Brain Zap Poll?

Do you know what a Brain Zap is?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Please do not respond to this post. Do not explain what a Brain Zap is. Do not look it up before answering.

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Cool, thanks everybody. I’m not gonna close the poll, but you can feel free to talk about whatever here now.

I made the poll for my partner. She’s a chem/bio person who’s pretty deep into the literature about brain chemistry. She wanted some perspective on how common knowledge this concept was. (I know this forum doesn’t represent the “general populace” :sweat_smile:)

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lookin’ at you, venlafaxine… :brain:

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Considering I’ve been medicated / am no longer medicated, I was definitely aware of what they are, though fortunately I didn’t experience them. I have friends that have though. It’s not something that I would have heard of before though, so I’d expect relatively few people to know what they are.

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Same exact reason for me. Was on an SSRI for a while, made myself aware of every potential side effect. Thankfully I didn’t experience brain zaps or serotonin shock, although I experienced a load of others.

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Not only this forum is definitely not a “general populace” kinda place, but I only knew that because my degree is in Psychology and I ended up reading on the topic through that.

Although I think not even within Psy it’s common knowledge.

How intense is it?
Is it something I might have experienced and quickly wrote off as some random sensory glitch?

By the experiences of people I’ve spoken to…
It’s the sort of thing that if you had it, you would have known.

Unless, of course, you are the type of person to break your thumb by kicking a rock and only notice the next day… :stuck_out_tongue:

But I may have had a limited pool.

image

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Personal experience… :sweat_smile:

RDT_20210614_1513531953510644458284618

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I broke my nose once… I don’t know when, I just know that at one point I was sent for an x-ray and they said “we don’t see anything other than your broken nose, but you knew about that right?”. They figured that as it was well and truly healed that would not be news to me.

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Same except without the X-ray, and just feeling the bone structure and my medical professional in-laws, are like… yea you broke your nose at some point

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from my personal experiences, the things i kinda liken brain zaps to are;

  • the kind of zap you get from an electric fence
  • a circuit breaker flipping
  • a severely clicking HDD header
  • hitting a reset switch

but… in your brain

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Are brain zaps a more sporadic sensation or is it something that can be more constant? Because I’ve definitely experienced an unfamiliar sensation when getting off citalopram or venlafaxine (both of which, I think, boost serotonin). I got shocked for the first time by an electronic device a week or so ago and the sensation I’ve felt getting off those medications seemed similar (except that it was in my head), but I’d previously described it as dizziness or vertigo.

For me, my zaps were sporadic, but found to be constant in certain situations and doing certain things.

Situations: Getting off an SSRI, Decreasing Dosages, Changing SSRI
Things: Fast head movement generates low grade zaps, Anxiety generates medium zaps.

An electric zap is a very good way to describe it in my book. Very short, but a bit jarring.

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Closing the poll at 69 votes because I can.

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nice

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Let me guess… you also play Monikers? :sweat_smile: