Ever feel like your brain is a slippery bar of soap?

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There are days when it seems like if I try to hold onto a thought, it goes
shooting off to some nether land. The harder I try to hold the thought,
the faster it slips away. Or if I'm listening to someone talk, and concentrating
very hard to catch the important parts of the conversation, some kind of
static interferes so I miss the key elements of the point that person was
making, then once again I am conversationally lost. I don't think this is a
memory problem, something interferes with my ability to understand what
the other person is saying.

Other times if I'm woken suddenly out of a deep sleep I feel
a pulsing like a strobe light going off inside my whole body, not in time with
my heartbeat. Very unpleasant. Do other people get this?

One other oddity: sometimes when I'm talking about something that's important to me,
I start shivering hard and my face muscles get tenser and tenser until it's like I'm
trying to talk through a mask of ice. I can see that other people notice it, and I am fully
aware of what's happening, but can't stop it, so if I want to get my point across I have to
just keep talking, even if I'm starting to slur a bit. Sound familiar to anyone else here?

actually, I feel that way about other people.

Dunno... maybe the GFCF diet would help with this? That or I've also heard that low blood sugar can make it difficult to concentrate and I know there have been times that I've forgotten to eat to the point that I basically just fall over. But leading up to the falling over it becomes difficult to concentrate. So you might check your eating habits and see if they're regular, etc. If you can keep a diary of your eating habits (assuming they're not already very regular), you might be able to identify if there's a relationship to your diet.



Not a "strobe" specifically, but being woken from a deep sleep is always a bit unpleasant for me. I always feel "pressed" and kind of like I'm moving through molasses. Sometimes it also takes me a minute or two to separate what's actually happening around me from whatever I was dreaming about before the person woke me up.



Being passionate about a subject tends to change the way a person talks or even behaves around that subject... I suspect the specifics vary a little. Getting colder though seems kind of like the opposite of what I think happens to most people (who report getting "flushed").

Thanks for the comments. I'm usually pretty strict about being GF,
I'll try to track if the symptoms occur more frequently when I'm not.

Or if you're already on the GF diet most of the time, you could simply choose a time when you don't have any big responsibilities (i.e. "don't operate heavy machinery" as it often says on the side of drugs that make you sleepy) and then eat something that you know has a lot of gluten in it and see if you find that the effects are similar. Try reading a book and see what a big dose of gluten did. If you're wacked until it wears off, then you've likely got your answer.

I have brain fatigues and get an exhaustion that permeates my entire being. I think about doing stuff, feel jammed and then totally demoralized and don't want to do anything.
Most of the time I don't feel right in my CNS, like there is something off. I need to be on something but don't know what, exactly. I know there is something going on in my neurochemistry that would make me feel this strange way. I have been on one SSRI in the past but there were side effects I didn't like.

Have you ever been tested for multiple sclerosis? Or other autoimmune disorders?

The only thing I have ever been tested for is diabetes.

I don't know if this would help you, but I've found that upping my vitimin supplements
by adding Evening Primrose helps me feel sharper, helps dissolve the brain fog.

I'm too much of a lost cause to be totally cured by vitamins alone. I want to get back on the TwinLab, tho.

Have you been tested for epilepsy? The third thing you describe sounds like it could be a mild type of seizure.

On the other hand I sometimes get tremors in my hands and legs during and/or after intense or emotional conversations. With alcohol I can get really crazy tremors when excited. Maybe the thing you describe is just a more extreme form of this psychomotor excitation.

I'm not a doctor though.

Are you generally tired, even with plenty of sleep? I know it seems insultingly simple, but fatigue has more effect on the brain than people give it credit for. Even very mild hypoglycaemia or anxiety can cause fogginess (or fatigue that causes fogginess). Happens to me for at least an hour every day, while there are some hours my mind seems superhumanly clear. Quite variable.


Wait, what kind of pulsing, really? Your nerves, your muscles? Do you see or hear anything? Is it sharp, humming, throbbing? Painful at all?

Myself, I often hear a low-frequency thrumming sound (not unlike the bass of the THX intro) as I break out of a dream, along with a brief vibration through my body, and if my girlfriend is with me she'll be leaning over me with a concerned expression; apparently when this happens, my body 'shudders' awake. I didn't know this until she observed me sleeping.

If it's like that, it's not epilepsy, but it may be a minor seizure caused by sleep apnoea (if you stop breathing for long enough in your sleep, your brain makes a valiant attempt to wake you with jolting signals to muscles, which of course stops when it succeeds). Anxiety can also cause the sleeping brain to panic into mistaking sleep for death, and force you awake in a similar manner. My case is still being looked at, though, so don't take my word for it.


Also symptomatic of anxiety, especially if you shake or feel any tingling, a racing heart, or a flushing sensation in your chest. Adrenaline does crazy things.

If I'm interpreting your post correctly, I've had your symptoms all my life and assumed they were pretty usual, yet I recently ended up in the ER from a very severe panic attack. I was utterly convinced that I was dying, and when you're that convinced, you unconsciously begin to make all the preparations. Frightening stuff. Harmless, but frightening, as well as debilitating.

Hi Saerain,


The "slippery brain" feeling doesn't seem to be connected to fatigue, as far as I can tell. I think it's more of an attention deficit problem that is triggered by something -- possibly gluten exposure. Same with missing parts of conversations.

