I've had the same, but in the opposite direction -- and then back again -- from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Over a much longer time period (several hours). Craziest thing I have ever experienced.
Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse" things, like being able to wake up/see.
And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being able to reason at all about what is going on in the world around you.
Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized. Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are. At a level below speaking, having distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.
It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a complete fiction.
I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.
> Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are.
This primal good-or-bad feeling is known as Vedana in classical Buddhism. On an at-home meditation retreat two months ago I had begun to see this arise in every interaction with almost everything. So much so that someone set off a firecracker outside my house (pretty normal in my neighbourhood but at an unexpected time) and I first noted that something unpleasant had happened, then noted that my eyes had flinched, then heard the sound, then recognised the sound as a firecracker. (I was in the shower at the time, wide awake.) The first glimmer of almost every experience was this vedana.
Emotion seems to be a form of super-intelligence or pre-intelligence. Every time I worry about the rate at which we are supposedly approaching "artificial intelligence", I ask myself how close we are to being able to synthesize artificial emotion. Seems like a comfortable 1000 years, if not much much more.
Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse" things, like being able to wake up/see.
And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being able to reason at all about what is going on in the world around you.
Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized. Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are. At a level below speaking, having distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.
It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a complete fiction.
I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.