Science and Prescience

Factual Questions
1

This is gonna sound really bizarre, stupid, or trollish, but I am quite curious.

When I was 10, it was Time To Move. Every 2-3 years of my life I’ve moved, and my parents always timed it to occur right before school would start. Very soon after coming to this new place, I went to the first day of school, of course. All the kids gathered in the cafeteria, at the long tables, one table for each class. When I found my table, I recognized a girl sitting at it. In shock, I sat next to her and asked her if she’s Diana So-and-so. She looked very confused, and said yes, and who was I? I tell her who I am, and that I used to know her from ballet classes back in the city I used to live in (rather far from the new one). Well, to my surprise, she’s never had ballet lessons, never been to that city before, and doesn’t know who I am, and would I stop scaring her please?

After a bit of introspection for a few weeks after this, I realized I was having a series type of dream (I’m a lucid dreamer, and I regularly break all the ‘rules’ of dreaming, so this isn’t too odd) of going to my old ballet class, which I hadn’t attended in a few months, even before the move, and that the girl had been there, and she was friendly to me.

So the girl was right. I had never met her before except in sleep. And this is what confuses me. I know I never saw her before that, because I had not seen anybody after we had moved, let alone known their first and last name, and memorized what they looked like. I hadn’t overheard anybody say her name when walking up to the table AFAICanFigure, as not only was there barely anybody there to talk to, but I have TERRIBLE hearing for normal-pitch voices, especially in semi-crowded places, not to mention what use would she have to state her first and last name intelligibly enough for me to hear, or shown such shock at somebody obviously overhearing her?

I would really like a scientific explanation for this. I buy into no pseudo-science crap, and I have no religion (in case one of them likes things like this). Just random chance fell into this? It’s been less than 9 years since this happened, so it wouldn’t be mental deterioration (especially since I wrote about it and just conferred with my parents who remember it too), would it?

I’m sorry if this is rather disjointed, I’m kinda tired and I’m not known for phrasing things well. :stuck_out_tongue:

2

As long as we’re talking precognition here, I’ve had many instances of it my whole life, and sometimes I’ve remembered things before they’ve happened. The things I remember are always from my visual point of view, and they’ve always been random, meaningless moments. I know this is impossible from a Newtonian perspective, but is there some explanation in the laws of quantum mechanics, maybe involving tachyons or something?

3

Umm, straying into ‘deja vu’ territory here, ‘remembering’ things before they happen. How long after you remeber things, do they happen ?

Seconds ?
Minutes ?
Days ?

If its seconds (or apparantly seconds) it has something to do with the two halves of the brain trying to keep up with each other, but one lagging behind - I think, not sure.

Interesting

4

I get plenty of deja vu moments when I’m tired (silly laggy brain has no T1 connection to the Outside World I guess).

This wasn’t deja vu though, it was recognizing somebody, and knowing their full name, without the ability to know them before. I admit memory may have slightly failed me, although it seems my memory lapses are on a short-term basis, or that I heard her say her full name and managed to understand it and she was shocked at it. I guess all I’m curious about is whether there is another Likely Possibility as to how I knew her other than overhearing her. Or to be enlightened that random chance would produce such an event, which I guess it would eventually.

Bah, stupid insane brain, I’ll get you one of these days! :mad:

5

…Uh, what is an example of brain lagging in seconds? Is that like, you were thinking of telling someone something, and now you’re suddenly unsure if you actually told it out loud, or just thought you did say it??? - Jinx

6

Precognitive dreams are fascinating. It’s amazing you knew this girl’s name. Even more curious, why are such events always one-sided? Why doesn’t the other person experience a similar dream or other precognitive notion? This has always bugged me. You’d think there’d be evidence of some kind of pairing-up of such events, at least some of the time, anyhow… - Jinx

7

I met a guy in high school (grade 11) with whom I’d attended kindergarten. We’d been good friends, then one of us moved and we didn’t see each other for years. We still recognized one another.

Did you ascertain that she had never attended any of the previous schools you’d attended? Just because you just moved there doesn’t mean you never met her before.

I used to get dream-wise deja vu. I’d have a dream of an ordinary event such as a ball rolling across the grass, think it was strange to remember it in the morning, and then recall said dream a week or month later while playing ball tag with friends: hey, there goes the ball rolling across the grass! I remember that! It happened a few times over several years, but hasn’t happened in over a decade now.

8

I’ve also heard of the deja-vu explanation as stated by ChalkPit above. I’ve read it in a popular magazine, so I don’t know about it’s scientifc merit. The part of the brain that processes visual images is located at the far back of the head, above the neck. The part that processes sounds is located very near the ears. What happens in deja-vu is that you brain is a little bit out of synch, and you “hear” the information just before you “see” it, and when that happens you think to yourself “wait a second, something is familiar…”

9

Skeptico explains the “lagging brain” deja vu I and most (all?) people get.

