“Your past isn’t really your past, it’s just what you remember.” – Courtesy of some dank edibles.
Deja Vu is just an error with how we save memories.
It skips working memory, short term memory, and goes straight into long term memory so everything we experience feels like we’re remembering it, but no matter how hard you try you can’t remember the future.
During certain recreational activities, it can last long enough to realize what’s happening. Normally you just get a brief moment of it till shit gets straightened out.
Alright, so here’s my craziest deja vu moment.
I’m a teenager and I’m sitting around the table with my buddies, and somebody says something that makes me think “woah, deja vu” and I remember that after that phrase was said, Tony would stand up and get some water. There was a brief moment where I knew what was about to happen, and sure enough, Tony stood up and got some water. That was as far as it lasted and it never happened since, but it blew my mind at the time. Still does honestly.
When I was younger I used to have these dreams from time to time where some mundane unimportant things were happening. Like walking through the parking lot of my school with classmates to go to gym class. And then it would happen just as in the dream. They would happen some days, weeks sometimes years after these dreams. And I would remember the dream in that moment and think ‘deja vu’.
And I would remember the dream in that moment and think ‘deja vu’
That’s just Deja Vu. A common interpretation of it is that you dreamt it, because how else had you already seen it happen before? Your brain rationalizes it by telling you that you had dreamt it.
But that’s almost certainly not what happened. It’s the brain making a mistake recognizing a memory as it’s being stored. These types of mistakes get rarer and rarer as the brain learns to not fall for this, which is why Deja Vu becomes less common as we age.
(As I said in another post, I am not a doctor or a psychologist, this is just based on my experience and what I’ve read. But the idea that you’re remembering a dream you had and it played out the same way as what’s happening is a really common interpretation of Deja Vu. Our brains are really really good at rationalizing and inventing memories. And our memories are very flawed. So, Occam’s Razor, it is far more likely that your brain came up with a reason for what you were experiencing rather than that you predicted the future in your dream.)
That’s exactly what Deja Vu is. You’re convinced you know what is going to happen because you’ve seen it before. And when it happens you’re think, “I knew that was going to happen, it happened exactly as I had seen it!” So you remember it that way.
But in the moment you wouldn’t have actually been able to say what was about to happen. Your brain confirms that you did know what was going to happen when it does, because it’s essentially “reading” the memory as it “writes” it.
It helps that our conscious experience of the world is lagged a few milliseconds behind our instinctual reactions. So you actually did see it before you processed it happening, just by fractions of a second.
(NB: I am not a doctor or a psychologist or anything, this is just based on my experience and on what I’ve read. Human memory is very very flawed and we’re prone to remembering things differently than they happened, and be extremely confident about that misremembering. Especially the more times we go over that memory, rewriting it every time.)
No. You don’t understand. I know what regular deja vu is, that happens all the time.
I knew he was going to get up from the table and THEN he got up from the table. I’m not talking about boring old “this feels like it happened before”.
I actually thought to myself “Tony’s about to stand up for water.” BEFORE he stood up, and LONG before he went anywhere near the water (about 20 feet away).
I’d legitimately rather be a housecat.
I had a tech idea, which filled a gap in the market, something the world desperately needs but no one has ever thought of doing it. Instead of more money grab addictive tech junk, this would help people and would benefit society.
It was on ketamine. I forgot what it was when it wore off. I’m truly sorry. I hate myself.
If it makes you feel better, I used to have similar insights when I took ambien to help me sleep. I would be so confident that the ideas were world changing tech, or fantastic ideas for a book, or whatever. Sometimes I would be smart enough to write them down.
The next morning, they were almost never actually good ideas. I can remember exactly one book idea that is actually vaguely interesting.
When under the effects of certain types of drugs, we’re far more likely to think of ideas as brilliant. It doesn’t mean they actually are, though.
Oh I know it was good. I often think from different perspectives when on ketamine and always I see things rather well. The only issue is my memory, sometimes I just don’t remember. But the moments I do remember are really good ideas, but sometimes they are too hard to realize (I had a great idea for an app, but I lack the programming knowledge and I don’t even know where to start). A friend of mine wants to develop it, some others are interested to get involved too. So other people like my ideas too.
