LW - My hour of memoryless lucidity by Eric Neyman

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My hour of memoryless lucidity, published by Eric Neyman on May 4, 2024 on LessWrong. Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn't know what to expect. While I was unconscious during the surgery, the hour after surgery turned out to be a fascinating experience, because I was completely lucid but had almost zero short-term memory. My girlfriend, who had kindly agreed to accompany me to the surgery, was with me during that hour. And so - apparently against the advice of the nurses - I spent that whole hour talking to her and asking her questions. The biggest reason I find my experience fascinating is that it has mostly answered a question that I've had about myself for quite a long time: how deterministic am I? In computer science, we say that an algorithm is deterministic if it's not random: if it always behaves the same way when it's in the same state. In this case, my "state" was my environment (lying drugged on a bed with my IV in and my girlfriend sitting next to me) plus the contents of my memory. Normally, I don't ask the same question over and over again because the contents of my memory change when I ask the question the first time: after I get an answer, the answer is in my memory, so I don't need to ask the question again. But for that hour, the information I processed came in one ear and out the other in a matter of minutes. And so it was a natural test of whether my memory is the only thing keeping me from saying the same things on loop forever, or whether I'm more random/spontaneous than that.[1] And as it turns out, I'm pretty deterministic! According to my girlfriend, I spent a lot of that hour cycling between the same few questions on loop: "How did the surgery go?" (it went well), "Did they just do a coronectomy or did they take out my whole teeth?" (just a coronectomy), "Is my IV still in?" (yes), "how long was the surgery?" (an hour and a half), "what time is it?", and "how long have you been here?". (The length of that cycle is also interesting, because it gives an estimate of how long I was able to retain memories for - apparently about two minutes.) (Toward the end of that hour, I remember asking, "I know I've already asked this twice, but did they just do a coronectomy?" (The answer: "actually you've asked that much more than twice, and yes, it was just a coronectomy.)) Those weren't my only questions, though. About five minutes into that hour, I apparently asked my girlfriend for two 2-digit numbers to multiply, to check how cognitively impaired I was. She gave me 27*69, and said that I had no trouble doing the multiplication in the obvious way (27*7*10 - 27), except that I kept having to ask her to remind me what the numbers were. Interestingly, I asked her for two 2-digit numbers again toward the end of that hour, having no memory that I had already done this. She told me that she had already given me two numbers, and asked whether I wanted the same numbers again. I said yes (so I could compare my performance). The second time, I was able to do the multiplication pretty quickly without needing to ask for the numbers to be repeated. Also, about 20 minutes into the hour, I asked my girlfriend to give me the letters to that day's New York Times Spelling Bee, which is a puzzle where you're given seven letters and try to form words using the letters. (The letters were W, A, M, O, R, T, and Y.) I found the pangram - the word that uses every letter at least once[2] - in about 30 seconds, which is about average for me, except that yesterday I was holding the letters in my head instead of looking at them on a screen. I also got most of the way to the "genius" rank - a little better than I normally do - and my girlfriend got us the rest of the way ther...