It makes sense that depriving your brain of oxygen made you less intellectual. Almost like hypoxia damages the brain, innit.
Yeah I have considered that and others have suggested it but I doubt that’s it \u2013 I kept calm in large part because I’ve trained in grappling before, I have experience with air chokes (obstruction of the airway preventing air from reaching the lungs, as vs. “blood chokes”, obstruction of the neck arteries providing oxygenated blood to the brain) and it didn’t get even as far as I’d have tapped out, no loss of consciousness or narrowing of vision.
(At I’d estimate at about the 25-35 sec mark, self-heimliching opened the airway narrowly enough that I still had to shallowly inhale for another 30 secs or so to generate enough lung volume to cough, but part of that grappling training was realizing how little air I needed to get by)
Also immediately after the episode I entered for several days a “classical” up period of recursively referential racing thoughts i felt compelled to write, while the outgoingness either wasn’t present or wasn’t noticed as such until later. And outside of down episodes that resemble what others have described as “brain fog” depression and seem to have replaced other depressive symptoms (low self-value, more pessimistic interpretation of identical stimulus), I don’t feel any less intellectual or more limited since one year ago, before this all. Maybe one year of normal aging worth of degraded, at most.
Like I say it’s a bit frustrating because it seems to follow the pattern you’d expect from the psychological impact of a strong stressful experience on someone’s self-conception and worldview \u2013 developing with reflection some time after the fact, continuing in the absence of further external stimulus, affecting personality more than capability.
But at a conscious level, my ideas, values, and narrative self-conception haven’t at all changed, either before the fact as a prime-mover (say, like a “born again” conversion) or after (like\u2026 Phineas Gage? Did he understand himself as having “reason” for the personality change across a continuous experienced self?)
I guess we have a precedent in PTSD for the idea that stressful narrative experiences alone can alter otherwise constant personality characteristics without clear mechanisms in the physical, chemical dynamics that personality presumably runs on (though recent CTE developments suggest the WWI “shell shock” idea of “these guys are messed up from an environment of constant nonlethal concussive trauma” might’ve been on to something too)
I really don’t know, more than anything I’m writing this down to work through it, and in case my working through it helps anyone reading this understand me or themselves
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