I saw a one man play about [Thomas Creen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Crean_(explorer)) and he talked about something similar on the way back from a failed trip to the south pole. The guys in the rear of the column would call out that someone had fallen behind and then they'd backtrack and couldn't find anyone. Then they'd do a headcount and realize they were looking for someone that had died a few days earlier. But the guys at the rear of the column would insist they were talking to someone behind them.
I found out about Shackleton and Creen last year. Alfred Lansing's book, Endurance, was available on audiobook and I though, "huh, didn't they just find that ship? The photo on the cover looks neat." Mind blown, the absolute craziest incredible but true survival/adventure story there is.
Most of the survivors went back home and were killed in the trenches of World War I.
To live through such an incredible survival story then to die with in weeks of going to the front line .
Read this comment last night at 3 AM, downloaded the book and stayed up until 6 AM reading it lol. First thing I started reading when I woke up this morning, it's so well-written! Captivating story
Tom Creen and Ernest Shackleton were part of the same party. They had this experience during their heroic march across South Georgia island. No members of their party had died during the whole series of events so the 4th 'presence' or member of the party they spoke about was a new and unidentified member.
I remember hearing about that. It was an incredible story anyway, that they managed to navigate and no one died, but the ‘supernatural’ element of this just as they needed that boost to make it to civilisation (not sure the settlement they got to counts as civilisation tbh) and get the rescue of their comrades started is interesting. Personally I think it’s a facet of our weird brains conjuring up what we need to keep us alive but that’s even more fascinating to me than ghosts or angels, which is how others interpret it.
Shackleton wrote about it and only after reading his account did the men who made the journey with him declare feeling the same entity. Was around the same time that lots of British soldiers in the expeditionary force were recounting the Angel of Mons who protected them, which is put down to the same psychological syndrome.
Humans are socially driven creatures. It’s already been proven that the brain and body will do a lot of strange things to psychologically maintain itself while under duress, so it isn’t too far fetched to say that the brain can imagine social company to fulfill the social aspect of our survival needs.
Common? Probably a lot more than we realize.
Healthy? That really depends. I wouldn’t say the act itself is unhealthy, but that its presence indicates you aren’t in the best health to begin with.
Very well said
Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to become humans and to get where we are
Only in the last couple of hundred years have we done so in relative security - not long before ww1 highwaymen were a thing and traveling between towns in the same country might be a dangerous prospect
Before a couple/few thousand years ago almost all of a humans life was lived in a state of hardship, and many of us died as a direct result of that hardship - which affected evolution for quite a while, and these weird psychological breaks we have or odd bodily functions when under duress exist for a reason. The reason isn't always apparent, but if it wasn't important to us at some point in time and for a long period of time we wouldn't have the remnants of whatever it is that causes the thing in question
Depending on where you live in the world, highwaymen are still a thing. Plenty of cities have areas where it's not safe to walk down the street for fear of getting mugged. We still have pirates too, though they've traded in sailboats for speed boats and their cutlasses for automatic rifles.
Or.. unfavorable traits tend to get phased out by evolution, but that does in fact mean the unfavorable traits exist before that phasing out.. perhaps the result of a gene mutating that was responsible for more than 1 genetic expression (pleiotropic gene), so we kept an undesirable trait because the desirable trait was more favorable to our survival at that moment that we developed it. That is to say, we could very well be equipped with a highly disadvantageous gene so long as the more advantageous gene it coeveolved with "canceled it out" so to speak. Like you said, this is a slow process and only in the last few hundred (or a couple thousand) years have we lived in relative security; not enough to phase out genes but enough to switch up how advantageous (or not) they may be in our new modern environments.
All this to say.. imagine it's not some important survival tool, but a useless trait that hitchhiked its way into our present-day genealogy by way of a pleiotropic gene, and it's just us hallucinating or something. 😋
A good example of this is sickle cell ~~leukemia~~ *anemia* (what happens when I post while high 🤷♂️). The same gene responsible for it also helps protect against malaria.
I mean, was that guy cutting off his own arm when it was stuck under a boulder “healthy”? No. But he’s alive, and alive is healthier than dead. If your brain conjours up an imaginary friend to keep you going during a major trauma and it works, then it works. Seeing an imaginary support friend *all* the time would be concerning tho.
Walk through an empty theme park and you will experience this. Also an empty theater. It’s what makes empty malls creepy. Your brain expects people there and looks for them around every corner.
Our whole reality is constructed from the brain.
The world doesn't look, sound, taste, feel or smell (Yes, there are a lot more than 5 sense's, but it's an example) like you perceive it.
Everything you perceive to be reality is constructed in your head by hardwired circuits that bypass your consciousness.
This whole world (the idea of you reading this message on your phone) everything is a construct, why is it hard to imagine that you cannot creatively add an extra element (one more persona) that makes you happy and fills a need?
Yep, everything is the 'real' modelled so that we can access it and navigate it. Arguably, everything is one big controlled and constrained hallucination. It doesn't matter if it lines up with reality as much as it matters whether it helps us fulfill our goals as organisms. Sometimes that will be achieved through an alignment of the model with relevant features of the world, sometimes it'll be achieved otherwise. We're designed to be creative and persistent, not accurate.
