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Even The Blind Get Deja Vu
zentropa writes "Cosmos magazine is reporting that even the blind experience deja vu — backing the idea that it is caused by misfires in the brain's temporal lobe. They quote a British study where a blind man feels like he has 'already seen' some unfamiliar situations. 'Hearing and touch and smell often seem to intermingle in the déjà vu experiences,' said the study subject, whose name has not been made public. 'It is almost like photographic memory, without sight obviously... as if I was encountering a mini-recording in my head, but trying to think "Where have I come across that before?"'"
...or have I seen this article before?
It happens when they change something
http://dejavu.movies.go.com/
I'd rather be an ignorant moron than an anonymous coward.
It seems to me like blind people would be even more likely than sighted people to experience deja vu. If you think about it, only four senses need to be replicated, and all four are more likely to recur than identical visual patterns.
Some attitudes replaced or by cgi optimizes
from the again-for-the-first-time dept.
Isn't that slashdot's motto?
... er, i least it feels... kinda... like... one...
in the matrix. I'm waiting for the 3rd version to come out.
I, for one, welcome our new... again... er...
...After all, in the future outside of The Matrix, even blind people make good robot-batteries.
Next you'll be telling me that blind people can feel emotions and think logically, just like regular people!
When I get the deja vu feeling, it is usually because I feel as I have heard something (or discussed something with someone) before. If my sighted deja vu is mostly auditory, why is it a surprise that someone who can't see experiences the same feeling?
that Deja Vu always involves sight... Every now and then here in Melbourne we get a bit of wet, humid weather and I have to think where have I felt this before? and its usually Malaysia in the wet season I am reminded of, but it takes a bit of back tracking to work it out.
BTW I do have temporal lobe epilepsy and back when I had a lot of problems a feeling of deja vu was often associated with a siezure.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What happens if you have deja vu of a false deja vu memory from virtual reality?
I am sure I am not the only one who is not the slightest bit surprised. In fact I would be surprised if anyone told me that their deja vu exprience was primarily visual.
Every time I have had it it was a feeling of actually re-living the moment in every way and detail even down to the actions and thoughts I had seeming strangely familiar.
For me deja vu has been a completely immersive experience where no single one of my senses was predominant.
First off, with a little practice you can will yourself to have Deja Vu. Just think about how you felt the last time you had Deja Vu. Ask yourself if you remember seeing random things, etc. Eventually you mind just snaps into Deja Vu and if you do this often you can do it at will.
Why would you want to? Well, I've noticed this curious little thing; if you try to remember something when you're in the middle of Deja Vu, you won't be able to, forever. It's like you've erased a part of your memory. Why would you ever wanna forget anything? Well, its actually useful. Say you accidently found what your girlfriend is giving you for xmas. She's gone to all this trouble to hide it so it will be a surprise, and now you're going to have to fake it under the tree on xmas day. No problem, just walk away, wait an hour or two, will up some Deja Vu and try to remember what she got you. Quite apart from the fact that you could remember it 5 minutes ago, you can't remember it now, and you won't be able to remember on xmas day either. Sure, you'll be able to remember that you once could remember, but you won't be able to remember anymore.
It's also good for forgetting the password to your encrypted filesystem when the russians grab you. Not, that, you know, I need to do that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... given the title. After all, who could actually think the blind couldn't get deja vu?
I swear I haven't seen this before!
Did not not just read this a day ago?
I'd be more interested in knowing at what age Deja Vu begins to show up. I've always figured Deja Vu really was you recognizing something similar to something from your past. Nothing fancy, just a little fragment of sensory perception you stored up there and happened to set off the recognition trigger. If it happens in very young children no less often than adults, then you've got a good indication it's not a real memory fragment.
Demented But Determined.
Or maybe it's like this:
Your brain is built by nature's mathematics. You don't freak out all the time because the patterns you encounter around you, are basically the same that built your brain. But every now and then, there will be an anomaly in one of the computed patterns: a detail that doesn't match the anticipated result. Your brain just encountered something known as a 'nullity'. This freaks you out.
Yes you have and no you have not. Deja Vu is that feeling,
but you must understand, ALL people have this!! The Blind,
the Deaf, the Autistic, ALL people get this temporary
sensory feedback loop. It is much like a mental hiccup.
I fart, therefore I am, well noticed.
