Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting

esocid writes writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that scientists may have found a way to study deja vu, that uneasy feeling you have seen something before. Using hypnosis, scientists claim to be able to incorrectly trigger the portion of the brain responsible for recognition of something familiar. From the article: "Two key processes are thought to occur when someone recognizes a familiar object or scene. First, the brain searches through memory traces to see if the contents of that scene have been observed before. If they have, a separate part of the brain then identifies the scene or object as being familiar. In deja vu, this second process may occur by mistake, so that a feeling of familiarity is triggered by a novel object or scene."

Comments

Re:by mistake?

[Znork]

Apparently, blind people also experience deja vu, which makes the theory unlikely.

I dont quite see the need to go to complicated explanations for deja vu; the human brain is one huge neural network, false positives and random matches should be expected. Without a certain fuzziness in temporal recognition, we'd be unable to ever recognize any repetetive event as every repeat would cause slightly differing levels of synaptic activation, depending on the totality of sensory input and internal state.

The amazing thing is rather that it functions as well as it does, minimizing both false positives and negatives, although perhaps erring a bit more on the negative side for the average person.