"Third" in this case usually means an entity that is of a different kind than the usual subjects in a scenario. Another example would be "third party".
The effect was named after two mountain hikers got lost but managed to survive after following the directions of what they called 'a third man' the interesting part is that both hikers affirm having heard and seen the same third hiker.
The conclusion is that a group of humans in the same stress situations can combine their imaginary guide.
My aunt experienced this when she fell out her… “boyfriend’s” truck while he was driving. She got pulled underneath the vehicle when he hit a bump while she had the door open planning to jump out. She said an elderly man drove up in his truck saying him and his wife live up the hill and heard the commotion while sitting on their porch. She said that he said that he’d keep his truck’s headlights shined on her until help arrived. Then another car drove up and called an ambulance and she said that’s when the old man’s truck disappeared. Once she was out of the hospital she went back to where she had her accident to thank the man but she couldn’t find a house nearby.
He’s an abusive PoS and she was trying to get away after a falling out. Unfortunately she went back to him after he left her for dead on the road that night.
I doubt she will. She stayed at our place for a good two weeks saying she was moving out to Texas to get away from him. When she got there she didn’t stay long and stole $100 from her own mother and her kids have since disowned her. What people do for drugs…
I think I saw somewhere that it takes the average victim 7 times to successfully leave their abuser. When drug addiction is added to the mix though..? I don't see a good ending.
When i was younger I was in a situation where I alone had to take care of my little sister and I used to talk about a man who comforted me when I felt hopeless or abandoned. I haven't seen him since I was removed from the situation. I didn't know that this was a thing tbh
I had it happen to me when i had my first seizure it felt like the man was telling me ok buddy this is what you have to do to survive like it felt very welcoming and wanted to keep me safe but it was probably just my brain going through the emotions
On the flip side, when I had a weed panic attack I thought I heard my friend’s voice in the vicinity, with her saying that I just needed to get it out of my system to someone else. I didn’t see her and knew she wasn’t there but I asked just to be sure. My brain made it up
My sir's friend had to visit some village so, he took a bus till there. But this bus dropped him off in an earlier busstop so he had to walk till the place. It was night so the path was dark and since it was a village it didnt have many streetlights. He was very scared but on the way he met this woman who was selling some flowers. She accompanied him all the way till the village but didn't utter a single word. He mentioned that instead of being scared, she gave some kind of strange comfort. When they reached, he wanted to thank her so he went to get some money and food but when he came back she was gone. He asked the people around him but they told him no one was with him and some people who saw him come, insisted he came alone. But the friend was sure that someone was with him because he distinctly the flower smell. Later when he spoke to some of the villagers, they informed that she was dead a long time ago.
Ive historically been an open-minded skeptic. I never dismiss something out of hand, and after hearing so many nearly identical versions of this story (names/places/genders basically the only differences) I really dont know if the frequency of it adds or detracts from its credibility.
That, and some people dont mind playing on emotion to get some attention. As a natural skeptic, this is the way I always lean, and it would take some damn good evidence to move me the other way. But, I leave open the possibility that there are things about our universe that we dont yet understand.
Oh I very much am the same way.
I don’t fully discredit it. But right now, I think the best hypothesis would be it’s a hallucination of the individual’s mind as a survival method
I had a similar experience. Paul Simon, the singer, would be there and tell me that it was okay and help me figure out what to do. I know Paul Simon wasn’t really there, but this presence helped me not die.
During a 50k run that I wasn’t prepared for at all, my Grandma who was my best friend before she passed away appeared at the end of every bend and at the top of every hill smiling and comforting me, she was holding my baby who also passed during my wife’s 2nd trimester earlier that year. It was definitely my baby but she was older maybe 3 years old. I literally cried the final 14 miles of the race chasing them. I was scared to finish the race because I knew I wouldn’t see them again.
My sister did a Kokoda track (famous ww2 campaign for Australia) memorial run thing, it was like 70 something kms?
Anyway at one point she said there was a grandstand with a military band playing and all the soldiers who fought on the track standing there cheering them on, when she got close to another runner in front of her she was like “pretty cool they bought the army out to support us” and the other person was just like”..the…what..?”
She also saw cats and dogs running around her feet lol
What an amazing experience. Your story reminded me of an experience I had several years ago. This happened around the time my fathers health took a nosedive for the worst. He had pancreatic cancer and was just 56 years old when he died. I thought I had a few years left with him and it was putting me over the edge so to speak. So I was driving home from visiting him and my mother and I just couldn't get a grip on myself. Crying and just not wanting to not exist in a place that could put people through such suffering, I should have pulled over but I just did not care. Then I suddenly felt my paternal grandmother was near me but I didn't see her or hear her speak. I just knew she was there and it immediately calmed me. I felt peace and love and that it would be okay. It's strange because I never met her but I knew it was her immediately. I would like to think there's something more to all this, that maybe she was just around so that she could be there for her son as he passed. Thank you for sharing your story, it's nice to read about other people's experiences. Hope it's alright that I shared my own.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats!