It is most probable that, as we are on slashdot, the article is a dupe, a 'digital deja vu' if you will.
I am Spartacus
It's just a glitch in the Matrix.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I always thought that deja vu was an experience, comprised of things our senses tell us. most of my deja vus are triggered not by what I see but rather a combination of senses that makes up the familiar experience of deja vu.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd kinda expect blind people to experience dejavu more often than the rest of us considering how they have to make their way around the house counting how many steps they've made & how many seconds it takes for X to happen.
They're bound to feel like they've done it before sooner or later.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This report comes out just as a Denzel Washington flick of the same name is hitting theaters. Science and marketing, two great tastes that go great together.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
In Soviet Russia...it's Deja-vYOU!
Get it?
YOU are the Deja-vu for someone else?
No kidding. I read this and thought "um... no kidding? In what world did anyone think that the blind *couldn't* get deja vu!?"
What's next, a /. article that says that blind people can dream? (Giving /.ers deja vu).
Gotta admit it makes for a good excuse to talk about deja vu, and there's plenty of nerdy jokes that can be made on the subject.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
This is not to say that Deja Vu does not also sometimes happen under just those sorts of circumstances, but it seems rather too arbitrary.
-FL
And all across America, the hawks are thinking "Is it just me, or is this Vietnam again?"
In other not news, the blind can hear, touch, feel, etc.
--I know. Occam would have a fit. But Occam was also a monk who was satisfied that his theory was useful in finding proof of god, so one should accept that his logical razor leans heavily upon one's experiential biases. Example: If you have never experienced telephones or the supporting technology upon which our telecom systems rely, then is it more rational to assume that people have invented a world-spanning telephone system or that you are simply being lied to by the person making such a claim?
It's all about perspective. The less you know, the more statements must be taken as assumptions, which serve to invalidate them in Occam's equation. Thus, it can be fairly said that Occam rewards ignorance by logically validating inadequate explanations.
Thank-you. --You can buy a copy of my CD at the end of the show.
-FL
I used to have temporal-lobe epilepsy (aka psycho-motor epilepsy) and the "Trigger" emotion/sensation was a very intense feeling of deja-vu. The sensation did not cause the seizure but was rather a warning sign that an episode was starting.
It was caused by a tumor in my Right-temporal lobe. Surgery was preformed and removed my right-temporal lobe plus more from a deep 'root' as the doctor called it. That was April 30/1990. I am feeling much better now. =)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
the most believable explanation of dejavu i've heard is that our brain "short circuits" momentarily recording information directly to long term memory instead of it's normal route through short term memory and on through. the sensation we experiencing is not remembering so to speak, so much as the sensation of accessing long term memory.
Even if you're blind, you need to know your room to navigate and think. I get so much flack about my implementation of Artificial Intelligence that it needs a modern 3d card and high end CAD to work because people tell me it has no eyes so it can't think for itself. I have half a notion to spend my entire life on AI, but I won't since there are more pressing matters to attend to.
God spoke to me.
... i read a possible explanation for deja vu the optic nerve signals were rerouted from short term memory and rather ended up going directly into long-term memory, triggering immediately the sense that you've seen this exact scene a long time ago...
in any case, this explanation explains why this particular study was noteworthy.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Instead, it's a completely overwhelming feeling that every aspect of the current situation down to your thoughts has occurred in this exact sequence before. Senses are only a part of the equation. So should it be a surprise to anyone that this affects those missing one or more of them?
I seem to recall that Deja vu is actually your brain mis-interpreting what you are currently experiencing as being something you have experienced in the past (ie: processing what you are currently experiencing as if it is coming from your brain's archives. Or in nerd talk - Your brain is mixing up off-site storage with L1 cache.). So, once again, I don't see what this has to do why Deja vu would be isolated to sight based events.
remember reading somewhere that its because one of the eyes deliver the signal a bit late than the other eye (or one ear than the other), so the brain already knows what has happened
fifteen jugglers, five believers
What a stooopid article. Are there people out there dumb enough that they thought "deja vue" was strictly VISUAL? It's known as being a "feeling". Why wouldn't blind people experience feelings??!
