My hour of memoryless lucidity

My grandmother suffered from Dementia. For a period of a couple of years I would call her every Friday, and we would have literally the exact same conversation each time, including her making the same jokes at the same points in the conversation, using the same phrasing. I concluded that people are in fact pretty deterministic, even over the long term.

I had a very similar experience as a teenager after a mild concussion from falling on ice. According to my family, I would 'reboot' every few minutes and ask the same few questions exactly. It got burdensome enough that they put up a note on the inside of my bedroom door with something along the lines of:
"You are having amnesia"
"You hit your head and got a mild concussion"
"You've already been to the ER, they said you're likely to be fine after a few hours and it is safe to sleep."

The entire experience was (reportedly) very stressful to me due to disorientation.

Do you know what the drug was which did this?

I wish I could figure out how to share screenshots here (first time commenting), but I had a similar procedure, and here's what I found in my conversation history on my phone later that day (no recollection of any of it):

Me: "Was anesthetized this morning for procedure"
Me: "Probably still not all the way conscious"
Me: "Woke up maybe 30 minutes ago?"
Me: "I vaguely remember explaining to the doctor, 'I'm not fully conscious right now. I have no conscious idea of what I'm saying. But I'm having a coherent conversation. It turns out the Wernicke's area of the brain (language center) can engage in cogent conversation entirely on autopilot, just as I'm having now. This is fascinating given the findings with AI, which aren’t conscious and yet can string together coherent sentences.'"
Me: "The entire conversation is now remembered vaguely as a dream"

Friend: "so you had a conversation while unconscious about being able to have conversations while unconscious"

Me: "Yes, it seems?"
Me: "Shelby has filled in the details"
Me: "She says I was really nerdy and enthusiastic about the implications of my experiences for cognitive psych"
Me: "She wasn’t supposed to give me my phone yet"
Me: "So I’m probably not even supposed to be talking right now"

Friend: "well you're at least coherent"

Me: "I guess that’s the point"
Me: "Coherence doesn’t require awareness"

I would love to hear suggestions for other things I could try. If you have any, let me know in a comment!

My answer. [LW · GW]

You might be the only person in the history of humanity for whom the so-called "wisdom" tooth has finally done its job.

To test whether Drake’s circumvention of his short-term memory loss worked via the intended mechanism, I could ask my girlfriend in advance to prompt me once — and only once — to complete the long-term memory scene that I had been practicing. Then I could see if I have a memory of the scene after I fully regain my memory.

You should have her decide (and write down) what to encode in advance, so that you can check later not just if you remembered something, but if you successfully encoded it in such a way that you communicate what you intend to communicate to yourself.

(Since Drake managed to send a memory, but was only guessing about what it was intended to mean.)

Update: the strangely-textured fluid turned out to be a dentigerous cyst, which was the best possible outcome. I won't need a second surgery :)

Anecdote. The first time I went under anesthesia, I was told by a nurse that I would not remember her talking to me. I took it as a challenge. I told her to give me a word to remember. When I finally sobered up, I was able to remember that word, but pretty much nothing else at all from my experience.

This leads me to suspect that Drake's achievement had more to do with concerted effort and holding it in RAM than it did with storing the thought in long term memory. 

This kind of study is really great because so much of what we know about short-term vs. long-term memory is based on just a few (admittedly, very convincing) lesion studies. I was always a little skeptical about the supposed clear distinction between short-term memory, long-term memory, and cognitive function, but this story really made me update in favor of this model! The fact that you could still perform pretty well on the spelling bee even without seeing the letters in front of you is impressive! I hope we see more LessWrong self-experiments along these lines (hopefully safely and under clinical supervision). :)  

I consumed edible cannabis for the first time a few months ago, and it felt very similar to the experience you're describing. I felt regularly surprised at where I was, and had lots of trouble remembering more than the last 30 seconds of the conversation. 

The most troubling experience was listening to someone telling me something, me replying, and while saying the reply, forgetting where I was, what I was replying to and what I already said. The weirdest part is that at this point I would finish the reply in a sort of disconnected state, not knowing where the words were coming from, and at the end I would have a feeling of "I said what I wanted to say", even though I could not remember a word of it.

I recently had cataract surgery with the same mix of sedatives and was assured I would remember nothing. Didn’t work in my case. I followed the play by play between the nurse anesthetist and surgeon offering my own commentary. “You’re going to have to give him some more” was something the surgeon said more than more than once along with “I’m going to have to ask you to be quiet now Mr Gunflint.”