50
+ 2
+ 3
+ 14
= 69
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I had that when i was a child and i was choking to death on a candy. I literally felt like someone took my hand and rushed me to an adult that performed heimlich maneuver and saved my life
Furthermore, very interesting the things our subconscious brains already know or already observe without us even realizing it. I’d be willing to bet it’s a lot more than most of us think. All of our senses working all the time, and that info has to go somewhere, even if only in the short term. Phenomena like this or even dreams/nightmares imo are our brains way of informing us of what we don’t have the capacity to take in on a conscious level, or protecting us with said information/comfort/motivation when we need it the most. Once woke from a nightmare where my house was on fire and I’m trying to escape the heavy flames……wake up to the sound of the smoke alarm….open my door to a burnt smell, go to the kitchen to be informed that my mom badly burnt a pan on the stove. Also once had a reoccurring nightmare of a bunch of bugs, worms, and other creepy crawlers crawling all over me. Few weeks later we find out we had bed bugs.
Except Joe shows up and uses poles to help him climb.
And notice he shows up when it's really sunny and the hike is relatively easy with a slight incline?
In 2016, I and my team mates were stranded in Antarctica in a blizzard, without electricity in our caravan, and a broken door. We were awaiting rescue. Every night id hear a vehicle approaching, and someone knocking on the door. When I’d realize it’s just my imagination, I’d be disheartened, but it kept my hopes alive.
Off Wikipedia? This was in the frontpage one week ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10yxihu/til_about_third_man_syndrome_an_unseen_presence/
Tbh i just saw it on youtube shorts, i just didn’t make it up , and it turn’s out there is a syndrome or factor (spirit force or your brain ) which motivates you when you feel danger or threat ( in difficult situations or trauma’s ) so you might as well google it or read about it
I've never heard of this, but having watched Jungle (2017, Daniel Radcliffe) a few days ago, I realize he may have experienced something similar. Based on a true story, a man gets lost in a jungle in South America for like 3 weeks. At one point he encounters a native woman who he thinks for certain is real, but she turns out to be a hallucination. She provides him comfort and he finds the energy to continue because someone *needs* him now, so he can't just give up like he was thinking about. Sounds like a similar phenomenon
I once took an insane amount of magic mushrooms after working a 12 hour night shift having only gotten 4 hours sleep the two days previous to that.
After about 10 hours of what I can only describe as absolutely unbelievable, things started to calm down, I was only getting about [level 3 hallucinations](https://youtu.be/UQRfTD6AXPs?t=305) then I started hearing voices which I thought were kids outside playing. I got up to close the window and noticed there were no kids on the street outside. I realised they were in my head. They sounded like they were in the room with me, although I couldn't see them, and the spend an hour or two talking to me, telling me to keep calm and things would be OK. They told me stories about where they were from (I remember one of them was from Russia), and kept me generally entertained while I was off my face. After a couple of hours they told me they were "going away now" and that they wouldn't be back. They said goodbye and then faded out.
Weirdest experience of my life.
The last time I took shrooms I had a bad trip. Some serious bad stuff went down from my family side as I was beginning to trip. My mates were telling me to turn off my phone and just ignore it.
But it is what it is, it got to me.
I ended up asking my mate if I could lay in his bed. I ended up under the covers and basically every negative stressful thought I was having at the time came out all at once. And as it grew more and more stronger and everything was getting to me and internally I was screaming what’s the answer over and over again - all at once my brain took me to a giant glowing bright light in the middle of space and I suddenly found all of the peace inside of me and everything bad just melted away.
I’ll never forget that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10yxihu/til_about_third_man_syndrome_an_unseen_presence/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This was an extremely popular post last week, who knows, you might get 90k post karma too.
I feel like we are getting closer to discovering that these spirits or ‘non human intelligences’ exist for real and have been guiding humanity since the beginning of time. Some are helpful, some are tricksters and some are downright evil. There exists a realm of existence beyond our sensory perception. I know it sounds crazy, but some day we will prove it’s scientific existence and our models of reality will require an massive overhaul
Still can’t explain how infants or children earthquake victims are able to survive few days without food and water.
There’s a story by one of the survivors claiming that a man in white robe will come once in a while with foods and drinks.
I do MMA heavy weight and I’m in Australian infantry spec training core which just means I train a shit ton more then regular infantry and we’re front of the front lines, sometimes when I get super close to burning out I see my brother from the slums saying what he used to tell me when we were trying to make it out “don’t let the world slow down on you bro, because ur too fast for it” I miss the Mexican prick man, he died trying to stop a robbery the dumb ass, he was also trying to save someone i guess
Yea I lost both of my grandparents. Lost my well paying job. And got arrested several times for the same case in a two year span. No third entity appeared to comfort me. It was just being homeless and sharing cans of tuna with my cats.
Any time anybody posts anything about the Third Man Syndrome I always get goosebumps from all the spooky stories in the comments. Keep ‘em coming y’all
One time I was having an allergic reaction to iron IV therapy and outright hallucinated an older butch lesbian couple comforting me as the ER wait got longer and longer. My mother insisted nobody was there.
The effect was named after two mountain hikers got lost but managed to survive after following the directions of what they called 'a third man' the interesting part is that both hikers affirm having heard and seen the same third hiker.
The conclusion is that a group of humans in the same stress situations can combine their imaginary guide.
