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I've never experienced what you have but it's fascinating. > our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume I arrived at the same concl

I've never experienced what you have but it's fascinating. > our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume I arrived at the same conclusion from different experiences. In my late teens and early 20s I worked for several years as a professional magician doing close-up slight of hand magic in nightclubs, restaurants, bars, parties, trade shows and corporate events. I performed for a lot of different types of people in different contexts and noticed how people would describe an effect they'd just seen me do to a friend who didn't see it. Their memory of something they'd just seen moments before was substantially different than what had actually happened. This is unsurprising because my performance was carefully designed and rehearsed to create that misperception. What is surprising was the extreme detail and certainty of erroneous perceptions even from highly intelligent expert observers who were 100% focused on my every action with maximum effort. I found this super interesting and spent quite a bit of time exploring it with various experiments and pondering the implications which led me to the same realization you had about our conscious perceptions being less accurate and more variable than we internally experience them to be. In short, our memories can seem like a video recording to us but that's just a very convincing self-illusion. In recent decades psychologists like Richard Wiseman have published research documenting this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM

mikelevins 5y ago
I learned a bit of hobby sleight of hand as a kid, but never enough to work as a pro. I did later learn another set of similar skills, though, and owned a business in that field for a while: martial arts. Some martial arts are like stage magic in that they work in part by training yourself to do things that most people find surprising because they don't know how you do them or what training it requires to pull them off. Not all martial arts use techniques like that, but some of them do, and some of the tricks of the trade make pretty good party tricks. One example of a party trick that I've witnessed (and even learned to reproduce, poorly): I know a guy who can take a dart in his hand, hold it with his arm fully extended, and, without bending his elbow, stick it in a dartboard from normal playing distance. It looks like magic: the dart flies across the room and sticks in the board. If you have the relevant kind of training, then you know exactly how he's doing it (although, simply knowing it doesn't make it easy to reproduce!), but if you don't, then odds are you don't believe it's even possible.

mikelevins 5y ago

I learned a bit of hobby sleight of hand as a kid, but never enough to work as a pro. I did later learn another set of similar skills, though, and owned a business in that field for a while: martial arts. Some martial arts are like stage magic in that they work in part by training yourself to do things that most people find surprising because they don't know how you do them or what training it requires to pull them off. Not all martial arts use techniques like that, but some of them do, and some of the tricks of the trade make pretty good party tricks. One example of a party trick that I've witnessed (and even learned to reproduce, poorly): I know a guy who can take a dart in his hand, hold it with his arm fully extended, and, without bending his elbow, stick it in a dartboard from normal playing distance. It looks like magic: the dart flies across the room and sticks in the board. If you have the relevant kind of training, then you know exactly how he's doing it (although, simply knowing it doesn't make it easy to reproduce!), but if you don't, then odds are you don't believe it's even possible.