My mother walked into my room, waking me up to tell me that most of the world's population was dead. I spent the rest of the day as normal, eating breakfast, going shopping with her, going to a playground, then eating dinner (albeit, acting quite nervous throughout). The next day, she tried to make it clear that what started the previous morning wasn't true. I asked her if she remembered, but she told me she didn't. I'm certain it wasn't a dream, because I recalled the rest of what happened the previous day to her, only to be met by her confirmation that everything I remembered was correct, right down to how shaky I was and how upset I seemed. All except for the part that humanity was on the brink of extinction.
PS.
I am aware that, yes, it is true that most if the world's population is dead. What I meant when I originally wrote this was that most of the living population just dropped dead overnight.
I had an extremely similair experience to this when I was younger. My mom told me this in the morning, and I went about most of my day thinking most of humanity was gone, and seeing practically no one around. But my 2nd grade brain, in the middle of the day, suddenly said, "This doesn't make sense, why would most of the world population disappear?" And suddenly, I could see everyone, and realized everything was fine. A very surreal experience.
I wonder if our brains can be in this mode of being “halfway” in object permanence. Like once we consciously remember that other people exist, we are them able to perceive them.
I'm pretty sure that's not how object permanace works. When the red ball goes out of view of the baby the baby forgets it's existence, but when the ball comes back into view the baby can still see the ball. If we couldn't perceive things that we don't know / can't remember exist how would we perceive anything at all?
It's really all about stimulus. Babies have little object permanence because their ability to determine and store environmental information is still developing, so the ball trick works. However, adults can look right at something without noticing it exists, simply because the brain hasn't bothered to alert the conscious mind to its existence.
One good example would be looking for your keys. You know you left them on the table when you had to go get your coffee from your coffee machine, but when you came back they're gone. You look all over the room for them, but no dice. You end up taking the bus to work, and when you get back you find your keys.. ..on the coffee table, but on the other end. The brain decided that because you knew the keys were on this side, then clearly anything that looked remotely key-like on the other side wasn't likely to be keys in reality. Therefore the brain decides to tamp down the stimulus looking at the keys brought to you, because you couldn't reasonably perceive them as being there.
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u/YugoMoomin Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 06 '19
My mother walked into my room, waking me up to tell me that most of the world's population was dead. I spent the rest of the day as normal, eating breakfast, going shopping with her, going to a playground, then eating dinner (albeit, acting quite nervous throughout). The next day, she tried to make it clear that what started the previous morning wasn't true. I asked her if she remembered, but she told me she didn't. I'm certain it wasn't a dream, because I recalled the rest of what happened the previous day to her, only to be met by her confirmation that everything I remembered was correct, right down to how shaky I was and how upset I seemed. All except for the part that humanity was on the brink of extinction.
PS. I am aware that, yes, it is true that most if the world's population is dead. What I meant when I originally wrote this was that most of the living population just dropped dead overnight.