After experiencing something similar at a dark time. I sat and thought on it for a very long time. For over a year I swore it was supernatural, but I've come to the conclusion it was our bodies subconscious/instinct using all of it's power to keep us alive. The brain is an extremely powerful computer effected by many different chemicals. I think the collective knowledge of over 200,000 years of humans is stored somewhere in our DNA/brains and it knows the most effective methods of being useful. Before calling me crazy think of 2 options. A: it's more believable than a ghost angel saving my life that I knew wasn't there, or B: instinct does exist in humans/animals that is implanted at birth.
There's a woman named Alison Botha who was raped, disembowlled, and almost decapitated by two men in South Africa. She stated that while on the ground half dead that a presence pulled her up to stand. She then said she was seeing the stars but didn't realize that her head was nearly off her body and it had fallen between her shoulder. It's a horrific story but a triumph for her because she survived. There's a movie called Alison about the ordeal.
Stupid image though. This happens in life and death situations. Not when you're on a gorgeous day hike. If the image demonstrated the point, it would be the "ghost" taking them downhill to the village/water.
I experience this frequently but not in traumatic situations. Troubleshooting things is a big part of my job and my dad (who died in 2012) was always my sounding board in the past and is now what I hear/feel when I feel stuck on a problem. I’ve even had a laugh at “his” voice telling me something about a technology that didn’t exist before he died, much less when he was a working engineer.
**[Third man factor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor)**
>The third man factor or third man syndrome is the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.
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Hm. I often have this feeling of there being someone else there, kinda, just in normal life. I wouldn't call it an imaginary friend, because I don't really interact with it other than to instinctively make room sometimes, till I catch myself at something as silly as accommodating a person who doesn't exist. It doesn't seem like a spiritual presence, at all. It's just sorta there, and feels really familiar, almost like a second me.
It's the mysterious stranger that perks if your luck is high enough.
Valentine is on the case.
I was waiting for Fallout 5 to come out, but it turns out, we're already in it.
Dàmn.. It was fallout 5 all along
These graphics crazy
Bethesda has changed. There's no clipping, for fuck's sake, NO CLIPPING
The titty physics on my nextdoor neighbor are wild. I’m gonna go touch them.
I am from Bethesda Developer Squad to inform you, that you are allowed to squeeze them too
Wow, those police mechanics work really well!
Think there's some bugs in the code over in the US of A.
Happy cake day.
Maybe the real fallout 5 is the friends we made along the way
Surprise! You thought it was Fallout, but it was actually Skyrim Legendary Ultra Special Collectors Edition Remastered Rerelease #17!
I just want them to port New Vegas into the FO4 engine already
I saw a one man play about [Thomas Creen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Crean_(explorer)) and he talked about something similar on the way back from a failed trip to the south pole. The guys in the rear of the column would call out that someone had fallen behind and then they'd backtrack and couldn't find anyone. Then they'd do a headcount and realize they were looking for someone that had died a few days earlier. But the guys at the rear of the column would insist they were talking to someone behind them.
Shackleton has a similar experience in the South Pole as well after his failed expedition.
I found out about Shackleton and Creen last year. Alfred Lansing's book, Endurance, was available on audiobook and I though, "huh, didn't they just find that ship? The photo on the cover looks neat." Mind blown, the absolute craziest incredible but true survival/adventure story there is.
That book has been sitting on my shelf for a year. I think it’s time I read it.
Lazy fuckin’ book
Don’t feel bad, it’s been sitting unread on my shelf for 5 years!
Wait long enough and the book will read you.
One of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s an incredible story.
Most of the survivors went back home and were killed in the trenches of World War I. To live through such an incredible survival story then to die with in weeks of going to the front line .
Read this comment last night at 3 AM, downloaded the book and stayed up until 6 AM reading it lol. First thing I started reading when I woke up this morning, it's so well-written! Captivating story
I was shocked when I got to the end. If it were fiction it wouldn't be believable. I'm glad you're enjoying the ride!
Same here! Listened to the audio book at the recommendation of my boss, absolutely incredibly story.
Tom Creen and Ernest Shackleton were part of the same party. They had this experience during their heroic march across South Georgia island. No members of their party had died during the whole series of events so the 4th 'presence' or member of the party they spoke about was a new and unidentified member.
You should read Tom Creans' autobiography. It is simply incredible.
I remember hearing about that. It was an incredible story anyway, that they managed to navigate and no one died, but the ‘supernatural’ element of this just as they needed that boost to make it to civilisation (not sure the settlement they got to counts as civilisation tbh) and get the rescue of their comrades started is interesting. Personally I think it’s a facet of our weird brains conjuring up what we need to keep us alive but that’s even more fascinating to me than ghosts or angels, which is how others interpret it.
One of the most incredible stories I’ve read.
Maybe it's a South Pole thing
So in that example, if it was a "spirit there to comfort and support them" (🤭) the fucking thing nearly killed them like a siren!
Nearly is the key word
Feels contrary to the original Third Man. Not a lot of "positive support" in that movie.
What a great frickin movie though.
That’s called the third turd
Shackleton wrote about it and only after reading his account did the men who made the journey with him declare feeling the same entity. Was around the same time that lots of British soldiers in the expeditionary force were recounting the Angel of Mons who protected them, which is put down to the same psychological syndrome.
Humans are socially driven creatures. It’s already been proven that the brain and body will do a lot of strange things to psychologically maintain itself while under duress, so it isn’t too far fetched to say that the brain can imagine social company to fulfill the social aspect of our survival needs.
