Than you for sharing your story, and for tying that to what many may be experiencing with climate change and the coming discontinuous series of events.
First - to your memory and your experience. There is great value in you sharing it. Whether here or on Medium, or where ever.
In a vaguely similar way, my experiences and memory are also far distant from most people. I used to remember the future. That is what it felt like. And it was entirely accurate. It isn't and wasn't deja vu or anything else. It was literal memory of things that had not yet occurred. Like you I did not know that this was unusual. Also like you I expected that was how everyone experienced the world.
So too with memory. I too have an extremely long and detailed memory. It is different from yours or your wife's. And different from my father and brother. And it is different yet from five ladies in my life and one male friend. All six of them had universally perfect memories. None of them ever revealed that to anyone else in their lives - ever - to the days they each died. They lied and pretended to have bad memories. Every one of them was exceptionally kind.
They were blessed and cursed by their memories. The blessings were easy. The curse was that they each remembered every slight, every harsh word or thought they made to someone else, or that others made to them. And they lived those in the present moment every day of their lives.
The researchers, medical folks, psychiatrists and psychologists have a very narrow view of human memory and cognition. They generally work under the false premise that everyone is close to normal and the same, with minor degrees of differences and occasional severe defects.
They fail to understand that we humans are a collage of half a dozen to a dozen or more homo lines (Neaderthal, three+ Denizovan lines, Errectus, Heidelbergensis and others). Each of those developed and specialized in their own ways before the mergers 72k years and and 39k years ago, plus other cross breeding events.
I have become persuaded through my own experiences that the Neanderthals in particular developed a massively parallel way of experiencing and remembering the world through tremendous changes in their visual cortex and brain systems.
Sapiens became much more proficient at extreme audio processing and social organization, exploiting both complex audio analysis and linear memory as well as emotional interconnection in groups.
Mind you these are all variations off a common base, so anyone anywhere may exhibit degrees of all of these. And with the huge movement of peoples around the world, that is even more true. We have no true races in the human lines. We were never that distinct.
However, we do have huge variations. And it is that which the experts miss. I suspect that some or much of your uniqueness is from this complex reblending and in particular from Neanderthals unique visual abilities.
One thing you might consider, even in retirement, is the Irlen method. My father, my brother and my nephew all exhibited a form of dyslexia where text on a page wouldn't hold still. For each, colored transparencies lain over the page caused everything to stop moving. Each of them benefitted from a different color. For my nephew it was pink. My brother blue, And my dad a light green.
In my case, I do not 'suffer' from that, by I understand what they were seeing. We process visual imagery and text differently. In my mind b, d, p, q, 9, and 6 are all the same character with slight embellishments, rotations or inversions. I don't usually confuse them. For my dad and my brother, they had more difficulty. They had to learn to see the characters in relation to those adjacent to them to get them to hold still. Their minds (and mine) are constantly playing with the shapes. We seem not just as they are, but in all of the possible spatial rotations from there. Somehow the addition of the color transparency changes the balance. And the text quits moving.
As to climate change. I worked with a lot of the analysts and researchers, policy makers and such in the 1990s to the late 2010s. In the late 1990s many of the scientists and researchers became distraught. Their field work showed them frightening things about where we were and where we were headed. They became very active in fighting to get hat message to policy folks and decision makers. They were not especially successful. The decision makers and politicians in particular were far more caught in weighing economic impacts on industry in the current moment. They couldn't look 5 years into the future, let alone a few decades. Their world was the next election and the year following. That was it.
By the early 2000s, the scientists hair were proverbially "on fire". They were scared.
By the 2010s the fire went out and they largely became despondent. The change was that they had learned enough to know that there is no solution possible. And that even the most strident and urgent actions will inevitably result in massive changes, massive extinctions, and worse.
And they largely became quiet. It isn't that they don't care any more. They do - desperately. But the conditions they see now are even more dire. Stopping the emission of pollutants is enough on its own to shove us over the edge into severe change. Not stopping does the same slightly more slowly.
We messed up. It is clear now that our last point at which we could change to maintain a world somewhat like what we new as children into the future was likely before we were even born. And with every passing year and new information it becomes clearer that the point of departure to the dystopian future was even earlier than we thought a year before.
Next. Next where we go is to the fallacy that the world is in some sort of stable equilibrium and that no matter how hard we push, we change that in limited ways. No one states that out loud. But that is one of the implicit assumptions.