They wheeled me into recovery. I noticed the temperature on the thermostat was set to 65. “Why so cold” I asked? “You can see that?” they responded. In recovery I chatted up another nurse getting my wife to show the nurse a picture of the trout I had caught the week before. The nurse looked around a bit nervously and broke protocol and pulled out her phone to show me a picture of the fish her husband had recently caught.

My memory of the whole event remained intact. I can only assume it has something to do with my embarrassingly high tolerance to intoxicants.

For what it's worth, being sedated for a wisdom tooth extraction preceded my stream entry (Buddhist term for an early stage of awakening) by about 6 months. Before that I had no real experience with being in severely altered states (other than accidentally Robotripping which I was unintentionally doing because I didn't realize how sensitive I was for DXM and had been experiencing it since I was a toddler taking cold medicine and thought it was just part of being sick). The experience of seeing myself continue to operate when "I" wasn't there was eye-opening.

Curated! This is a nice short post! I think the altered state of memorylessness is pretty interesting evidence for how minds might work. I would not have guessed that the multiplication tasks wouldn't be impaired (though I'm a little confused how to think about exactly what it means to have no trouble doing a multiplication while needing to be reminded of the numbers).

This post also reminds me of (HPMOR spoilers)

A better way to do the memory overwrite experiment is to prepare a list of what’s in the box to match each of ten possible numbers, then have someone provide a random number while your short term memory doesn’t work and see if you can successfully overwrite the memory that corresponds to that number (as measured by correctly guessing the number much later).

Clive Wearing's story might be interesting to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos&feature=youtu.be

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Benzodiazepines such as midazolam cause anterograde amnesia. I had the same experience while under conscious sedation for a brain MRI. 

AA impacts episodic memory, but it can occasionally impact semantic memory. In this latter case, it will look like you're cognitively impaired even if you're not. 

thereby writing directly into your brain’s long-term storage and bypassing the cache that would otherwise get erased

What do we know about "writing directly" into long-term storage versus a short-term cache? What studies? Any theories about the mechanism(s)?

Having wisdom teeth out was also a fascinating experience for me for similar reasons, but I don't know what I did in that lucid-but-amnesiac (and for all I know actually unconscious?) interval. I did apparently walk to the recovery room under my own power, so while I don't think I was asking questions or solving math problems, I was at least navigating under my own power and avoiding running into walls. What really sticks in my mind was that I had this experience of "coming to", like almost identical to the sensation of waking up except without feeling like I had just been asleep. It wasn't that different from other experience where I'd had a lapse of awareness and come back suddenly to awareness of the present moment, but the discontinuity was more dramatic.

(As a side note, I love the thought of smuggling a short-term memory out of a period of memory loss by hiding it in a long-term memory. No idea whether I'd expect that to actually work, but definitely a creative approach to the problem.)

That was fascinating, and well written, thanks for sharing. There I thought eventually having my wisdom that out would be a hassle, now I’m looking forward to it.

To test whether Drake’s circumvention of his short-term memory loss worked via the intended mechanism, I could ask my girlfriend in advance to prompt me once — and only once — to complete the long-term memory scene that I had been practicing. Then I could see if I have a memory of the scene after I fully regain my memory.

Maybe you need to think the thought many times over in order to overwrite the original memory. In your place, I would try to prepare something similar to what Drake did. Some mental objects that you can retrieve have a predesigned hole to put information. To me, it seems like this should not be that hard to get. Then for ideally 30 minutes or so (though the streaming algorithm experiment seems also very interesting) after the surgery when you don't have short-term memory, you can repeatedly try to insert some specific object in the memory.

Maybe it would make sense for the sake of the experiment to limit yourself to 3 possible objects that could be inserted. Your girlfriend can then choose one randomly after surgery, for you to drill into the memory, by repeatedly thinking about the scene completed with that specific object.

Then after the 30 minutes, you do something completely different. Then 1 hour afterwards your girlfriend can ask you what the object was that she told you 1 hour ago. Well and probably many times during the first 30 minutes.

Probably it would be best if your girlfriend (or whatever person is willing to do this) constantly reminds you during the first 30 minutes or so that you need to imagine the object. Probably at least every minute or so.