How do you know you don't have any knowledge?
Good point and to highlight this:
I will tell a tail that may seem spooky and all that seems to speak of retro-cognisance:
This is a true tale. This I know because it happened to me a few years back. I used to belong to an English Civil War re-enactment group called
”The Sealed Knot’ . This is mentioned only as a backdrop to the tale as it was on one very pleasant afternoon during one of the regular musters (events) I stopped by the beer tent for some refreshment and got chatting to this pleasant young lady and her fella. I had not met either of them before, I can’t even recall seeing them before either (not that strange in an organisation that was around ten thousand members strong at the time)
So there we were chatting, and being the kind of bloke who doesn’t like to leave questions un answered I asked “what’s with the walking stick?”. She said she had been in a car crash. She smiled and added that she must have been out of luck as she was the only one who had been seriously hurt, cept for her boyfriend, of the time, who had his hand cut up quite bad.
I then had a flash vision of the accident. After sitting blankly for a moment I then proceeded to tell her what had happened that eventful evening .
The four of them had been out for an enjoyable late summer’s day, and buoyed up with the high spirits of a time well had they set home just after dark. The girl in question was in the back seat of the car and was cuddling with her fella, who sat on her right and had his left arm round her waist. The boyfriend’s friend was in the driver’s seat with his girlfriend in the front passenger seat. The music was up high and they were busy chatting about their day. During their drive home a late summer shower had kicked in. Nothing major just a brief burst of cool wetness to ease the heat out that long hot day. They were not too far from home when the driver approached one of the roundabouts on the outskirts of town just that little bit too fast and he lost control of the car. Spinning off the roundabout the car collided with a lamp post, which stoved the rear left panel/door of the car right in. Sadly for our girl this was where she was and thus suffered quite severe hip injuries. Oh yes and the car was a White MkII Ford Escort.
During this tale the young lass was getting paler and paler and looking at me in many ways. Not least with shock, awe and no small amount of fear. You see I had been right on the money with my tale .
You may think this is a clear cut case of retro-cognisance but it wasn’t. Sure I had received all this info in flash of vision but as I went through all the facts in my tale it was apparent that I already knew far more about the event than you would at first think. In truth what happened was my brain had taken the very small amount of info She had given me and processed it really quick, combining it with facts I already knew to construct the most probable scenario, then pointing me to the mental equivalent of ”your tube’ where I saw it play out visually.
My reasoning then (spoken to mainly stop her hobbling off screaming) was this.
She had a banged up left hip that she got in a car crash. Other than that the only other major injury was her boyfriend’s hand.
How does the only major injury in a car accident, severe trauma to a left hip, happen?
Well for her, and only her, to be hit that bad in the left hip then the car needs to be hit in the side. The left hand side. It also means she needs to be sat on the left hand side. As a thump strong enough to do this to her would need to be quite strong you have to explain why the person in the front left seat was not also taken out. This would require an impact with a strong but vertically thin structure. So we would need to be looking at a lamp-post or telegraph pole. Her fella’s hand also got messed up. The most logical explanation for this would be if it was some how more to the left of him or, for that matter, most of her. The most likely assumption here is that he has an arm round his lady. As her left hip took the brunt of the impact it’s obvious that he was sitting to her right thus it’s his left hand that took the damage. To have your left hand that far round your girl does imply that they are sitting quite close. This impys that these two were in the back, while other friends were in front. Now basic driving stats determines that out of a couple the bloke is the most likely to A: have a licence and B: if both have a licence, will treat driving as his ”domain’ thus it’s not too far of a stretch to assume that the other boyfriend would be driving while his girl was in the front passenger seat.
So we have now an idea where everyone was sitting and where the vehicle was hit and by what. We now have to explain how the left rear quarter was stoved in so bad to crack a hip. Vehicle on vehicle collisions tend not to present the required isolated impacts but tend to present the force over larger flatter areas so impact with a thin vertical static structure is the most likely culprit. The most readily available structures that fit the bill are roadside telegraph poles and street lighting. So to hit a static structure with the rear left quarter of the car means it must have been going sideways. How does a car typically end up going sideways? The driver looses control and spins off the road. How does a diver normally end up losing control and spinning? Buy entering a sharp corner too fast for the conditions. What are the conditions most prevalent to causing this type of miss-calculation? Slightly damp roads after a long hot summer when the rain dampens the summers deposits of rubber and makes them extremely slippery. Now very sharp corners tend to show up either on back lanes or on roundabouts, and as back lanes are rarely well lit (or lined with telegraph poles) then the roundabout is more likely the scene where this act played out. And as roundabouts do tend to be well lit it’s more likely that what they hit was a lamp post.
Now we come to the car itself. A white MkII Ford Escort. Well these Kids were young and thus probably had a older car, this being Essex then it’s not too wild an assumption to assume a Ford Escort. MkIIs still have a rep for being good cheep sporty/customisable first vehicles. Being an inexperienced escort driving Essex boy driving his friends home after a good day out it’s not too surprising to find him going a bit faster than he should have and getting caught out by a late summer shower. And White? Lucky guess
Now it takes a while to describe all that but it doesn’t change the fact my brain did all that detective work in an instant delivering the result as a visual presentation.
Retro-Cognisance may seem to be verging on the psychic but it’s usually the result of gaining a few seemingly insignificant clues and your brain filling in the rest.
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Edited by ohnhai, : typo
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