And I managed to omit part of the story, oops – I became sort-of friends with her later, until my hamster bit her thumb and she was blood-fainty. But talking with her, she had lived in that house her entire life, so I definitely hadn’t met her before. =/

10

There are other complications, too. In this case, you walked up to a person you never met before, called her by a name, and that name just happened to be her actual name. But how many times have you walked up to someone, called them by a name, and it turned out you were mistaken and thinking of someone else? I know it’s happened to me. How many times? I dunno, I’ve never really kept track.

Likewise, a bunch of other people do this often, as well, and never keep track of it, either, because it’s really not all that remarkable. But when one time one person randomly happens to get the name right, that person most certainly does remember it, and tells everyone about it. Since we didn’t remember all the failures, the one success seems a lot more significant than it really is.

This is why skeptics are always emphasizing the importance of controlled experiments. If we could put you in a room and one by one bring in strangers to meet you, and you guessed their names reliably and repeatedly, then we’d be on to something. But I’ll bet that if we did that, you wouldn’t do any better at naming the folks than random chance would indicate.

11

Perhaps a simpler (although still completely speculative) explanation would be that you did know her from somewhere other than your ballet lessons and that your mind provided some extra details free of charge.

I strongly suspect that the memory of the dream about the ballet lessons is something that your brain constructed after the meeting - I think it might have been like this:

You saw someone you had met before.
You (mis)remembered the place of meeting as having been your ballet lessons (maybe there was someone else there that looked, smelled, sounded etc a little like them).
You talked to the person, asserting that you met them at your ballet lessons.
They denied this, causing you confusion.
In your confusion, you rack your brains trying to think why you remember it this way. This perplexes you a great deal.
Your brain obliges by convincing you that you merely dreamed it, but in constructing this convenient false memory, the little detail of how you could possibly have dreamed a future event is overlooked.

Speculative - YMMV

12

Well, from my personal experience I don’t think at was any kind of cognitive lag, although the memories generally happen a second or so before the occurences. I’ll remember something, then I’ll see or hear it. I get a lot more instances of deja-vu then actually remembering things beforehand, though.

13

What? You think your memories don’t deteriorate over nine years?

What was on the menu that day?

One phenomenon that is very easy to overlook is the way that repeated tellings and retellings of a story reshape our memories, glossing over some facts, exaggerating others, and maybe, just occasionally, wholly confabulating some more.

My mother claims she was witness to an event that happened to me when I was about ten, but I am sure she was not there. Her version seems to me to contain extracts from more than one event. I even imagine that in my adult life I have seen her version change over time. The version in the last retelling contained elements that categorically could not be true. But I couldn’t talk her out of her POV, after all, she knows what she saw! But so do I. At least one of us is wrong and yet we both believe our own version to be correct.

Bottom line – you cannot trust your memory, and definitely not my mother’s.

14

You have several dreams EVERY night, 365 days a year, every year you are alive. Inevitably some of them will “match up” with something in the real world.

15

Chronos: At most once, at least never. I don’t talk to people I don’t know in a personal manner (too much “don’t talk to strangers they’ll kidnap you” junk when growing up), and if I know them, I won’t be calling them by name anyway unless I’m sure they have no idea who I am, and that’s nowadays. I was much much much more shy back then. Sorry, I’ve never been a social creature; even talking on a message board can be slightly frightening.

Mangetout: I’m hoping I had seen her in a grocery store or something where she said her full name. I had excellent memory back then, possibly due to being overly bored so I memorized my environment to a high degree. Not to mention every other possibility is insane or stupid.

The Great Unwashed: I don’t trust my memory, hence I was asking here what were some possibilities. I know the transcribed event happened, but before that is kind of fuzzy other than that I know I hadn’t known her to any degree outside perhaps viewing and hearing in a public place. I know how awful memory can be to make seeing a meteorite into seeing a UFO with aliens waving and fuzzy dice.

So okay, since random chance possibility things don’t seem to be too awful possible I’ll go with the next likely, both to corroborate with what I kinda expected, and to help stop my mother from using it as ‘proof’ I’m psychic. -_-

16

Good, I’m glad to hear it, you’d be surprised how many people never truly understand the consequnces.

Er, hang on a second, you recognise the need to distrust your memory AND you know these events happened?

I guess you have good corroborating evidence that somehow you forgot to mention in you OP.
Forgive me for writing so clumsily, but do you undersatnd what I am saying?

17

After long and careful reflection, I have come to the conclusion that the phenomena that ChalkPit mentioned, that of different parts of the brain sometimes lagging in perception, explains my precognition. I believe that the cognitive part of my brain conceptualized the meaning of words a split second before the audio & visual signals of the events were perceived by me. I now believe that this phenomenon is the source of “deja-vu”, which I have experienced at times throughout my whole life.
My belief system has been altered by this realization. I’m aware of many of the incredible, magnificent, beautiful, and enigmatic properties of the world around me as I was before, but I no longer believe in any sort of temporal manipulation, or precognition, and I find myself somewhat saddened by this. I also am adding this to my collection of examples of how unreliable human perception can be.
The Dopers have my thanks for this illumination.
Virgo: (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Certain shortcomings in your education and upbringing cause you to read meaning into the relationships among various celestial bodies.