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."

Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool

[dfedfe]

Actually deja vu isn't recall, it's familiarity (two distinct processes in the brain). But it definitely is true that Alzheimer's starts in the hippocampus, which is nestled in and intricately connected with the medial temporal lobe, which is very likely where deja vu occurs, and so the two are at least somewhat related.

Re:This is deja vu

[Almonday]

Yeah, my eyes glazed similarly, but then it occurred to me that so long as there's someone with a big honking imaging device collecting data about brain states, the form of whatever external stimulus they choose to use doesn't matter so much. One doesn't need to be a fan of transcendental meditation to demonstrate that its practice causes physical changes in the brain, nor to record and draw certain, albeit tenative conclusions from said data. I'm not sure if these folks are actually doing that or just conducting a poll of their volunteers, but the mere presence of hypnosis in a scientific setting doesn't necessarily mean that the experiment is without merit. A red flag, sure, but nothing more.

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.

Re:You've just experienced Vuja De!

[cayenne8]

"Actually, according to Steve Martin, "Vuja De"

Close...was George Carlin.

:-)

Re:Scientist? definitely not a historian.

[not-enough-info]

Galileo [wikipedia.org].

Re:One explanation

[ManoSinistra]

I think this is the guy here . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient) [wikipedia.org]

Re:less frequent now

[Anonymous Coward]

... passing assigned messages to other students in the class through dreams near the end of a single summer class ...

There's $1,000,000 waiting for you here [randi.org] if you can reproduce it

I can't just reject evidence that doesn't match my picture of the world

What evidence?