4 ms·
Whenever I read articles or studies about scientific approaches to "restoring" memories, particularly approaches involving pharmaceuticals, I instinctively assu
by 58x14 4y ago
Whenever I read articles or studies about scientific approaches to "restoring" memories, particularly approaches involving pharmaceuticals, I instinctively assume there's a significant metacognitive counterpart. Surely mental/psychological techniques and external stimuli have an equal or greater impact on memory retrieval?
I have a bizarre personal anecdotal experience with spontaneous memory activation. I was leaving work one evening, and I'm recounting a dream from the night prior to a colleague as we left.
Suddenly, in what felt like an instant, I began to rapidly recall a chain of lucid dreams I've had. Dreams I hadn't remembered in years. I remembered not only the dreams themselves, but my life's circumstances when I had them. I describe this as a chain, but it felt to me more of a... portal. As if inside each of these dreams was a connection to the next.
I awkwardly paused, said a brief goodbye, and returned inside to look at myself in the mirror. My pupils were very dilated, and I felt like I was on psychedelics.
The strangest part is that this... connection has persisted. If I try to recall any of these dreams, including writing this comment, I'm unwillingly transported through these memories, and I have to consciously focus elsewhere.
No idea what to make of this, but it's definitely interesting.
- ethanbond 4y agoOut of curiosity, how do you know you’re remembering things that actually happened? Keep in mind the “felt sensation” of remembering is itself also generated in your head, and we know people can have that sensation while “remembering” things that never happened.
- 58x14 4y agoI suppose it's impossible for me to "prove" whether these memories were/are more-or-less accurate. However they're self-consistent: since this phenomena emerged I've been recording my experiences and the referenced details within the dreams have remained unchanged. The circumstances also map correctly to knowable context: in one of these dreams, I was traveling for work and staying at a hotel. I have the email confirmation from that hotel, and a note from the same day with a simple remark about that lucid dream. Beyond this, I feel a deep, unshakeable confidence that this experience of recollection is unmistakably true. Who knows?
- Maursault 4y agoYou should try eating mushrooms in a sensory deprivation chamber.[1] [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080360/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080360/
- derefr 4y agoFunny, I have a similar cognitive sensation for a kind of deja vu I sometimes get, where I'll remember remembering something and my train of thought about it, but also remember remembering remembering all the previous times I remembered remembering it, and along with it, unwillingly, I'll remember all the trains of thought I had at the times I remembered remembering, sort of replaying all at once, cacaphonously. It's sort of like looking down a well, but it's well of time, where each time I look, the well is one unit deeper and there's another new snapshot of me looking down the well added to the top. It's honestly kind of annoying, because it's almost the cognitive equivalent of an earworm — I have to willfully dismiss it from my focus, otherwise it sticks around. I wonder if this is the original meaning of the term "navel gazing"?
- 58x14 4y agoThis matches my experience eerily well, especially the "one unit deeper" aspect. I feel like I can voluntarily summon this experience in my mind and travel through it forever. It feels frightening, in a way, being confronted with the depths of an unexplored internal mental chasm. Do you have other "threads" with similar phenomena, or is there a singular thread that branches?
- NortySpock 4y ago> It's sort of like looking down a well, but it's well of time, where each time I look, the well is one unit deeper and there's another new snapshot of me looking down the well added to the top. I had to go digging, but it reminds me of the novella Cascade Point by Timothy Zahn. In it, spaceships can travel through hyperspace, but skimming the edge of parallel universes in this way causes the occupants of the spaceship to see visions/hallucinations of their parallel-universe-selves standing nearby. Being able to see the various results of major decisions in your life -- some which lead to the death or grievous injury of the parallel-universe-self -- is quite a shock to most people, and thus it is customary for all passengers to be asleep for the hyperspace travel portion. But all captains are required by regulation to be awake for the transit, and thus in the story this captain must muse on his life-choices, alone on the bridge, because he runs a passenger liner. It's a bit of a wooden, flat story, with a somewhat basic plot, but I thought it was a neat concept-and-consequence of FTL. A blog post with a quick mostly-spoiler-free review: http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/01/review-of-cascade-point-by-timothy-zahn.html http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/01/review-of-cascade-p...
- MikeDelta 4y agoDreams have this tendency to disappear from memory even as one is thinking about them in the morning. Keywords written quickly in a dream journal at night can amazingly trigger entire scenes back into memory.
- darepublic 4y agoI have occasionally experienced disassociative episodes where memories of dreams start to mingle with real memories and I have a hard time telling them apart. Has happened to me a few times.
- mountainriver 4y agoIt’s called prompting ;)
- superkuh 4y agoI don't think the mice in the study are doing much meta-cognition about the experiment.