The forgetting mechanism

[Jees]

While dude slipped out of the changa experience, he literally felt a mechanism at work busy with forgetting what happened, the slipping out of the "what happened" could be felt directly as an ongoing process, like a gum wiping out gently and slowly the event. Even the gumming out action in itself was a clearly observable action event. Like one can feel sand flowing out of the hand between the fingers. Like inevitable, non reversible. Like impossible to merge the two realms. Some minutes later, all was wiped out and it was done slow and steady. Grabbing back and wanting to remember did not help. It was not allowed.

I wonder if this is how very traumatic events, like accidents, or hostile attacks also often are erased from the consciousness by the same gumming mechanism within a human being.

 

[TGO]

It is funny you should mention this because my latest experience felt very similar. I was shown things from previous trips and was told that I had forgotten them and why/how we humans forget. But like you said, as I was remembering these things they were also slipping right out of my head at the same time. It was indeed observable for me too. It felt like some sort of joke the DMT space was playing on me... I guess it brings new meaning to "in one ear, out the other."

I haven't really been able to find a way to remedy this. While there, it seems like there is no way I could ever forget and I have an infinite amount of "ah-ha!" moments but as soon as I am back it is a struggle to piece things together.

At a certain depth of hyperspace, recall becomes very difficult. Going in and coming out are always crystal clear..it is the middle that is muddy. Although sometimes some trips are clearer than others for me, I just haven't been able to put my finger on as to why that is.

 

[Chan]

Hypercubes don't fit into postage-stamps?

Glad I'm not the only one! I reckon it's to do with some kind of "dimensional mismatch"...but that is only my completely uninformed speculation.

 

[Strigiform]

Psychedelics reroute signals in the brain in all sorts of strange ways and really distorts the perception of the passage of time. Beyond synesthesia and hallucinations, I do not think that it's especially crazy that we might perceive lower-level functions of the brain at work.

The brain doesn't really capture that much information when forming memories. The memory is absorbed into certain regions as a kind of electrical and physical change. When we remember something we're calling on a number of things all at once that helps us replay the scene/sketch the picture out in our heads, but truly photographic memory is rare. Our moods and various ideas at the time can transform memories into the realm of fiction. Eye-witness testimony is the worst possible form of evidence since our memories are so bad at capturing detail! So really, the brain does quite a bit of filtering before bothering to really commit anything long-term like equations, Scriptural verses of some kind, music or how to stand on your head.

And the brain certainly supresses traumatic memory. Psychedelics can lead to traumatic episodes in a number of circumstances.

 

[RhythmSpring]

You guys are all on point.

I'm just coming to say: thank goodness for our forgetting mechanisms! Sometimes we curse them, wanting to remember our wildest dreams, visions, and memories, but ultimately, the forgetting mechanisms in a healthy person allow him/her to be an efficient, effective, streamlined, and stable soul.

 

[gibran2]

Here are a couple of old threads/posts where this very topic is discussed:

Memory and Forgetting

"Selective" Forgetting

(I still remembered them after 6 years!)

 

[Jees]

Thanks for the inputs.

Forgetting as a data overload prevention seems useful, but when it comes to the experiences it looks more like accessibility issues. I've now had several pharma sessions that allowed me to remember past night dreams that were long forgotten, as if accessibility became possible, and knowing that after the pharma the dreams will become "forgotten" again and it did. So I know they were never gone, but only in special circumstances accessible again.

Like it has been mentioned in the posts/links, It heavily tends to temporal diverted brain routing and its effects. I've (intuitively) never been a fan of memories are stored like data in brain as on a usb stick, but rather think of brain routes being an antenna receiving frequencies. Change brain route = resonating on other frequencies = other data is tuned in.

Very hardware and no data ever kept stored locally in the head. Less mysterious too except for the fact that all frequencies are out there, all knowledge, all dreams, emotions, feelings, etc, like a huge vibration-library open to be visited-tuned-in if you can. Then learning and forgetting is like making a shift in frequency addressing by change of the antenna structure, which is the brain signalling route form. Just guessing though...

 

[thymamai]

memory is a fascinating concept. is it not like some sort of slow slow motion cronus of the dissolution of substances in water, of the dissipation of a cloud of dust? it seems to hold, but if ever fastforwarded would it not resemble some aquatic cataclysm? a ripple a sound a plume of smoke... memory itself is a myth. there is the nature of the substance of the imprint that endures and nothing more.

 

[eastlancsguy]

Very hardware and no data ever kept stored locally in the head.

Whaddya know?! The brain uses cloud storage Great concept.

 

[anon_003]

For hyperspatial memories.... perhaps state dependant memory memory? WIKI-State Dependant Learning

For traumatic events... perhaps a self-defense mechanism of the psyche?

 

[tryptographer]

Always a fascinating subject... I don't think it's a similar mechanism as the blocking of traumatic memories.

