Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting 331
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."
Dupe! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dupe! (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Dupe! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2)
It's the Mind (Score:4, Funny)
*runs*
Re:Dupe! (Score:2)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2)
Re:Dupe! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dupe! (Score:2, Funny)
Dupe!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dupe!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Dupe!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Actually I was, but then I got a weird feeling that I'd seen that joke on here before...
You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:2)
Given the increasing number of Backslash posts, that doesn't seem too unlikely.
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:2)
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:3, Informative)
Close...was George Carlin.
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:2, Interesting)
or of course you could 'Read' the article tommorow which would be 'Vais Lire Deja Demain, or 'Lirai Deja Demain'
Of all of them, I think Verr Deja sounds the best. It is that feeling that you will have this same experience in the future. This can be applied to experiences like reading a post welcoming our new Overlords on
Remember, French
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:3, Interesting)
Déjà Verrai: The feeling this is not the last time you will undergo this experience.
Re:You've just experienced Vuja De! (Score:2)
Considering that this is
damn! (Score:2)
less frequent now (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Great news! (Score:2)
You're quite the Unknowing Fool (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows but maybe the cure to Alzheimer's is FOUND because we understand how the brain triggers recall, which is touched upon when deja vu is wrongly invoked?
Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool (Score:2)
Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool (Score:2)
MCD
Coincidence, I think not
Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool (Score:2)
Re:Great news! (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great news! (Score:2)
Also, if you like computers, you might want to read Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. And if you are interested in spice, you might want to pickup the Dune series. Other completely off topic book recommendations include...
Re: (Score:2)
Don't panic. (Score:2)
Even people without TLE can have deja vu. About 70% of the population claims to have experienced deja vu at some point in their life.
A journey of a 1000 miles.... (Score:2)
Yes, and by learning seemingly stupid and trivial things like this, it ultimately will pave the way towards a greater understanding of the brain that will allow them to eventually figure out how and why those disorders affect people.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Confucius
It's Official (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's Official (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take "obvious joke" for 500, Alex (Score:5, Funny)
*rimshot*
This is deja vu (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously though, as soon as I read the line "using hypnosis in a laboratory" the plausible-interest part of my brain shut off and my eyes glazed over. Recreate THAT in a laboratory.
Re:This is deja vu (Score:3, Informative)
Hypnoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
My thoughts exactly. Since when did data gathered from hynposis or 'hypnotised' patients make its way into the lab? Even hypnotists admit that the discipline involves suggestion. Subjects' responses are usually compatible with the expectations of those around them - the data is tainted. Find a biochemical way of triggering a neurological deja-vu response and I'm interested.
From the article:
The Leeds team set out to create a sense of deja vu among volunteers in a lab.
They used hypnosis to trigger only the second part of the recognition process - hoping to create a sense of familiarity about something a person had not seen before.
The researchers showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them and told them that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it.
Green frames would make them think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.
After being taken out of hypnosis, the volunteers were presented with a series of words in frames of various colours, including some that were not in the original 24 and which were framed in red or green.
Of the 18 people studied so far, 10 reported a peculiar sensation when they saw new words in red frames and five said it definitely felt like deja vu.
I suppose science - or at least its standards - must have changed a lot since I was in school.
How about we get to the real issue? (Score:2, Funny)
Much love to George Carlin
Re:How about we get to the real issue? (Score:2)
by mistake? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:by mistake? (Score:2)
Re:by mistake? (Score:2)
If that were true, wouldn't I be able to trigger deja vu by closing my eyes, and then opening one before the other one?
Re:by mistake? (Score:2)
Re:by mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
it all makes sense (Score:2)
Want to test an experimental interface for comments?
nuff said...
Works for me (Score:3, Funny)
MOD PARENT FUNNY (after reading the grandchild) (Score:2)
Re:I hate touchpads (Score:3, Funny)
This happened to me many times (Score:2)
One particular substance always made it seem like things had happened before - like I was experiencing something in real life that I had dreamt about before and it was very weird/scary. I'm guessing that it was causing the portion of my brain responsible for identifying familiar things to trigger (as mentioned in the article).
No scientific content... (Score:2)
"Using hypnosis, scientists..."
I rest my case.
Not even single-blinded (Score:2)
This sounds badly bli
Re:No scientific content... (Score:2)
Hypnosis and its use in understanding the brain are not unscientific. As with anything in science, there is the potential for drawing unscientific conclusions about hypnosis based on assumption or faulty reasoning, but one should not dismiss hypnosis based on some people's misrepresentation of its scope and capabilities. Stage hypnosis is not the same as clinical hypnosis. It is known that electrical impulses fire at certain frequencies durin
Re:No scientific content... (Score:2)
You're right, I must have repressed that memory...
Kidding aside, hypnosis may be useful for altering cognitive processing, but it's useless for pulling usable data from somebody's noggin. You simply cannot escape the subjective nature of the whole experiment.
