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mare-of-night comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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A tulpa is an "imaginary friend" (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they've consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.
Here's an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.
Not sure whether this is actually possible (I'd guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.
If this is real, there's probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.
I browsed around the tulpa community some more, and found some mentions of "servitors", which have the same mental recall abilities (and apparently better access to current information - some people there claim to have made "status bars" projected on top of their vision), but the community doesn't consider them sentient. This forum has had several conversations about them. The people there tend to (badly) apply AI ideas to servitors, but that might just be an aesthetic choice.
This would probably be a better munchkin option, since it has most of the same usefulness as a tulpa, but much less likely to be sentient. Supposedly they have a tendency to become able to pass the turing test by accident, which is a little worrying, but that could be the human tendency to personify everything.
In general, what I'm taking away from this is that intense visualizing can have really weird results, including hallucinations, and conscious access to information that's usually hidden from you. I don't have a high degree of certainty about that, though, because of the source.