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:Great news!

[CRCulver]

Good to know! Now maybe they can get to work on those other trifling brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease--you know the minor ones that don't mean anything.

Actually, deja vu--along with similar phenomena like presque vu and jamais vu--is a major part of senility. Studying it could lead to a better understanding of getting soft in the head in general.

If you like science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, specifically the volume Blue Mars has these symptoms of senility as a major plot point. It's a sort of fate that might await us all as lifespans grow increasingly longer.

One explanation

[ManoSinistra]

One very good explanation for Deja Vu that I learned in my college psychology class was this:

When you see something normally, data is sent to and stored in your brain's hippocampus. However, on some occasions for reasons unknown, your hippocampus "mis-fires" and stores the memory and recalls it at the same time. In most if not all cases, you have not seen what you saw before, but rather it appears so because your brain stored and recalled the memory at the same time.

Eh.. for what it's worth...

Bull

[eno2001]

Everyone knows that dejavu goes beyond just a simple object but can cover hours of experience. Not only that, but if you've ever experienced it you can completely recount everything that is going to happen just before it happens. I don't think it's psychic though. I think it has something to do with your consciousness readjusting to a timeline shift. Considering that the metaverse is made up of an infinite number of universes that take every possibility into account and our consciousnesses are just reading through the data in a non-linear fashion, it's easy to see how a slight difference in one timeline can result in a little synchronization problem when you jump from one line to another. Don't believe me? Try it yourself. Focus on one particular small aspect of your reality and think of how it could be slightly different. With some practice you can control your read through the metaverse timelines and forcibly jump from one to the next. The article and the research commented on therein is either a misunderstanding on the part of the researchers or deliberate obfuscation to keep a larger part of the population from controlling their timeline reads. Now... off to Tralfamador to spend a little time with Montana Wildhack. Rowr!!!

less frequent now

[maddogsparky]

I used to experience deja vous on a somewhat regular basis (once a month or so). I found that when I was highschool/college, it increased in length (from a fraction of a second to 1-2 seconds). At that point it occured more frequently as well (several times a week).

The freaky part happened when I realized I could make very quick mental predictions of what would happen. At its peak, my longest deja vous was about 10 seconds into the future. At some point, I realized I was also somewhat aware of what my part was supposed to be and found that I could change my actions and make the expected thing not occur. After "changing the future" a few times by not acting according to my "vision" (a poor word, since the affect covered all my senses), the frequency of deja vous dropped to almost zero.

I don't think deja vous can be wholly explained by malfunctioning grey matter--too many people I know or have given strong evidence of visions and other phenominon. One of my supervisors in college took a course on dreaming at the university of minnesota, duluth in the late 90's and had some really weird things happen (e.g. passing assigned messages to other students in the class through dreams near the end of a single summer class). Don't get me wrong-I think most of those phsycic hotlines a bunch of baloney, but as a scientist, I can't just reject evidence that doesn't match my picture of the world; I need to keep an open mind or risk becoming like those who ridiculed Da Vinci for saying the earth went around the sun.

Re:Dupe!

[orangesquid]

"novel object or scene" -- not really! Sometimes when seeing something that I know I haven't seen before I will feel that it's familiar, and sometimes when in a place I know I've never visited before I will feel that I have been there, but what's much much stronger in effect is the sensation I sometimes get when there's a sequence of events or thoughts. I'll have a sensation that "the things from the last few minutes... have happened before!" and the sensation will stick for a while. Maybe it's just more profound because it's more closely tied to internal processes than simple sensory input? I often will be lying on my bed, waiting to fall asleep, and thinking, and I'll think that I've had this exact same train of thought before---not something similar, but identical. Or, I'll be having a conversation on AIM, and I'll think the conversation has happened identically before.

Maybe by 'object' they mean 'anything tangible' and 'scene' is 'any temporal thought process', but, it sounds like they're studying simple recognition of items, and that's never been half the mindfuck of things that are temporally extended. Maybe it's "recognition in the mind's eye" tied to the recognition-circuitry somehow re-triggering itself repeatedly? (Maybe thinking "I'm having deja vu" will make it more likely for the feeling to continue? Suggestion and association?)

The end of the article does mention things about the temporal lobe... maybe future research will go in this direction (I'm very curious to see)

I think I've posted this comment before... ;)

Sequence of events...

[Ayanami Rei]

What you'll come to find out (through multiple experiences) is that the deja-vu, when it happens, doesn't have a defined cue to attach itself to.
For some reason the seen-before-search area gets triggered and it happens without context.
So whatever you were thinking about (the last 3 minutes of conversation, a scene that occured, a song you were trying to remember) will seem familiar overall.

But as soon as you conciously try to pick it apart or take each piece in context, the feeling goes away.

Usually the sensation is triggered by external stimuli that arrive in the brain with a time skew that prevents them from being correlated. This triggers the seen-before paths but since it isn't memory-retrieval the sensation is not attached to the stimuli but whatever you are currently thinking or focusing on. :-/