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Comment by clbrmbr | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else sometimes have the experience where you feel like you know everything that’s going to be said or happen, as if life were a movie you saw so many times in grade-school that you know every line, but forgot about the film until just now?

I feel like this is another situation where sense of time can be reversed.

Derives from consciousness being actually a slow integration of diverse parallel processes.

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There are Jamais Vu, Presque vu, and the more well-known Déjà Vu, but I'm not sure any of them are quite what you're saying.

I've had a semi-similar feeling, where it seems like I've made a decision simultaneously in past/present/future. So it's somehow the way it has always been, even though I decided it now.

I would strongly suggest reading “Time Loops” by Eric Wargo if you’re interested in investigating this feeling more. There are many (documented!) instances of people “remembering” and dreaming about real events in their lives that haven’t yet happened. But of course, the scientific evidence for precognition is pretty flimsy. If it’s real, it seems to have a very small/rare effect.

There have been many occasions where I've been somewhere I know for a fact I haven't been before but can vividly "remember" being there, just as a still frame of what I was looking at in that moment.

My theory is that the brain is temporarily using a lossy delivery protocol - you're receiving short-term memory packets out of sequence and its causing you to feel like you're "remembering" the present.

There is no basis for my theory and it's fantastical horseshit.

Yeah I feel like it’s some kind of time delay.

The reason the scientific evidence is flimsy is that this can almost entirely be attributed to selection bias: it feels important when you make predictions that are correct, it doesn't feel noteworthy when you make ones that are wrong - you'll probably even forget about them by the time they turn out to have been wrong.

Plus our brains are pretty good at predicting what will happen based on things we've seen before and most people have intrusive thoughts (though these are usually based on actions rather than just things happening, e.g. throwing a baby out of a window or jumping in front of an oncoming train). Our memories are also extremely malleable so if a prediction didn't match exactly our brains will happily adjust the details to find a match or we'll ignore details that don't match because they don't seem as important as the ones that do.

It's spooky but the real wonder here is that our brains work somewhat reliably most of the time to begin with. Even our vision is a complete mess - ranging from the physical blind spots in our eyes to various forms of "blindness" (e.g. change blindness) and the work our brains have to do in order to compensate for saccades (i.e. why you don't see motion blur every time your eyes move).

Perhaps you're looking for Déjà vécu (already lived), or Déjà rêvé (already dreamed)?

I've experienced that exact same feeling you're describing a handful of times. Never quite could pinpoint the phenomena ever before; so I resorted to asking ChatGPT, and it gave me this: https://chat.openai.com/share/a3b2aff6-3973-466b-b2b3-a3612c...

Déjà vécu. A movie analogy: https://chat.openai.com/share/7ac902c8-39c2-49a0-a883-90d5e5...

"Zeman says he has seen several people whose experiences fit the description of déjà vécu more than déjà vu, because they are so overpowering. Like Shona, a woman in her mid-twenties who woke up one morning, ate breakfast, got ready for work, but felt she was 'acting in a film that she had seen before.'", from https://www.vice.com/en/article/gymn5m/there-is-more-than-on...

Twice I've had a similar sensation. DMT was involved.

I tripped in the same place twice exactly a year apart (four trips, two places). On the second of these I had a sense that time looped around so I could hang a left and go re-live the past year, or I could take a right and move on to the future.

Not sure how many lefts I made, but the most recent pair of choices were: right, right (as they'd have to be in order for me to be in this now).

This feeling is connected to memory formation and the fading out and fading in of action potentials aka neuronal spikes. Little research so far.

I'm certain it's strongly connected to dopamine and serotonin (of fucking course) circuits and global receptor states and depending on intensity of the sensation and level of awareness of person probably linked to schizophrenia, paranoia and other fun stuff.

I can't remember the name of the study but I believe it was posted here on HN a short while ago. If anyone is in the mood or has it stored in memory or bookmarks, please provide. Thanks!

I used to sit in class and speak in my head exactly what the teacher was saying, which made it feel like I was somehow predicting what the teacher was going to say next.

Do you mean a deja-vu? Or do you mean something different?

I think they mean the strong sense of déjà vu. I get a weird one where the déjà vu itself is what I've felt before, déjà vu squared. Feels horrible!

Yes! I've experienced this a few times before, like a meta-déjà vu. It is a really uncomfortable feeling.

Description sounds like normal déjà vu to me. It's not a feeling that I felt before, it's a feeling that I know what's going to happen the next moment, but I can't actually recall it, but the moment it happens I recognize it as recalled.

Sometimes, I feel like not only I've been in this same situation before and know what will happen next, but also that I've felt like I've been in this same situation before. So basically like this is (at least) the third time I'm experiencing this situation: once when it was new to me, a second time where it felt like deja vu, and this third time where the deja vu itself is already familiar.

I think a clinical psych person may label this as depersonalization/derealization.

But I like how the parent called it "a slow integration of diverse parallel processes" - not labeling the experience as some kind of problem.

I've experienced a few long déjà vu sessions where I feel like what is happening has already happened. It only happens to me when I slept badly.

"It's called mescaline, it's the only way to fly".

Yes, almost constantly.

I mean there are times where I feel like I’m so familiar with the variables involved or so fixated on observing everything that I can make very good guesses about the sort of thing that might happen next - but that isn’t the same as knowing or getting time backwards or ‘remembering the future’ or something.

Maybe on psychedelics?

> Derives from consciousness being actually a slow integration of diverse parallel processes.

Yes. I might rephrase to highlight possibility that consciousness is a form of recursive self-control of the relative timebases of those many parallel, and only roughly synchronized neural processes.

Modulating relative synchrony (parasynchrony) may be as important in cognition and consciousness as the number of spikes per time window.

One of the big challenges in consciousness research is the binding problem across systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem

Binding may be explainable by multiplexing and manipulating a set of quantal temporal offset strata spaced a few milliseconds apart from each other. Binding, attention, and even consciousness may involve a set of recursive attentional proceses that shift and shunt active neuronal subcircuits into different temporal offset tiers. A few milliseconds one way or another may be the difference between attending or ignoring a stimulus or proto-thought.

An inexact metaphor: imagine a set of adjacent radio channels swapping content to be closer or farther apart in frequency. Neighboring channels snap together if content harmonizes, giving rise to vibrant voice and music. If not, then only low level signal or noise.

The recursive modulation of thalamocorticothalamic activity across “chosen” subsets of circuits may be what Douglas Hofstadter was hinting at towards the end of Gödel, Escher, Bach (p 709; Strange Loops as the Crux of Consciousness). What I am adding is the probable CNS circuitry and the idea of temporal multiplexing—-a common theme in both analog and digital processor design and computing.

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