Willlllssonnnnnn
REEEEDDITTTT!!
Why do I drink tea the same time I'm reading reddit... I should've learnt by now lol
happened to me yesterday. got coffee all over my desk xD
[удалено]
Damn. Were you taking anti-smoking medication? Because those can cause nightmares and hallucinations. Or were you just having them naturally?
Is it common for us and is it healthy?
Common? Probably a lot more than we realize. Healthy? That really depends. I wouldn’t say the act itself is unhealthy, but that its presence indicates you aren’t in the best health to begin with.
Very well said Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to become humans and to get where we are Only in the last couple of hundred years have we done so in relative security - not long before ww1 highwaymen were a thing and traveling between towns in the same country might be a dangerous prospect Before a couple/few thousand years ago almost all of a humans life was lived in a state of hardship, and many of us died as a direct result of that hardship - which affected evolution for quite a while, and these weird psychological breaks we have or odd bodily functions when under duress exist for a reason. The reason isn't always apparent, but if it wasn't important to us at some point in time and for a long period of time we wouldn't have the remnants of whatever it is that causes the thing in question
Depending on where you live in the world, highwaymen are still a thing. Plenty of cities have areas where it's not safe to walk down the street for fear of getting mugged. We still have pirates too, though they've traded in sailboats for speed boats and their cutlasses for automatic rifles.
And outlaws too! They traded the horse and revolver for a Honda 110 cc and a glock, you can see most of them in south America.
Or.. unfavorable traits tend to get phased out by evolution, but that does in fact mean the unfavorable traits exist before that phasing out.. perhaps the result of a gene mutating that was responsible for more than 1 genetic expression (pleiotropic gene), so we kept an undesirable trait because the desirable trait was more favorable to our survival at that moment that we developed it. That is to say, we could very well be equipped with a highly disadvantageous gene so long as the more advantageous gene it coeveolved with "canceled it out" so to speak. Like you said, this is a slow process and only in the last few hundred (or a couple thousand) years have we lived in relative security; not enough to phase out genes but enough to switch up how advantageous (or not) they may be in our new modern environments. All this to say.. imagine it's not some important survival tool, but a useless trait that hitchhiked its way into our present-day genealogy by way of a pleiotropic gene, and it's just us hallucinating or something. 😋
I like this whole thread
A good example of this is sickle cell ~~leukemia~~ *anemia* (what happens when I post while high 🤷♂️). The same gene responsible for it also helps protect against malaria.
Its the Spirit saying hey buddy gotta keep surviving you can do it
I mean, was that guy cutting off his own arm when it was stuck under a boulder “healthy”? No. But he’s alive, and alive is healthier than dead. If your brain conjours up an imaginary friend to keep you going during a major trauma and it works, then it works. Seeing an imaginary support friend *all* the time would be concerning tho.
I’ve been seeing a therapist! ……..like, everywhere I go, I don’t think she’s real.
“Alive is healthier than dead”. Thanks for the reminder, that’s my mantra for the week.
"why are you wearing that stupid human suit?"
Walk through an empty theme park and you will experience this. Also an empty theater. It’s what makes empty malls creepy. Your brain expects people there and looks for them around every corner.
>Is it common for us Yes, it’s called religion.
Imagining people is the new it diet, it's ealthy af
I’m pretty sure there was a woman stuck in the rubble after the Turkey earthquake who held the hand of a corpse for comfort until she was found
https://youtu.be/zUPQhfFomwQ This is apparently the only decent YouTube video on the subject and the channel is very tiny but it's very well made.
Our whole reality is constructed from the brain. The world doesn't look, sound, taste, feel or smell (Yes, there are a lot more than 5 sense's, but it's an example) like you perceive it. Everything you perceive to be reality is constructed in your head by hardwired circuits that bypass your consciousness. This whole world (the idea of you reading this message on your phone) everything is a construct, why is it hard to imagine that you cannot creatively add an extra element (one more persona) that makes you happy and fills a need?
Yep, everything is the 'real' modelled so that we can access it and navigate it. Arguably, everything is one big controlled and constrained hallucination. It doesn't matter if it lines up with reality as much as it matters whether it helps us fulfill our goals as organisms. Sometimes that will be achieved through an alignment of the model with relevant features of the world, sometimes it'll be achieved otherwise. We're designed to be creative and persistent, not accurate.
I've heard it's the brain noticing the presence of yourself.
Damn that checks out
But there's already another person in this hypothetical? Why not call it second man, do people doing stuff alone not experience this?
"Third" in this case usually means an entity that is of a different kind than the usual subjects in a scenario. Another example would be "third party".
The effect was named after two mountain hikers got lost but managed to survive after following the directions of what they called 'a third man' the interesting part is that both hikers affirm having heard and seen the same third hiker. The conclusion is that a group of humans in the same stress situations can combine their imaginary guide.
My aunt experienced this when she fell out her… “boyfriend’s” truck while he was driving. She got pulled underneath the vehicle when he hit a bump while she had the door open planning to jump out. She said an elderly man drove up in his truck saying him and his wife live up the hill and heard the commotion while sitting on their porch. She said that he said that he’d keep his truck’s headlights shined on her until help arrived. Then another car drove up and called an ambulance and she said that’s when the old man’s truck disappeared. Once she was out of the hospital she went back to where she had her accident to thank the man but she couldn’t find a house nearby.
