I often daze out. Some call it spacing out. Some apparently call it tripping (even when no drugs are involved). Everyone that I have asked about it does.
Well, I always thought this was a simple thing. You sort of lose focus for a minute or two and think really hard. Then you go back to your normal state and continue on with your day.
But it's a lot more complicated than that! Your brain pretty much stops receiving signals from your eyes for the duration. If something startles you out of the dazed out state, your heart rate speeds up and you have the effect of a small adrenaline rush.
This is a very physical experience as well as mental, and I want to learn about it (seeing as I'm just hypothesizing about all this).
However I can't find what the technical term for it is called, either medically or phsychologically or whatnot.
[point] Does anyone know anything about this other than what I've stated? What is it called? Linking to a wikipedia entry about it would be sufficient
I dont know.. but I bet it's reptty much the same as being in a trancic state.. you focus on a single thing to the extent of blocking out all else..
My response to someone saying it could be petit mal seizures:
No, this doesn't seem right. The kind of dazing out we experience is just very intense thought in which your other senses (sight, hearing, etc.) and all movement just kinda stops for a minute because you're concentrating so hard on your thoughts. It's not dangerous so much, and it happens when driving as well. It's not that you can't move while doing it. When driving, if I daze out, my hands and feet can control the car just fine (steering, stopping, etc.) until I the experience has ended. And when standing or sitting, sometimes I will perform reflexive actions like flipping a page in a book thought I don't realize I'm doing it, or reading a paragraph like 10 times before realizing what I'm doing or reading. It's not entirely normal or common, but it's not uncommon either from what I understand. My mom has this condition much stronger than I do. She will sit there with a blank gaze in her eyes staring at nothing for minutes while I'm talking, and won't respond; then when she's done dazing out, she asks what I said because she wasn't paying attention. I'm convinced it's caused by deep thought, but I wanted to research it more because it seems to do more physically to your body than it leads on to.
Quote:When driving, if I daze out, my hands and feet can control the car just fine (steering, stopping, etc.) until I the experience has ended.
I notice this effect when walking long distances of routes i know well. Between friends, we call this 'Long Boring Road Syndrome', and the spacing out is caused by a repetitiive task. I used to do it when i worked in repetitive jobs, for example script based sales, and mail delivery. These jobs were the same almost everytime, so i'd only 'wake up' if something unusual happened
Quote:reading a paragraph like 10 times before realizing what I'm doing or reading.
I treat this as something different, usually lack of concentration, i do it a lot if i leave the tv, or music on while reading. I do it alot where i realise that i've just read a whole paragraph and not taken a word in.
Quote:Petit Mal
What is this (Small Death?!?!?)
i think z1re is the closest to what i'd suggest about it; that you fall into another state, closer to trance. try doing one of those eeg, or maybe ecg.. whatever measuers your brainwaves ;p you are in beta waves normally, and alpha when you 'trance' a bit, and just before you fall asleep, then during sleep you reach theta, and in deep rem sleep your brain emits delta waves. or mayb ei have theta and delta backwards. but yeah, only the craziest monks in the world can will themselves to be in theta or delta in a concious state, its deep meditation.
i do it too, its not a seizure ;p btw i believe petit mal means that only a part of your brain 'seizes'(gets a large current passing through many neurons, instead of controlled how it usually is) whereas a gran mal would be most or all of your brain undergoing the electrical shock (seizure). i might be wrong about half the stuff i said, but you wo't know until you learn more about it, so go do that, hehe ;p