There was a DJ for 106.7 KBPI in Denver that now owns the Guiness record for longest continous radio broadcast. He was on air for something like a month and a half. The way they tested to see if he was still sane was to have him sing Kid Rock songs. Once he finished his record, he was off air for about two weeks, slept it off and came back. As far as I know, he suffered no long-term effects, mental or physical (assuming you don't think of two weeks as long term). Of course, he was never quite sane to begin with, to attempt such a record.
I think the increased brain activity is just undirected and unstructured. As the article said, the parietal lobe became more active, while the temporal lobe became less active. The temporal lobe is associated with language processing, and if I remember my high school psych class, people with highly developed language skills were more likely to think structurally. Dreams are considered to be random thoughts and memories working themselves out and linking themselves to other thoughts in your brain. Now, if you consider dreams at least similar to hallucinations, these hallucinations can be thought of more like waking dreams then they are brand-new images. Sometimes this unfocused power surge can be beneficial. For instance, Leonardo DaVinci was said to sleep in a cycle of four hour stretches of being awake followed by a 20 minute nap. This works out to be less than two hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. And he, of course, was the ultimate Renaissance Man. Maybe it wasn't that he was good at everything, his brain couldn't stay focused on one task at a time.
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There was a DJ for 106.7 KBPI in Denver that now owns the Guiness record for longest continous radio broadcast. He was on air for something like a month and a half. The way they tested to see if he was still sane was to have him sing Kid Rock songs. Once he finished his record, he was off air for about two weeks, slept it off and came back. As far as I know, he suffered no long-term effects, mental or physical (assuming you don't think of two weeks as long term). Of course, he was never quite sane to begin with, to attempt such a record.
I think the increased brain activity is just undirected and unstructured. As the article said, the parietal lobe became more active, while the temporal lobe became less active. The temporal lobe is associated with language processing, and if I remember my high school psych class, people with highly developed language skills were more likely to think structurally.
Dreams are considered to be random thoughts and memories working themselves out and linking themselves to other thoughts in your brain. Now, if you consider dreams at least similar to hallucinations, these hallucinations can be thought of more like waking dreams then they are brand-new images.
Sometimes this unfocused power surge can be beneficial. For instance, Leonardo DaVinci was said to sleep in a cycle of four hour stretches of being awake followed by a 20 minute nap. This works out to be less than two hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. And he, of course, was the ultimate Renaissance Man. Maybe it wasn't that he was good at everything, his brain couldn't stay focused on one task at a time.