I feel the situation, sight has nothing to do with deja vu.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
More than once, I've had déjà vu about having déjà vu about, well, let's just say it's recursive and I don't feel like there's an end to it. Good way to make your head spin for a while. Although, maybe I should call what I've felt déjà vecu ... :]
I have fairly good recollections of myself during déjà vu, so I'm not sure if your method of forgetting will work for others. That said, I *do* know another technique that works for me and it does use a recursive thought pattern to erase something.
Think of your thoughts as links--each idea reminds you of other "nearby" ideas. I associate, say, a certain smell with soup, and perhaps I associate soup with the red & white cans of Campbell's soup, winter days, and a thermos, etc. So on some level, each idea is like a web page that has links to it from other ideas, and which (probably) links out to a few other things.
The trick is to make a recursive-nothing thought. That is, some dead-end idea that has only one link--a link to itself. So once an idea links to there, it goes nowhere, because the only link out goes right back to that recursive nothing that it was just at. Then, you search through all the things that make you think of the thing you want to forget, and replace those associations with links to this recursive-nothing thought. Remember, though--the link has to be one way. Like the roach motel, thoughts check in, but they don't check out.
Now, unless it's a very new thought that you want to forget, you probably have a lot of links you've missed. This is normal. You need to link them to the recursive-nothing when you find them. Keep doing this and eventually you can suppress the thought or memory entirely. Or at least, I can. Maybe each person needs to come up with their own method, but I find it interesting that we both end up using some form of recursive thought.
Perhaps that's the key in and of itself? I wonder...
I had a recursive-nothing thought for such occasions. It used to go nowhere. But now it is gonna remind me of slashdot.
This proves that they have the same capabilities as the rest of us, so the blind can finally stop parking in the good spots up front. ;)
When I Deja Vu I can sometimes guess what the other person is going to say 2 seconds before they say it. Especitally if it is something distinct, like a pun, a joke, a new spin on a cliche. Its not just "Hmmm... i've had this conversation before..." but more like "Hey we've had this conversation before, I know what he's going to say.."
Deja vu is caused by a glitch in the Matrix - this would affect all senses, not merely visual. Am I the only one that thinks this is really obvious?
A false positive is bad, especially if there are far too many, but a false negative can be lethal. This would be more true, say, 100,000 years ago than today, and that's when most of these mechanisms became as finely tuned as they are. Back in the days when hominids were trudging through deadly terrain, you had to remember places and situations that were Bad News with enough time to get clear. In those days, there was a shortage of humvees, so having time to get clear meant having extremely early warning. From that, Deja Vu is a very obvious, direct consequence. In fact, no matter how good humans may have been at avoiding such situations, Deja Vu would always be selected for far more often than against.
(The above can be translated by crypto geeks as follows: The brain has a really crappy but very very fast hashing algorithm used to label sensory data. It's so fast that being crappy doesn't hurt survival chances, but it's crappy enough that we are seeing a very large number of hashing collisions.)
Now, here is where it gets fun. The senses are all cross-linked and cross-referenced in the brain. When the barriers in the brain don't work as expected, we get synaesthesia. Now, it is not at all obvious where the comparison is made, or how the barriers work. For this reason, it is entirely possible to imagine a situation where data from sense A is compared with a prior input from sense B. All it would take is for the barrier to fail to work correctly for recalled data, even if it worked just fine otherwise. This is not "classic" Deja Vu, because the brain is not incorrectly matching an experience with a prior experience of the same sense - it is incorrectly matching totally different types of data. Is this possible? Depends. Any connection that is bi-directional in the brain by nature can fail to mask or block data in either direction, so I can see absolutely no reason why - given synaesthetes are proof that the failure can occur one way - it cannot fail on recall.
(There are soooo many brain disorders associated with inexplicable associations, spooky feelings and false associations that you could fund half the field of neurology for the next fifty years just looking at sensory mismatches and nothing else. Given that, I'd call it almost a flat-out certainty that some of these experiences are cross-sensory errors that involve some of the same matching failures as Deja Vu.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
déjà vu - (d'zhä v') - n. A feeling of having seen or experienced something before.
This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original...
This reminds me of that bogus psychological study on Auditory "Hallucinations" brought on my frequent iPod use. Some quack spouting off about people hearing sounds that weren't there--more serious than having a song stuck in your head. Again, that's what I spend my life TRYING to do!
You're a reasercher? Gotta research SOMETHIN'!