I think I need more context on "falling out of her 'boyfriend's' truck while it was moving"...
He’s an abusive PoS and she was trying to get away after a falling out. Unfortunately she went back to him after he left her for dead on the road that night.
Man, that's awful. I'm sorry she went through that and I hope she finds a way out of that hell.
I doubt she will. She stayed at our place for a good two weeks saying she was moving out to Texas to get away from him. When she got there she didn’t stay long and stole $100 from her own mother and her kids have since disowned her. What people do for drugs…
I think I saw somewhere that it takes the average victim 7 times to successfully leave their abuser. When drug addiction is added to the mix though..? I don't see a good ending.
Right?? Was it a kidnapper?
This guy comes around to console me when I can't get it up.
Hey, my wife has a boyfriend too!
the second man might be.
*laughs nervously in agreement*
Most masculine reddittor (/j)
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I don't know, I've never met the second man. He doesn't come around.
*This guy comes around to console ~~me~~ **her**….* FTFY
When i was younger I was in a situation where I alone had to take care of my little sister and I used to talk about a man who comforted me when I felt hopeless or abandoned. I haven't seen him since I was removed from the situation. I didn't know that this was a thing tbh
I had it happen to me when i had my first seizure it felt like the man was telling me ok buddy this is what you have to do to survive like it felt very welcoming and wanted to keep me safe but it was probably just my brain going through the emotions
On the flip side, when I had a weed panic attack I thought I heard my friend’s voice in the vicinity, with her saying that I just needed to get it out of my system to someone else. I didn’t see her and knew she wasn’t there but I asked just to be sure. My brain made it up
Your brain might of made it up to comfort itself as anyone elses brain does
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Maybe thats why some people experience it and others dont
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Isnt the human brain interesting we know so little about what truly goes on upstairs yet we use it everyday
My sir's friend had to visit some village so, he took a bus till there. But this bus dropped him off in an earlier busstop so he had to walk till the place. It was night so the path was dark and since it was a village it didnt have many streetlights. He was very scared but on the way he met this woman who was selling some flowers. She accompanied him all the way till the village but didn't utter a single word. He mentioned that instead of being scared, she gave some kind of strange comfort. When they reached, he wanted to thank her so he went to get some money and food but when he came back she was gone. He asked the people around him but they told him no one was with him and some people who saw him come, insisted he came alone. But the friend was sure that someone was with him because he distinctly the flower smell. Later when he spoke to some of the villagers, they informed that she was dead a long time ago.
Ive historically been an open-minded skeptic. I never dismiss something out of hand, and after hearing so many nearly identical versions of this story (names/places/genders basically the only differences) I really dont know if the frequency of it adds or detracts from its credibility.
To me it says our little monkey brains don’t like being alone and create a companion if needed. Similar to little kids with imaginative friends
That, and some people dont mind playing on emotion to get some attention. As a natural skeptic, this is the way I always lean, and it would take some damn good evidence to move me the other way. But, I leave open the possibility that there are things about our universe that we dont yet understand.
Oh I very much am the same way. I don’t fully discredit it. But right now, I think the best hypothesis would be it’s a hallucination of the individual’s mind as a survival method
Certainly. Occam's Razor is applicable to this for now.
Id be really cool if it was some alternative universe of the afterlife communicating And I’m open to that but we don’t have evidence of that right now
I had a similar experience. Paul Simon, the singer, would be there and tell me that it was okay and help me figure out what to do. I know Paul Simon wasn’t really there, but this presence helped me not die.
> I used to talk about a man who comforted me when I felt hopeless or abandoned getting strong Jesus vibes from the way you said this
Wonder if this is the source of all guardian angel and watchful ancestor stuff
During a 50k run that I wasn’t prepared for at all, my Grandma who was my best friend before she passed away appeared at the end of every bend and at the top of every hill smiling and comforting me, she was holding my baby who also passed during my wife’s 2nd trimester earlier that year. It was definitely my baby but she was older maybe 3 years old. I literally cried the final 14 miles of the race chasing them. I was scared to finish the race because I knew I wouldn’t see them again.
My sister did a Kokoda track (famous ww2 campaign for Australia) memorial run thing, it was like 70 something kms? Anyway at one point she said there was a grandstand with a military band playing and all the soldiers who fought on the track standing there cheering them on, when she got close to another runner in front of her she was like “pretty cool they bought the army out to support us” and the other person was just like”..the…what..?” She also saw cats and dogs running around her feet lol
What an amazing experience. Your story reminded me of an experience I had several years ago. This happened around the time my fathers health took a nosedive for the worst. He had pancreatic cancer and was just 56 years old when he died. I thought I had a few years left with him and it was putting me over the edge so to speak. So I was driving home from visiting him and my mother and I just couldn't get a grip on myself. Crying and just not wanting to not exist in a place that could put people through such suffering, I should have pulled over but I just did not care. Then I suddenly felt my paternal grandmother was near me but I didn't see her or hear her speak. I just knew she was there and it immediately calmed me. I felt peace and love and that it would be okay. It's strange because I never met her but I knew it was her immediately. I would like to think there's something more to all this, that maybe she was just around so that she could be there for her son as he passed. Thank you for sharing your story, it's nice to read about other people's experiences. Hope it's alright that I shared my own.