The strobe feeling doesn't affect muscles. No pain with this, no sound, but it does affect concentration, and I do feel shaky. The only way I can describe it is like a light flashing inside of me, and it happens only after I've woken suddenly out of a sound sleep (like if the telephone rings). I'm guessing it has something to do with the nervous system. Maybe the transition from sleep to waking runs into turbulence.

In the past I've had problems now and them with a swarm of jolting muscle contractions while I'm trying to sleep, my whole body jolts, or my arm swings wildly from one side to the other. The doctor couldn't tell me what it was. But I finally tracked that down to iron levels. I get anemic, and I guess the jolting is muscle response to lack of sufficient oxygen. Now I know that when my eyelid starts twitching, I need to get back on schedule with my iron pills.

I don't think the shivering while talking is related to anxiety, or if it is, I've disassociated myself from it. I fell calm and I'm observing myself shivering and my facial muscles getting more and more tense, but what I feel is "Oh, buggers. Not this again. Well just keep talking, You've got to get the message across somehow." I don't feel anxious. It's more that I need for the other people to know this is important -- sometimes even when I know it isn't anything especially important.

I'm sorry you had such a bad panic experience. Here's something that might help keep it from happening again: www.capacitar.org

I recently heard a woman speak about Capacitar exercises that are being taught to children who have gone through traumatic experiences (seeing their parents massacred in war zones, huge earthquakes, Katrina, etc.) These kids wake up screaming from nightmares, have difficulty concentrating in school, the whole bit. The Capacitar group has developed a set of exercises that are designed to use the body to reach the part of the brain that is responsible for our most ancient "fight or flight" responses. The way she explained it, that part of the brain can get "inflamed" by some traumatic event (or medical condition) and after that any little trigger will throw that person into full flight mode. The exercises are supposed to reduce the "inflamation."

A simple one to start with is the finger exercise. The five fingers of your hand are assigned emotions.
Thumb = tears, grief, emotional pain
Index finger = fear, panic
Middle finger = anger, rage, resentment
Ring finger = worry, anxiety, preoccupation
Pinky finger = lack of self esteem

So first you have to identify what you are feeling. then you grab that finger with your opposite hand and hold it gently for about five minutes while you breath in slowly as you recognize and acknowledge what you are feeling, and breathe out slowly and imagine that feeling draining away. The deep slow breathing is essential, since it can actually change the chemistry of your brain. People can induce panic attacks by shallow rapid breathing. I think it has something to do with the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in the blood stream. (Same reason some people breath into a paper bag when they feel panic.)

Hi Marshall, I did get tested for unusual brain activity once several years ago.
The doctor thought I might have petit mal, but they didn't find anything.

The thing you mentioned about tremors after an intense or emotional conversation
sounds like what I experience, but I'll be shivering all over, and feel very cold.
I've only noticed it when I'm trying to talk to other people, when I'm telling them
my belief or opinion, or making a report on something.

I once read about something call disautonomia (I think). It was defined as "an inappropriate
physiological response to normal stimuli." Which I think means the nervous system has some
rogue circuitry that makes the body respond in an abnormal manner to certian things. Maybe
that's what this is. Although someone suggested to me that it's caused simply by being too tense.
That if I could learn how to really relax, the problem would disappear. That person wanted me to
join a Toastmasters Club and practice giving speeches to large groups of people. Ain't gonna happen.

From what I'm being told, the idea that a panic attack is necessarily a high-strung bout of paranoia isn't necessarily true. I'm an eerily calm person, I'm told, but the physical effects of panic occur anyway, no matter how level-headed I am.

Even during the episode that lead me to the ER, I was calm, simply absorbed in a book, when I had a little trouble taking a deep breath and, assuming it was just some stiffness from sitting, decided to lay down. Shortly after I felt some tingling in my feet, then my left arm went numb. Perplexed rather than panicked, I used my right hand to feel my pulse. I felt two beats, then nothing for about four seconds. Just before I lost consciousness, I felt an adrenaline surge accompanied by my heart kicking back in with a vengeance. I called 911 and told them my heart stopped. This raised eyebrows coming from a 22 year old, but I got in, on a stretcher, with oxygen, shaking like I'd had an ice bath. Most of them thought I was a druggie until the tests came back negative.

Anyway, that's where the panic attack diagnosis came from. If you ask me, I didn't panic until after I felt my heart stop, since that's usually a somewhat serious matter, but who am I to argue with the local hospital and my PCP?

But back to you.

Oh, I thought you were speaking more about simply sluggish thought, like sinus pressure tends to cause.

As for gluten, before I knew about the possible connection between AS and gluten, I followed a raw diet for several years, which was coincidentally gluten-free. I can't say it improved my conversational skills, but I did feel generally better.


No sound or sight, but the feeling of a light flashing? I'm afraid I can't follow.

Like an electrical current?


Ah, anaemia rather than apnoea. Still, yes, low oxygen.

An interesting, useless fact: I am anaemic, yet I also have haemochromatosis; so, I have too little iron in my blood and too much iron in my tissues. It's fun watching them try to figure out how to treat that situation.

What you've described doesn't sound like a panic attack to me, more like a heart attack, or a small stroke, or a sudden steep drop in blood pressure. Did you get your heart checked out? The left arm going numb sounds very suspicious. Pain in the left arm is a classic symptom of heart attack.

The strobe thing I feel does make me think of an electrical current. But I was shocked once (slightly, low voltage) and that was more a buzzing sensation.

Last edited by Bea on 29 Dec 2008, 1:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.