at burning man a friend of mine took an unfortunate mix of psychedelics and prescription drugs, and for the rest of the day he lost much of his ability to sensory gate. he became extremely sensitive to light and sound, asked us to speak softly without hard consonants
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he asked us all to do this, even though some people were maybe 20 feet away and quiet already. he requested that someone hold his hand while staying grounded and when that person’s posture was ungrounded he could feel it through the hand and he asked them to shift it
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through the hand, he could tell how grounded someone’s posture was in their *hips*
this isn’t the only story i have of someone exhibiting high levels of sensitivity but it’s one of the most extreme. gave me a visceral sense of how much raw sense data is being filtered
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another story: another friend of mine told me that once when he was a teenager he had a very unusual day (i forget if it was triggered by drugs again) where he felt like he knew what people were going to say a few seconds before they said it. never happened again
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he’s not a woo or hippie guy, if you met him you might think he was a trucker or an ex-football player, iirc military background. i have no reason to believe he was lying or even exaggerating this story for effect. at the very least i believe this is how he remembers it
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but actually i’m pretty inclined to just take him at his word, that for a day he could, in a limited way, see a few seconds into the future. i believe the raw sensory data is there to permit this level of inference, under conditions, in a totally physics-compatible way
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all of it. i don't think it actually matters much which; i think the mind will look for whatever signal it can in anything. wind currents, electrical / magnetic currents, smells, facial expressions, body language
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Pheromones
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maybe not in isolation but i could buy in combination with facial expressions and body language. like i said i think the mind uses everything it can get its hands on, ML algorithms are similar
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i guess this just all seems like a very convoluted handwavey explanation when it’s orders of magnitude more likely the guy had a short manic episode or something
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i mean that seems compatible with what i’m saying? i think short manic episodes are exactly the sort of condition likely to produce in reased sensitivity
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