Given what I felt (or 'felt', as the case may be), your first suggestion seems more likely than your second; though given what little I do know of the brain, the second seems more plausible than the first. I don't have enough data to think one is significantly more likely than the other, and I'm not sure where I might find or create such data.

As for the downvotes, I'd made a private bet to myself before posting, that I was sufficiently oblivious to and unaware of local social norms that I'd make /some/ social error causing my post to be downvoted to oblivion, and that I wouldn't know why unless someone explicitly told me, which I expected to be unlikely. I'd thought I'd recalled LessWrong's "oblivion" was five downvotes rather than three, but was wrong about that.