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.
>>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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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'.
Yep and if you're on-call for a week 24/7, I'd say it's only fair you do nothing else preemptively. Because you need to allow for the possibility of being paged.
No manager or employer would ever buy that shit because it rounds in the direction of less work though.
A shift pattern without anyone on call. 3x 8hr shifts in a 24hr day[1], optionally distributed around the planet so that all shifts are working in their local daytime.
Fred Brooks said [1] that there are two types of complexity, accidental and essential. While accidental complexity can be reduced the theory is that the essential complexity cannot.
"Accidental complexity relates to problems which engineers create and can fix; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things."
I guess the whole point of design or engineering for that matter is to get as close as possible to the bare minimum of essential complexity. Elegance comes to mind, if you are able to jump over several complexity traps.
While OODA is an interesting and increasingly popular concept, it is really only useful when applied to very short intervals of time. You can and should expect that an opponent with "a reasonable amount" of time will make the correct response. In business that timeframe is much longer than the few minutes or seconds a modern aerial duel might be concluded in.
The general idea of OODA is that if you can "play fast" you can beat someone who can otherwise "play better". Think about how blitz chess differs from traditional multi-hour games, even though the rules of play are the same: for example it is often possible to exert time pressure by playing "confusing moves". This concept of "fast play" translates into the business timeframe more as the concept of "agility" (to be contrasted with large-company "inertia"), whereas businesses only try to confuse one another on television or by accident :-)
Concepts similar to OODA but more applicable to a business context and timeframe would include PDCA [1] and DMAIC [2].
PDCA a.k.a. the "Deming cycle" stands for "Plan, Do, Check, Adjust" and is closely related to the concept of "kaizen" [3] (or "continuous improvement"). PDCA happens in timeframes that can best be described as a "short project" (or a "kaizen event").
DMAIC ("Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control") on the other hand is a framework commonly used for larger business interventions where the stakes are higher, more project members are needed, more structure is required and so on. It is a key feature of the Six Sigma [4] approach as well as Lean Six Sigma [5].
Note: I'm sure there are other valid approaches too. I'm just mentioning the ones I am familiar with in case anyone else is interested in methods to help businesses improve and respond to change.
There is an excellent book about XM607/ Operation black buck written by Rowland White. It’s not just about the actual mission it’s also about retiring the Vulcan then bringing them back and all the other bit that led up to the mission.
- each horizontal/diagonal line is a refueling operation
So, planes take of from Ascension Island at the bottom, only one reaches the Falkland Islands.
Ignoring the gray vertical lines (they are for ‘insurance’, in case other planes would have hit a problem), we have:
- 6 Victors taking of
- 3 of them refueling the other 3 after a short while (presumably because taking of and getting to flight height uses more fuel than steady flight), immediately returning to base afterwards.
- the bomber taking off
- a seventh Victor taking off, refueling the bomber twice, and then returning to base
- one of the 3 Victors of the first wave refuels the bomber twice, then refuels another of the three before returning to base
- that second one refuels the third one and returns to base
Of all the aicraft that took off, only one actually flew over the target. It had to be refueled seven times on outbound journey, and the last tanker itself had to be refueled three times to fly that far.
Yeah, OK, wow. That's ... complicated. And I think they didn't manage to get a very good return for all this effort, from a diagonal reading of the article.
Er. Sorry, I'm being thick, but your hint about the link to the relevant maths etc went way over my head. I might be missing a cultural reference? :0
Didn't the British do something similar in the Desert Campaign during WW2, burying supplies to be recovered later. The Long Range Desert Group perhaps?
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/