My ideas make me create new music, helped me to start learning CAD and buy a 3D printer and laser cutter. Also some things I created were products of a ketamine trip. It helped me create a music tower for all my synths which is made to perfection and makes everyone’s jaw drop when I show them. People are even telling me I should build music studio’s professionally. It was all a product of my brain on special K. I created the perfect synth tower while I never even touched a synth 6 months before I started or knew how one works. Heres a picture. It’s foldable and on wheels. Perfect cable management and everything.
My autistic brain is capable of some nice things but in general it’s unable to perform as I want it to. But ketamine helps breaking through barriers and reach otherwise locked potential. Different perspectives, able to see the bigger picture while at the same time taking all the details into account.
That you can be at a city park, minding your own business while drinking a beer, and every now and then some totally sober Karen will come up all belligerent threatening to call the law, just because I’m drinking a beer.
For reference, the cops don’t care if people drink beer at our park, as long as nobody acts a fool and people clean up after themselves. Hell, even our city mayor will occasionally host events out here and he’ll drink a beer or three.
Pretty ironic that a sober person would be belligerent and threatening to a guy just sipping on a beer and not saying or doing anything except maybe browsing Lemmy or watching YouTube videos.
Like, how is it that me drinking a beer peacefully can cause random sober people to act a fool?
I was DEEP in a K-Hole in my early 20s, laying in bed, floating through space, watching scenes from my past on tiles attached to a huge structure floating through space.
I realized that if I don’t like someone, I never have to see them again; I can just delete them from my life. If I don’t want to do things, I can just say no. If I don’t want to go somewhere, I can just… not. If I don’t like where I am, I can just leave any time.
It changed my life completely. I now only see awesome people and I stay home almost all the time with my partner and cats. I love it.
I invented a gelato store called gelottery. You order by number but you don’t know which flavor is which number and it changes every week. You have to just risk it or go see what other people have posted on our social media.
This is absolutely brilliant. Why does this not exist yet?
🤷 i have no money and i didn’t know how to make gelato. Also, my family doesn’t see the potential in it that you and i see.
I wrote this down, this is verbatim:
I wonder if there are bad drivers in Star trek, like you’re just cruising along in your Galaxy class starship minding your own business and all of a sudden there’s like some fucking romulan right behind you with a bird of prey highbeaming you because you’re only doing warp 7 in a warp 5 zone.
You keep hailing them on subspace frequency telling them to go around, go around and they will not go around you no matter what.
What does a Starfleet captain do? There’s only one correct answer and it’s the same answer that I wish we could do it here on Earth which is to fire photon torpedoes, disable their life systems, board them, kill the survivors and rifle through their pockets.
But they won’t let you do that in starfleet for some reason
I had taken an unmeasured handful of goldcaps and stems. My buddy used to sell them on college and he brought an entire sack for just eats on break. I laid in my bed while my buddy and my other friend exchanged stories while the imagery around my room evolved from scant to vivid. My fan became the root of a tree, and the blankets on me started lapping like waves with faces. For whatever reason, I stared at this scene and felt how all things are connected in life. My vision took me across a myriad of animal and insect lives to experience this. I felt this feeling with every cell of my body. Thats the moment I really realized why the call it the web of life.
The true meaning of life is appreciation.
Also, my dog is so stupid and stupid I love him he’s so me I’m a big stupid smelly idiot dog too
Feeling empathy for a person who was an asshole. Crying because of the misfortune that led them to behaving like that, all the while completely disapproving and ready to fight against it. Mdma is wild
“I should take lsd less often”
yeah you should, your body builds up tolerance to it crazy fast! give it a month’s rest and then it’s perfect!
jokes aside, as probably Watts said - once you get the message, hang up the phone. Psychedelics can be both good fun and very insightful, but if you focus solely on the fun part that’s just escapism - and the drugs will likely and bluntly point it out to you
We’re all just biding time for the trees
When I took acid as a teenager in the 90s, I was tripping balls and realized that entertainment or anything that occupies that mind that we enjoy, in essence makes time seemingly go by faster. Therefor, the more you entertain your brain, the quicker you approach your demise. It really groundbreaking for me at the time. I swore I might just stare at a clock for the rest of my days just to make time seemingly like it passes slower to savor my mortality lol
Memory is a funny thing. If you don’t fill your days with stimulation, the day drags on. But when you look back on that time, you find that you’re not forming many new memories, so the perceived time is shorter. The days get longer and the years get shorter.
Life is often shorter than we’d like, it seems a shame not to try and fill it with new experiences
there’s a good Vsauce video about this!