It is entirely false. We have been in a quasi-stable oscillating pattern for a few million years. It is technically an ice-age, but it oscillates (did oscillate) between warmer and colder periods every 41k or 105k years based on a set of wobbles in the Earth's orbit. Since the end of the last deep cold about 10k years ago we entered into a reasonably stable period - the holocene - that allowed for the development of agriculture. This is usually not possible for long.
The changes we have now wrought, push us out of this stable little band. We are now headed to hot house earth at +11 C from the preindustrial baselines. There is a barely possible chance that with extreme effort we might put the genie back in the bottle and that Greenland and Antarctica might provide the buffer to allow that. It is now unlikely.
The transition we are entering is at 20 times the rate, or more, as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum transition. (PETM). We are about to go through changes that are astounding. And that may be unsurvivable for humans. Most species will die. A new world is about to be born.
This was an excellent read, thank you for sharing. It’s oddly comforting to hear your personal story and to understand how you think, which is truly fascinating. What a gift to be able to hear your analyses on the climate predicament. Thank you for your perspective.
Thank you for this article, Richard. It is important for many reasons, not the least of which is your combining substack and medium into this single post. It seems to me that the climate crisis is squeezing some of us into opening more fully into what we bring to this incarnation. A network is forming for me of writers with special gifts looking into climate in different ways. Autism is very much a special gift - that is becoming very clear. Your research and your writing are, as always, meticulously done. MadRobin
Also, if you drink like I used to . . . WELL, YOU DONT WANT TO REMEMBER. I woke up once in ICU bound hand and foot to the hospital bed. They said I was "very uncooperative" and had such severe brain bleeding that they couldn't risk me getting and wanting to fight that guy just once more.
I have big, really big memory blurs . . . I thank God for them.
I'm banned from Medium so you have to tell some us the "different " stuff here. I find it facinating how people see things differently. Before I read your stuff on Medium I couldn't understand what all the climate worry was about. What's wrong with better weather up north? And how bad could it really be? And all those statistics confuses me. It wasn't until I read your stuff that I really "got it"
We're all gonna die!!! And die broke. Richard you are responsible for me going out and paying $10,000 OVER list price for the 45th Anniversary Edition of the Toyota Supra sports car. What goid will money be? The car, this car, it's all your fault! I love the car. Thank you Richard.
Richard,
Than you for sharing your story, and for tying that to what many may be experiencing with climate change and the coming discontinuous series of events.
First - to your memory and your experience. There is great value in you sharing it. Whether here or on Medium, or where ever.
In a vaguely similar way, my experiences and memory are also far distant from most people. I used to remember the future. That is what it felt like. And it was entirely accurate. It isn't and wasn't deja vu or anything else. It was literal memory of things that had not yet occurred. Like you I did not know that this was unusual. Also like you I expected that was how everyone experienced the world.
So too with memory. I too have an extremely long and detailed memory. It is different from yours or your wife's. And different from my father and brother. And it is different yet from five ladies in my life and one male friend. All six of them had universally perfect memories. None of them ever revealed that to anyone else in their lives - ever - to the days they each died. They lied and pretended to have bad memories. Every one of them was exceptionally kind.
They were blessed and cursed by their memories. The blessings were easy. The curse was that they each remembered every slight, every harsh word or thought they made to someone else, or that others made to them. And they lived those in the present moment every day of their lives.
The researchers, medical folks, psychiatrists and psychologists have a very narrow view of human memory and cognition. They generally work under the false premise that everyone is close to normal and the same, with minor degrees of differences and occasional severe defects.
They fail to understand that we humans are a collage of half a dozen to a dozen or more homo lines (Neaderthal, three+ Denizovan lines, Errectus, Heidelbergensis and others). Each of those developed and specialized in their own ways before the mergers 72k years and and 39k years ago, plus other cross breeding events.
I have become persuaded through my own experiences that the Neanderthals in particular developed a massively parallel way of experiencing and remembering the world through tremendous changes in their visual cortex and brain systems.
Sapiens became much more proficient at extreme audio processing and social organization, exploiting both complex audio analysis and linear memory as well as emotional interconnection in groups.
Mind you these are all variations off a common base, so anyone anywhere may exhibit degrees of all of these. And with the huge movement of peoples around the world, that is even more true. We have no true races in the human lines. We were never that distinct.
However, we do have huge variations. And it is that which the experts miss. I suspect that some or much of your uniqueness is from this complex reblending and in particular from Neanderthals unique visual abilities.
