[arctangent]

Julian Jaynes' book is of course relevant. [1]

Further to that, I've read on several occasions about lone survivors of disasters who report encountering a person who wasn't there who helped them to survive.

The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).

Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.

There would be an evolutionary advantage to be had if the brain was able to access some "hidden partition" containing recovery instructions during times of extreme stress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

[2] https://consumer.healthday.com/fitness-information-14/climbi...

Edit: better [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088769/

[sandworm101]

>>who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril

There is also the possibility that they in fact never perceived this person during the events, that their brain created the narrative after as a coping mechanism for the trauma. Unless we had footage of them at the time, the two scenarios are very difficult to distinguish.

Some war stories have paralleled this. Troops cut off from chain of command have talked spoken of non-existent leaders (officers, sergeants etc) giving them instructions. After the fact this can look like lies, made up stories to excuse some behavior. They may have actually perceived the individual, or they may only later remember that they perceived the individual. They did not consciously create the person, but nevertheless the person only appears in their minds after the events. Some 9/11 survivors spoke of being rescued by people who we now know did not actually exist. That doesn't mean the survivors don't truly remember them.

[zwkrt]

In the context of human experience I don’t really understand the difference between having a memory of a person helping and having an experience of a person helping. The imaginary person is imaginary and a coping mechanism either way, right?

[sandworm101]

The person who perceives the non-existent person during the events is hallucinating. They are not acting rationally. If you watched them have a conversation with thin air you would call them crazy and generally untrustworthy. But the person who's mind creates the narrative afterwards does not hallucinate, they act rationally at the time and only later use the story to cope with post-traumatic stress. Note that these perceived people are generally helpful, as opposed to hallucinated people who are generally not.

People remember their guardian angel helping them climb out of a collapsed building. You don't see such people ignore firefighters to continue their conversation with the angel. That would be crazy.

[jerf]

It can also help to remember that memories are far from totally accurate video recordings of an event. They are highly-lossfully-compressed, and there's some evidence that the act of recalling them is destructive, so every time a memory is recalled it is destroyed, processed, and re-written.

It isn't surprising that when a very out-of-the-usual event occurs, and the memory goes through this lossy compression and lossy storage, that when it is later reconstructed with the lossy decompression schema generated by a lifetime of "usual" experiences that it would result in phantom "usual experiences" being generated. It is very similar in process to those "deep learning" pictures that turn everything picture you feed it into bizarre mixes of dogs and sea creatures, because that's all that decompression schema understands.

[robocat]

> It can also help to remember that memories are far from totally accurate video recordings of an event. They are highly-lossfully-compressed, and there's some evidence that the act of recalling them is destructive

We have counter-examples of eidetic memory for vision, conversations etcetera so any model has to allow for near-perfect recall.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I think what parent is saying is that subjectively the experience of remembering an imaginary person helped them is not qualitatively different than the experience of remembering a real person helping them. As far as their conception of reality is concerned, someone helped them and for some reason there is no evidence that person existed.

[NetOpWibby]

I was sleepy but you’re last sentence snapped my eyes open. What an incredible concept.

[krisgenre]

Reminds of the movie Inception where Robert's subconscious mind is trained to protect itself from dream thiefs.

[NetOpWibby]

I wonder if such training exists today. Would it be called mindfulness? Maybe it’s just meditation.

[lisper]

Yes, that's it exactly. "Mindfulness" or "meditation" or whatever you want to call it is nothing more than a set of practices that gives your conscious mind awareness of and access to processes in your brain that it doesn't by default have access to. There's nothing mysterious or woowoo about it, other than the fact that your brain is not a computer so the activity by which this access is gained looks a little weirder (to a tech person) than hooking up a connector to a BDM interface. But it amounts to (more or less) the same thing.

[amelius]

I think the brain may very well have some hidden parts. For example, when we dream, a different part of the brain comes up with a plot for the dream which we don't have control over. It's almost like the brain is being trained using an adversarial network.

[NetOpWibby]

Ugh, wake up and notice a typo.

[theli0nheart]

> The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).

From the article you linked:

> the researchers believe that lack of oxygen and simply being completely dependent on oneself could trigger it.

Hypoxia can have bizarre effects on the body, but especially the brain. Anyone with chronic sleep apnea or who has dealt with hypoxia in any form can attest that the brain starts behaving in weird ways when it's deprived of oxygen.

[Fnoord]

> Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.

Cast Away with Tom Hanks is an example of that. Not sure if The Terminal or Into The Wild or Martyrs also had that concept, but it would've fit.

I wonder if (extreme) trauma can cause people to become so-called 'paranormal'.