I remember during one DMT session I witnessed something so miraculous I thought something like 'Oh, I'll never ever forget something so incredible' and promptly someone said/thought 'oh yes you will, you're not ready', flipped a switch and it was gone. Gold dust slipping through the fingers

Maybe it's like logging in and out of different systems, it's all about information and data channels...

 

[doodlekid]

I also think that blocking and forgetting are different things. That memories are cloud based concepts and never truly lost forever if they can't be remembered.

My first idea when reading this topic was entropy. Going from a high energy state to a lower one. In the higher state there is more detail and clarity and just when you deamplify a signal the noise treshold will be relatively higher and obscure detail from the original signal.

 

[DmnStr8]

In my experience with DMT I have forgot much of any given experience. I have also remembered parts of my past. Things get brought to the surface. Things you thought you forgot or blocked. The forgetting mechanism as you described is also a remembering mechanism.

DMT giveth and DMT taketh away.

 

[hixidom]

Our perception of the world is simple compared to the number of inputs that we process every second. There is some very advanced compression algorithm in the brain which takes millions of sensory input in a low-dimensional space and maps them into a very simple geometry in a high-dimensional space. Psychedelic visions are what we see when this mapping is distorted, allowing us to store memories under a new compression regime. After the experience is over, the sober decompression algorithm is not able to decrypt the psychedelic memories that were stored.

(I feel like I'm stealing these ideas from somewhere, but I can't remember where)

 

[Intezam]

Nothing is really forgotten, it's (essence conclusion may) just (be) 'temporarily-non-accessible'. You can ask the righteous Dūraoša, they can take we/you/them/they/us to the exact point which we thought was forgotten, and continue from there......

For we, part of our remembering has also been trying to find hints of evidence, (in support of) that what we was doing was actually fully legit (accord. our silsila) and not a cheat of sorts (or a deception)....anyways, we have had mixed results...but something seems better than nothing.

 

[○]

While dude slipped out of the changa experience, he literally felt a mechanism at work busy with forgetting what happened, the slipping out of the "what happened" could be felt directly as an ongoing process, like a gum wiping out gently and slowly the event. Even the gumming out action in itself was a clearly observable action event. Like one can feel sand flowing out of the hand between the fingers. Like inevitable, non reversible. Like impossible to merge the two realms. Some minutes later, all was wiped out and it was done slow and steady. Grabbing back and wanting to remember did not help. It was not allowed.

I wonder if this is how very traumatic events, like accidents, or hostile attacks also often are erased from the consciousness by the same gumming mechanism within a human being.

Both consensus reality and the dmt experience seem inherently tied in with the subjective experience. Being fully enveloped in the wash of the dmt trance fully - it feels so insanely removed from everything consensual and/or 'objective. When I start to slip back, the intense polarity of the two (consensus reality and the dmt experience) becomes incredibly evident until eventually they become as distinct as black and white; then your back, once again.

Though during the really heavy, powerful experiences, there's things that tend to stick and not let go as easily, even things that stick years later and don't seem to fully let up. But, during the meat of the experience, those deeply inherent threads that run through each and every experience, those threads themselves seem to be inherently evanescent and inherently ethereal, to the point of full evasion of memory.

The two seem to be inseparable, though paradoxically they're incredibly divorced, all in the same moment.

 

[sheep]

While dude slipped out of the changa experience, he literally felt a mechanism at work busy with forgetting what happened, the slipping out of the "what happened" could be felt directly as an ongoing process, like a gum wiping out gently and slowly the event. Even the gumming out action in itself was a clearly observable action event. Like one can feel sand flowing out of the hand between the fingers. Like inevitable, non reversible. Like impossible to merge the two realms. Some minutes later, all was wiped out and it was done slow and steady. Grabbing back and wanting to remember did not help. It was not allowed.

I wonder if this is how very traumatic events, like accidents, or hostile attacks also often are erased from the consciousness by the same gumming mechanism within a human being.

I used to get this a lot, not with DMT, but with LSD. When I took LSD a lot this phenomenon would happen. Primarily when I took well over the dosage anyone should really ever take considering the environment I was in and having a traumatic sense of death/impending doom feeling. Though at the end and even during I would have this forgetfulness and deterioration of what I thought I knew.

Though wouldn't this simply just mean that psychedelics induce amnesia? Intense levels of amnesia for that matter at a higher dose.

 

[NotTwo]

I wonder if there's a parallel here with remembering dreams. I've spent a couple of months now trying to cultivate lucid dreaming. One of the first exercises is to remember as much dream content as possible. When I started I had minimal dream recall. The trick is, when you wake in the night or in the morning, to not move and instantly go back into the most recent dream. Incredibly if you simply turn over or wait 5 seconds you can lose the whole lot. But if you grab the last part you can train yourself to trace it back getting more and more dream content from earlier in that dream and even earlier in the night. (Sleep cycles are generally around 90 minutes with more REM content in later cycles.)

I don't know if this same process can be applied to the DMT experience. The exit from DMT is a bit more gradual than from a dream so I'm not too sure at what point you'd start the attempt to trace the memories. I'll try and if I get any interesting results I'll report back.