Perhaps I feel this way because I have little to no desire to please anyone other than myself, and the whole concept of hypnosis is to be consistent with the suggestions of
Huh? (link NSFW) (Score:2)
Of course it happened in a lab setting (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Of course it happened in a lab setting (Score:2)
Re:Of course it happened in a lab setting (Score:2)
Mods, where are you?
Re:Of course it happened in a lab setting (Score:3, Funny)
Old news (Score:2)
I disagree a little (Score:2)
Maybe the model could be modified a little. In my understanding, the feeling of Deja Vu is its own feeling, not the regular, everyday familiarity feeling.
Re:I disagree a little (Score:2)
The strange "feeling" of Deja Vu is simply due to experiencing familiarity when you believe there should be none. There is nothing strange about being in a familiar environment. It's when something seems familiar and you know it should not, that there is an extra feeling that comes along with it.
Personally, I had an experience where some friends and I were riding our bikes through some trails and
Re:I disagree a little (Score:2)
You've just identified a mechanism that isn't accounted for in the model. How does the mind know that there shouldn't be any familiarity? Besides the memory-scanning mechanism and the feeling-of-familiary-generat
I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Great - just what we need... (Score:2)
Possible explanation (Score:3, Interesting)
Usually the brain is able to pair up the two images as being the same, but an occasional glitch can happen. Taking drugs or being tired might increase the chance of these glitches. Of course it would be possible to test this theory (it is falsifiable, unlike most other theories for deja vu) by seeing if people with only one eye get deja vu as frequently as people with two eyes.
I have no evidence that this theory is true, but it sounds plausible and I think the truth could be close to this explanation.
Re:Possible explanation (Score:2)
I will try and better explain. When you recall things from you long term memory you understand that these things are memories. When you think about the current situation you are recalling it from your short term memory, and you undertand it as currently happening or that it just h
So they fixed the bug in the Matrix... (Score:2)
Nice article for pseudo science fans (Score:2)
Hypnosis? A sample size of 18 people with only 10 experiencing the feeling? They haven't created anything but much ado about nothing.
Wake me when 38 people out of 40 experience it without any persuasion.
Something just occurred to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actual, serious question (Score:2)
Re:Actual, serious question (Score:2)
Re:Actual, serious question (Score:2)
Yes, Paul, we've all had that feeling. Try laying off the spice.
Deja Vu was stimulated artificially in 1959 (Score:2)
Wakeup call (Score:2)
Fortunately, deja vu can be (and is) being explained by science. I hope we don't get an influx of pseudoscientific theories like we did with the recent telepathy/esp article...
Every Solaris admin know to ignore memory errors (Score:4, Funny)
> Jul 25 04:11:11 blah UDBH Syndrome 0xb6 Memory Module Board 3 J3801
> Jul 25 04:11:11 blah SUNW,UltraSPARC-II: [ID 436398 kern.info] [AFT0] errID 0x000a3f92.c551de55 ECC Data Bit 30 was in error and corrected
> Jul 25 04:11:11 blah SUNW,UltraSPARC-II: [ID 858871 kern.info] [AFT0] errID 0x000a3f92.c551de55 Corrected Memory Error on Board 3 J3801 is Persistent
> Jul 25 04:11:11 blah SUNW,UltraSPARC-II: [ID 888460 kern.info] [AFT0] Corrected Memory Error detected by CPU10, errID 0x000a3f92.c551de55
As the hardware gets older these errors become more frequent. Leftover form the dot-com boom days, they can be safely ignored, and one just keeps on drinking.
Again and again (Score:2)
It's generating a redundant loop that's the fun part.
"Wait, I rememeber this... and this... and this... and this..."
One explanation (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
From a ed psych standpoint... (Score:2)
HAH! (Score:2)
Really... these "scientists" sometimes. heh...
Taking the pill... (Score:2)
Hey, where'd all these guys in black suits come frOH SHI-CONNECTION TERMINATED
Blackout (Score:2)
You think you saw the image before due to this blackout, I think.
Hypnosis (Score:2)
Hash collisions in the brain (Score:2)
Erm, haven't I seen this before... (Score:3, Funny)
Let me get this straight: someone named "Akira" is futzing with mind powers?
And very poorly understood ones (dejaa vu & hypnosis) at that?
Obligatory Monty Python quote (Score:2)
Tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened tonight, on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get that we've...
Anyway, tonight on "It's the Mind" we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange...
http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/dejavu.htm [orangecow.org]
RMN
~~~
Buzz off (Score:2)
If such a technique is used, the research has no meaning.
Lame... (Score:3, Funny)
100s of brilliant scientists... And 3 stupid ones.
DUPE!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Deja-huh?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Deja-huh?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's this? (Score:2)
Dude, that's just genetic memory.
Re:It is more than a 'feeling.' (Score:2)
"Hooked on a feeling?"
Re:Asking people? (Score:2)
scientist: Hi test subject x, are you familiar with the word polymorphish?
subject: "No, never heard of it before"
*scientist scribbles on a pad*
3 days later...
Scientist