this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
322 points (95.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
490 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have had some seriously bizarre cases of deja vu. Like, recalling dreams I had years before that exactly predicted a place I would be in in the future. It has happened five or six times. It does make me question things such as consciousness and my place in the universe. It also makes me wonder if my brain is broken.
Yeah, I think there are mundane answers to this. But "mundane" in this case could include cosmological factors like the universe is a weird temporal foam of timeywimey stuff.
I've heard two theories for this that I think are plausible:
A feeling of familiarity even though this is a brand new situation. Your brain is always trying to determine the best course of action from experiences where you've encountered that problem before. Sometimes we have a false positive where the situation is so similar you "remember it", but it's obviously slightly different and new.
Essentially a memory read/write error. Your brain is recollecting as it's consolidating the memory causing wonkiness (technical term) in your experience. You think you remember, but what you're remembering is actually the present experience.
Or you do remember, it's just very very very recent. The present moment is rather funky when it comes to perception (it's not an instant but more of a sliding window in time) and it's reasonable that things can feel like remembering precisely when you see something because whatever lag there is in "write to memory, read from memory" still fits into that sliding window.