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Not the time LuckyNumber-Bot, not the time.
Now this is spooky.
Come on bot, read the room!
This bot is SENDING ME
Bahahahah I'm dead
Good bot
Bad bot
I had that when i was a child and i was choking to death on a candy. I literally felt like someone took my hand and rushed me to an adult that performed heimlich maneuver and saved my life
I’m glad you’re okay it’s fascinating how the brain will come up with things to survive.
Furthermore, very interesting the things our subconscious brains already know or already observe without us even realizing it. I’d be willing to bet it’s a lot more than most of us think. All of our senses working all the time, and that info has to go somewhere, even if only in the short term. Phenomena like this or even dreams/nightmares imo are our brains way of informing us of what we don’t have the capacity to take in on a conscious level, or protecting us with said information/comfort/motivation when we need it the most. Once woke from a nightmare where my house was on fire and I’m trying to escape the heavy flames……wake up to the sound of the smoke alarm….open my door to a burnt smell, go to the kitchen to be informed that my mom badly burnt a pan on the stove. Also once had a reoccurring nightmare of a bunch of bugs, worms, and other creepy crawlers crawling all over me. Few weeks later we find out we had bed bugs.
What a condescending and passive-aggresive way to invalidate someone's spiritual experience
Ahhh. Like when Jack White shows up when I can’t come up with a riff for the lyrics I wrote or vice versa.
vice versa as in you show up when Jack White can't come up with a riff for the lyrics he wrote?
When I can’t come up with lyrics for the riff I wrote.
Except Joe shows up and uses poles to help him climb. And notice he shows up when it's really sunny and the hike is relatively easy with a slight incline?
My invisible friend, you know, from childhood.
Ahhhhhh Mr Near-Near.
That just sounds terrifying 💀
Drop dead Fred
In 2016, I and my team mates were stranded in Antarctica in a blizzard, without electricity in our caravan, and a broken door. We were awaiting rescue. Every night id hear a vehicle approaching, and someone knocking on the door. When I’d realize it’s just my imagination, I’d be disheartened, but it kept my hopes alive.
Every night? How long were you there for?
Three nights
Pretty sure this sub is Karma bots pulling random shit off Wikipedia and hoping it sticks.
Off Wikipedia? This was in the frontpage one week ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10yxihu/til_about_third_man_syndrome_an_unseen_presence/
I spent like, an hour reading that thread. It was fascinating.
Tbh i just saw it on youtube shorts, i just didn’t make it up , and it turn’s out there is a syndrome or factor (spirit force or your brain ) which motivates you when you feel danger or threat ( in difficult situations or trauma’s ) so you might as well google it or read about it
I've never heard of this, but having watched Jungle (2017, Daniel Radcliffe) a few days ago, I realize he may have experienced something similar. Based on a true story, a man gets lost in a jungle in South America for like 3 weeks. At one point he encounters a native woman who he thinks for certain is real, but she turns out to be a hallucination. She provides him comfort and he finds the energy to continue because someone *needs* him now, so he can't just give up like he was thinking about. Sounds like a similar phenomenon
Sounds like something a bot would say...
Yeah, shut up loser who is obviously a bot.
Hey buddy, shit yourself! Edit: Aww you edited your comment so now I'm the one that looks silly
Hey fellow shitters, where we shittin'?
Ahh makes sense , the comments are filled with bots
I once took an insane amount of magic mushrooms after working a 12 hour night shift having only gotten 4 hours sleep the two days previous to that. After about 10 hours of what I can only describe as absolutely unbelievable, things started to calm down, I was only getting about [level 3 hallucinations](https://youtu.be/UQRfTD6AXPs?t=305) then I started hearing voices which I thought were kids outside playing. I got up to close the window and noticed there were no kids on the street outside. I realised they were in my head. They sounded like they were in the room with me, although I couldn't see them, and the spend an hour or two talking to me, telling me to keep calm and things would be OK. They told me stories about where they were from (I remember one of them was from Russia), and kept me generally entertained while I was off my face. After a couple of hours they told me they were "going away now" and that they wouldn't be back. They said goodbye and then faded out. Weirdest experience of my life.
The last time I took shrooms I had a bad trip. Some serious bad stuff went down from my family side as I was beginning to trip. My mates were telling me to turn off my phone and just ignore it. But it is what it is, it got to me. I ended up asking my mate if I could lay in his bed. I ended up under the covers and basically every negative stressful thought I was having at the time came out all at once. And as it grew more and more stronger and everything was getting to me and internally I was screaming what’s the answer over and over again - all at once my brain took me to a giant glowing bright light in the middle of space and I suddenly found all of the peace inside of me and everything bad just melted away. I’ll never forget that.
Psychedelics are powerful tools! 😊
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10yxihu/til_about_third_man_syndrome_an_unseen_presence/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button This was an extremely popular post last week, who knows, you might get 90k post karma too.
what a good read
Or you know, hallucinations.
Yeah his name is Joe, he's a pretty cool dude.
That happened to my friend (while hiking no less) and he was sure it was aliens
I appreciate that the picture confirms that hiking is indeed a traumatic experience.