One thing you might consider, even in retirement, is the Irlen method. My father, my brother and my nephew all exhibited a form of dyslexia where text on a page wouldn't hold still. For each, colored transparencies lain over the page caused everything to stop moving. Each of them benefitted from a different color. For my nephew it was pink. My brother blue, And my dad a light green.
In my case, I do not 'suffer' from that, by I understand what they were seeing. We process visual imagery and text differently. In my mind b, d, p, q, 9, and 6 are all the same character with slight embellishments, rotations or inversions. I don't usually confuse them. For my dad and my brother, they had more difficulty. They had to learn to see the characters in relation to those adjacent to them to get them to hold still. Their minds (and mine) are constantly playing with the shapes. We seem not just as they are, but in all of the possible spatial rotations from there. Somehow the addition of the color transparency changes the balance. And the text quits moving.
As to climate change. I worked with a lot of the analysts and researchers, policy makers and such in the 1990s to the late 2010s. In the late 1990s many of the scientists and researchers became distraught. Their field work showed them frightening things about where we were and where we were headed. They became very active in fighting to get hat message to policy folks and decision makers. They were not especially successful. The decision makers and politicians in particular were far more caught in weighing economic impacts on industry in the current moment. They couldn't look 5 years into the future, let alone a few decades. Their world was the next election and the year following. That was it.
By the early 2000s, the scientists hair were proverbially "on fire". They were scared.
By the 2010s the fire went out and they largely became despondent. The change was that they had learned enough to know that there is no solution possible. And that even the most strident and urgent actions will inevitably result in massive changes, massive extinctions, and worse.
And they largely became quiet. It isn't that they don't care any more. They do - desperately. But the conditions they see now are even more dire. Stopping the emission of pollutants is enough on its own to shove us over the edge into severe change. Not stopping does the same slightly more slowly.
We messed up. It is clear now that our last point at which we could change to maintain a world somewhat like what we new as children into the future was likely before we were even born. And with every passing year and new information it becomes clearer that the point of departure to the dystopian future was even earlier than we thought a year before.
Next. Next where we go is to the fallacy that the world is in some sort of stable equilibrium and that no matter how hard we push, we change that in limited ways. No one states that out loud. But that is one of the implicit assumptions.
It is entirely false. We have been in a quasi-stable oscillating pattern for a few million years. It is technically an ice-age, but it oscillates (did oscillate) between warmer and colder periods every 41k or 105k years based on a set of wobbles in the Earth's orbit. Since the end of the last deep cold about 10k years ago we entered into a reasonably stable period - the holocene - that allowed for the development of agriculture. This is usually not possible for long.
The changes we have now wrought, push us out of this stable little band. We are now headed to hot house earth at +11 C from the preindustrial baselines. There is a barely possible chance that with extreme effort we might put the genie back in the bottle and that Greenland and Antarctica might provide the buffer to allow that. It is now unlikely.
The transition we are entering is at 20 times the rate, or more, as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum transition. (PETM). We are about to go through changes that are astounding. And that may be unsurvivable for humans. Most species will die. A new world is about to be born.
This was an excellent read, thank you for sharing. It’s oddly comforting to hear your personal story and to understand how you think, which is truly fascinating. What a gift to be able to hear your analyses on the climate predicament. Thank you for your perspective.
Thank you for this article, Richard. It is important for many reasons, not the least of which is your combining substack and medium into this single post. It seems to me that the climate crisis is squeezing some of us into opening more fully into what we bring to this incarnation. A network is forming for me of writers with special gifts looking into climate in different ways. Autism is very much a special gift - that is becoming very clear. Your research and your writing are, as always, meticulously done. MadRobin
Also, if you drink like I used to . . . WELL, YOU DONT WANT TO REMEMBER. I woke up once in ICU bound hand and foot to the hospital bed. They said I was "very uncooperative" and had such severe brain bleeding that they couldn't risk me getting and wanting to fight that guy just once more.
I have big, really big memory blurs . . . I thank God for them.
I'm banned from Medium so you have to tell some us the "different " stuff here. I find it facinating how people see things differently. Before I read your stuff on Medium I couldn't understand what all the climate worry was about. What's wrong with better weather up north? And how bad could it really be? And all those statistics confuses me. It wasn't until I read your stuff that I really "got it"
We're all gonna die!!! And die broke. Richard you are responsible for me going out and paying $10,000 OVER list price for the 45th Anniversary Edition of the Toyota Supra sports car. What goid will money be? The car, this car, it's all your fault! I love the car. Thank you Richard.