It may not be so explicitly tied up to sensory perception as the researchers are trying to prove/disprove. It has happened a lot of times when I am in deeply thinking about something and suddenly I get the deja-vu feeling, can't even put my hands on what was it that triggered it. Was it some particular incident in the train of thought or some particular person/place which poppped up somewhere. I am sure lots of people have similar experiences. It just so happens that almost all of the data we acquire comes through the sensory organs so we tend to relate the feeling to the way those organs operate.
Somewhere above someone has posted that it might be related to the brain short-circuiting to pass a memory directly to the long-term-memory, and we get the odd sensation when accessing that particular memory. I find it much more plausible than any particular organ responsible of the feeling of deja-vu.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
How many of you thought this was about getting the Fedora 6 font 'visible' to blind people by using assistive technology? Ow, just me. I need to get myself a life somewhere...
... OR TRUE +5
Personally, whenever I experience deja vú it's mostly related to non-visual stimuli.
not seen that before?
Blind people can feel like they remember experiencing stuff too! Like..., Wow!
If you divide a number by zero, you get an undefined^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a range between -infinity and +infinity and if this occurs anywhere in an equation your result will be undefined^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a range between -infinity and +infinty
When people kiss they tend to tilt thier heads in the same direction as they did when they were in the womb! Now there's something I didn't know, how much did this brilliant piece of research cost!
How about researching something a bit more useful, cheaper drugs, more effecient energy, useful biology?? No wonder they is no grant money for useful stuff!!
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
Thanks a lot! Now why don't you start thinking about thinking? Are you thinking about thinking? About thinking?
Get off my launchpad!
Excuse me, but that's bullshit. It might be part of the story, but there's something very big they're missing.
I have personally experienced enough deja vu that I went through the effort to document things which might come up as deja vu - dreams and daydreams, as well as all instances of perceived deja vu. Nothing came of it for a year or so, until I went back and checked the instances: I'd actually been dreaming circumstances which occured weeks, months, or years later.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
... ha
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Very interesting thread (including the replies so far)
This always happens when I don't have mod points... an excellent discussion.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Am I the only one who thinks it funny that the temporal lobe actually has something to do with time? I think I've heard this one before ...
I smelt this article before, it feels like a thought of a dupe. Or it's just a flashback?
my personal theory of deja vu: the brain is a storage device with finite capacity. As new experiences are acquired, old memories (ones already "forgotten") are wiped and replaced by new memories. The exact moment of replacement is experienced as deja vu, because that old memory path had beed trod before. You know you used to remember something in that part of your brain, but you'll never know what that was because now that part of your brain holds the new memory.
I am not a neuro-scientist, but a medical doctor I know explained deja vu as simply when the signals from the same event reach the two sides of the brain a split second apart.
The second one triggers the "I've seen this before" experience in the brain, which is technically true, but not in the distant past, rather in the very near past (less than a second ago).
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How did Helen Keller's parents punish her?
They stuck doorknobs on the walls.
Speaking as a psychology student: Duh! I've never even heard of this idea that deja vu is only tied to sight.
Speaking as a human being: Personally, I'm an extremely unvisual person, and I'm not sure if I ever had deja vu tied to sight. My deja vu is tied almost exclusively to speech, which is kind of what my brain focuses on in general.
Property is theft.
Groundhog day is on TBS. NO kidding. Wierd timing.
too bad this still wont help them in the matrix...
This is horrible reporting. None of the actual facts or quotes in the article supports the claim that the subject felt like he had "seen" anything, which is how the author characterizes it in the first sentence. And they completely overlook the quite significant question of, "Was the subject blind from birth?"
Well before many years I found out it is possible to spot deja-vu kind of dreams, so I narrated my dreams in details to my friend. An example was a book with front cover where on each finger tip was one coin, something for magicians. Months later I actually got my fingers on the book in the country where such books do not exist in bookstores. I was collector. And many times after that confirmed deja-vu happened to me, due to my ability to spot the deja-vu dreams. My explanation for deja-vu is that it is partly our wishes or planned future and partly real, physical world which we in spirit, while dreaming, visit or review. Anyone else out of his head?
Possibly you refer to the more common feeling of Vu-Ja-de...
The feeling that none of this has ever happened before.
it was like that when I got here.. I wasen't here when that happened... second shift musta done that....