections between them, and even expand on them.

And not to get too heavy into brain systems, but running alongside the somatosensory cortex is the somatomotor cortex. So if you're listening to a song played by guitar, and you know how to play the guitar, you may have to resist the urge to "play" along, even if a guitar is nowhere near your hands. The connections are strong.

Next up, an epic air guitar solo

Have I, as usual, gotten away from the original point? Maybe, but isn't brain physiology fun?!

Okay, seriously, head songs.  While I definitely fall prey to a repeated (usually annoying) melody, often of a song I don't like, my head songs are a bit different. They usually are the whole song - even if the head song begins at some point within the song, I usually hear the song as a gestalt (complete with accompaniment, percussion, harmony lines, and so on). So at least my auditory hallucinations are multi-faceted, right? That's got to count for something. In either case, this seems qualitatively different from ear worms.

As far as I can tell, the explanations for my head songs usually come from my dreams (e.g., I once had a dream about an androgynous person, and woke up with David Bowie's "Rebel, Rebel" in my head - "because she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl"), or some random thought I had upon waking (e.g., it's Monday and I get Foreigner's "Blue Monday" stuck).

Why is it usually the whole arrangement, not just melody/vocals? I probably should blame this on modern technology. Though we can't fully blame radio, iPods, and Spotify for ear worms, we can blame it for giving us a full - and usually consistent - experience of a song. And my head songs, though quite variable in genre, range, and instruments used, are most often songs I've heard more than once.

Do head songs happen to you or someone you love?  Don't worry, you're not alone. And there are worse things to have in your head when you wake up each morning. Unless that head song is [redacted to save your sanity].

Musically yours,
~Sara

On Sleep Disturbance, Color Perception, and the Loneliness of Perception

I just watched a wonderful video that discussed something I've wondered about before: is my perception of color the same as yours?  As I suspected, the video stated that this is something we will never truly know.  Specifically, it is part of the "explanatory gap" - the failure of language and human understanding to adequately communicate to another human what their own perceptions feel like or, in the case of color, look like.

We learn color through exposure.  No one is able to explain to us in words what "yellow" is; instead, they have to show us.  This school bus is yellow.  This pencil is yellow.  Over time, we learn how to identify yellow on our own, based on what we have been shown, as well as our ability to generalize learned information to other things.  We also learn to discriminate - to learn definitions in such a way that we can say, "This thing is yellow.  This thing, on the other hand, is orange."  We can never describe in words how we know this thing is a different color than another, except to say that it looks different.  These abilities are one of the reasons that, even a human of low intelligence is smarter than a computer when it comes to detecting context and experiencing things through perception, rather than hard numbers.

Which leads me to another story.  When I was 8 years old, I began my lifetime struggle with insomnia.  At best, I can get 7 or 8 hours a night - if I go to bed really early, and intend on staying in bed for far more than those 7 or 8 hours to make up for the latency in falling asleep and all those times I wake up in the middle of the night.  At worst, I get 2 to 4 hours a night.  These are the nights I dread.  It doesn't matter how tired I am.  It doesn't matter if I can barely keep my eyes open during the day.  I may still find myself exhausted and in bed, but unable to sleep.

It's a difficult thing for people without sleep disturbance to understand.  How can one be sleepy, but unable to sleep?  In fact, it isn't just their inability to feel my feels - I didn't even know that what I was experiencing was abnormal for a very long time.

Our only experience that we can truly know is our own.  As the video I linked above says, we are alone in our perception of the world.  We can use language and examples to describe our perception to others, but we can never truly know if they feel what we feel.  So for the longest time, I thought my sleep was perfectly normal, because I only had my own experience to draw upon.  I thought everyone took 30-60 minutes to fall asleep.  And I thought everyone woke up multiple times in the middle of the night.

I remember one time in high school, when I was sick, that I actually slept the whole night through without waking up.  I mentioned this to a friend the next day, expecting that they would say, "Yeah, you must have been really sick to be able to sleep that much."  Instead, I got, "What do you mean you wake up multiple times at night?"  Of course I do.  Doesn't everyone?  I was surprised to learn that, no, my sleep was different from others.

Still, I didn't think much of it, until I got to graduate school.  As a psychology student, I was taught again and again that the primary determinant of whether any disorder is problematic (and in need of treatment) was if it interfered with one's life.  When the stress of grad school caught up with me to the point that I was getting only a couple hours a night, I knew I had a problem.  And when I began forgetting things - important things, like class assignments and assistantship duties - I knew I needed to get help.

I was 23 or 24, and for the first time in my life, was finally diagnosed with insomnia.  Something I'd already spent 15 or 16 years of my life battling.

There is a clear stigma around mental illness - perhaps less so with regard to sleep disturbance, but the end result is the same.  People don't talk about it.  And given that our only experience of the world is our own, we may not know how it feels to be other people because we can't experience it.  Unlike color perception, however, we can use language to describe the experience of feelings: sadness, fatigue, anxiety, euphoria.

But we don't know what others are feeling - truly feeling - unless they tell us.  We may not realize that others feel sad for no other reason than they are and that things feel hopeless.  We may not realize that others feel anxious about different events.  We may not realize that others sometimes want to stop living in this world for any number of reasons - or no reason at all.

With the recent news of Robin Williams's suicide, the world is talking.  They're talking about depression.  Suicide.  They're expressing disbelief, or understanding, or fear that it may happen to someone they love.  Remember, no one knows what it feels like to be you, unless you tell them.  Here's to keeping the conversation going.  You never know what sharing that side of yourself to others may do.  It just might save someone's life.

Deeply yours,
~Sara