Further to that, I've read on several occasions about lone survivors of disasters who report encountering a person who wasn't there who helped them to survive.
The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).
Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.
There would be an evolutionary advantage to be had if the brain was able to access some "hidden partition" containing recovery instructions during times of extreme stress.
Fred Brooks said [1] that there are two types of complexity, accidental and essential. While accidental complexity can be reduced the theory is that the essential complexity cannot.
"Accidental complexity relates to problems which engineers create and can fix; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things."
Further to that, I've read on several occasions about lone survivors of disasters who report encountering a person who wasn't there who helped them to survive.
The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).
Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.
There would be an evolutionary advantage to be had if the brain was able to access some "hidden partition" containing recovery instructions during times of extreme stress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
[2] https://consumer.healthday.com/fitness-information-14/climbi...
Edit: better [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088769/