Chief Bob’s hearings might well be public[...] I don’t think I’ve ever been present for an actual court case, just seen them on TV.
This seems to me like an odd example given that you’re contrasting with American government, where court hearings are almost entirely public, written opinions are generally freely available, and court transcripts are generally public (though not always accessible for free). I guess the steelman version is that the contrast is a matter of geography or scale? Chief Bob’s hearings are in your neighborhood and involve your neighbors, whereas your local court might be across town during the business day and involve disputes between people you don’t know. But the American judicial system is a lot more accessible than it plausibly could be while still fulfilling its core function.
Having wisdom teeth out was also a fascinating experience for me for similar reasons, but I don’t know what I did in that lucid-but-amnesiac (and for all I know actually unconscious?) interval. I did apparently walk to the recovery room under my own power, so while I don’t think I was asking questions or solving math problems, I was at least navigating under my own power and avoiding running into walls. What really sticks in my mind was that I had this experience of “coming to”, like almost identical to the sensation of waking up except without feeling like I had just been asleep. It wasn’t that different from other experience where I’d had a lapse of awareness and come back suddenly to awareness of the present moment, but the discontinuity was more dramatic.
(As a side note, I love the thought of smuggling a short-term memory out of a period of memory loss by hiding it in a long-term memory. No idea whether I’d expect that to actually work, but definitely a creative approach to the problem.)