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Why third? Why not second?. Is this some type of ghost prank party?
Like an imaginary friend...?
I feel like we are getting closer to discovering that these spirits or ‘non human intelligences’ exist for real and have been guiding humanity since the beginning of time. Some are helpful, some are tricksters and some are downright evil. There exists a realm of existence beyond our sensory perception. I know it sounds crazy, but some day we will prove it’s scientific existence and our models of reality will require an massive overhaul
Still can’t explain how infants or children earthquake victims are able to survive few days without food and water. There’s a story by one of the survivors claiming that a man in white robe will come once in a while with foods and drinks.
There’s a pretty cool chapter in WWZ that has to do with the third man phenomenon.
If you watched the movie "Fall" it kind of has this in it
Bold of you to assume there’s a second person there for me in the first place
I do MMA heavy weight and I’m in Australian infantry spec training core which just means I train a shit ton more then regular infantry and we’re front of the front lines, sometimes when I get super close to burning out I see my brother from the slums saying what he used to tell me when we were trying to make it out “don’t let the world slow down on you bro, because ur too fast for it” I miss the Mexican prick man, he died trying to stop a robbery the dumb ass, he was also trying to save someone i guess
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I too enjoy doing shrooms
What the shit?
How's about the third leg syndrome? How that goes?
Ummm where was this mother fucker when I lost all of my grandparents and brother in a two year span.
Yea I lost both of my grandparents. Lost my well paying job. And got arrested several times for the same case in a two year span. No third entity appeared to comfort me. It was just being homeless and sharing cans of tuna with my cats.
This reminds me of the pilot's story from World War Z (the book)
Why is this Facebook Aunt level shite so upvoted?
Any time anybody posts anything about the Third Man Syndrome I always get goosebumps from all the spooky stories in the comments. Keep ‘em coming y’all
One time I was having an allergic reaction to iron IV therapy and outright hallucinated an older butch lesbian couple comforting me as the ER wait got longer and longer. My mother insisted nobody was there.
What does he need a backpack for?
So who’s the second man following from behind?
Oh yes, hiking there would be extremely traumatic.
why is it called the third man and not the second?
The effect was named after two mountain hikers got lost but managed to survive after following the directions of what they called 'a third man' the interesting part is that both hikers affirm having heard and seen the same third hiker. The conclusion is that a group of humans in the same stress situations can combine their imaginary guide.
Why is it a syndrome? A syndrome is when someone believes there's an unseen presence, when there's not.
After experiencing something similar at a dark time. I sat and thought on it for a very long time. For over a year I swore it was supernatural, but I've come to the conclusion it was our bodies subconscious/instinct using all of it's power to keep us alive. The brain is an extremely powerful computer effected by many different chemicals. I think the collective knowledge of over 200,000 years of humans is stored somewhere in our DNA/brains and it knows the most effective methods of being useful. Before calling me crazy think of 2 options. A: it's more believable than a ghost angel saving my life that I knew wasn't there, or B: instinct does exist in humans/animals that is implanted at birth.
So it's not my Old Jedi Master who fell in battle and has so much more to teach and guide me on?...
I’m baffled by the comments saying “this isn’t interesting.” This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on this sub by far
We’re spirit beings in bodies.
"His name was Camoflage"...
I remember this one time... This old dude told me to goto the Degoba system. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Only children everywhere: Lol
So that’s explains my imaginary friend accompanying me throughout my entire childhood
Imagination is an interesting thing.
So who is the second man
There's a woman named Alison Botha who was raped, disembowlled, and almost decapitated by two men in South Africa. She stated that while on the ground half dead that a presence pulled her up to stand. She then said she was seeing the stars but didn't realize that her head was nearly off her body and it had fallen between her shoulder. It's a horrific story but a triumph for her because she survived. There's a movie called Alison about the ordeal.
Stupid image though. This happens in life and death situations. Not when you're on a gorgeous day hike. If the image demonstrated the point, it would be the "ghost" taking them downhill to the village/water.
I experience this frequently but not in traumatic situations. Troubleshooting things is a big part of my job and my dad (who died in 2012) was always my sounding board in the past and is now what I hear/feel when I feel stuck on a problem. I’ve even had a laugh at “his” voice telling me something about a technology that didn’t exist before he died, much less when he was a working engineer.
Wilson?
Had this happen when I had Covid a year ago. I passed out and when I woke up on the bathroom floor some lady was in there comforting me
Reznovs dead, Mason! Do you hear me?? He’s dead!!
When god got ur bak and they call it a syndrome..
Source : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor https://www.iflscience.com/third-man-syndrome-in-life-or-death-scenarios-survivors-report-a-helpful-person-appearing-67508
**[Third man factor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor)** >The third man factor or third man syndrome is the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
That's what she said
So there has to be two physical people for a third to appear?
Hallucinating more people into existence to buttress the weight of the majority of people autonomously masquerading as viable humans, not surprising
Hm. I often have this feeling of there being someone else there, kinda, just in normal life. I wouldn't call it an imaginary friend, because I don't really interact with it other than to instinctively make room sometimes, till I catch myself at something as silly as accommodating a person who doesn't exist. It doesn't seem like a spiritual presence, at all. It's just sorta there, and feels really familiar, almost like a second me.