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."

by mistake?

[astanley218]

I read once a while back that deja vu was caused by the brain processing visual data from one eye marginally faster than from the other. This seems like a logical theory to me, but I am not a neurologist. Has anyone else heard of this?

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[account_deleted]

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I wonder...

[vishbar]

if something like this could be used to help one who suffers from social anxiety? According to TFA, the part of the brain that triggers deja vu is responsible for one feeling "familiar" with their environment. Maybe something like this could be used to cure the "jitters" from an unfamiliar social situation or a first date?

Possible explanation

[MarkByers]

I read once that deja vu can occur when the messages from each eye are handled by the brain out of synchronisation. First the image from one eye is processed, processed and stored in the brain, then a millisecond or so later, the brain starts to process the image from the other idea, and finds that it has already an exact copy of the same image in memory. You then get a sudden and very powerful feeling of having already seen the location before, because you just have seen it a millisecond ago!

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:You've just experienced Vuja De!

[Kesch]

Actually, the French for 'Will See Again Tommorow' is something like 'Vais Voir Deja Demain' or 'Verr Deja Demain'

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 /. at work or wanking off in front of your computerat home.

Remember, French can be fun!(TM)

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!!!

Me too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had it all the time when I was a child up through college. Specifically, I had the form where I was convinced that I had had a dream about the events beforehand, in a very specific format. I would even wake up some mornings convinced that I'd just had such a dream and forget it all within minutes.

The last major time was when a friend from my hometown was visiting me at college, and we went out to eat with neighbors in my dorm. I remember having felt when I'd "previously had the dream" that the strange combination of two of my friends that I figured would never meet while eating at a large table with a red & white checkered tablecloth with a houseplant behind the friend from home was such an odd combination "when I woke up."

Convinced I was having precognitive dreams (or that I was having a very difficult to prove/disprove hallucination), I began a dream journal. I only kept it up for a few weeks, but I haven't had a single moment of deja vu since then. I think concentrating on the problem made it go away. (More mystical types than myself would probably come to the conclusion that the gift left me for questioning it.)

Alternately, it could've just gone away with age, and the whole timing of it was coincidence.

Re:You're quite the Unknowing Fool

[dim5]

This is semi-unrelated, but an interesting experience with the "familiarity" part of the brain.

My mother went through a two year battle with brain cancer a few years ago, and during the end, she started feeling like everything was familiar. It was a strange thing. Every song on the radio was one she knew from her youth, and every face in every restaurant was a long-lost friend. The name of the song or person was always "on the tip of her tongue", but of course she didn't actually know it at all. It was very confusing for her, to have that familiarity trigger firing all the time.

Now in her case, the cancer was untreatable and trying to counter this phenomenon wouldn't have made any difference in her ability to recover, but the quality of her life and her ability to enjoy new experiences may have been significantly increased by getting rid of this nuisance.

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:One explanation

[ManoSinistra]

Is the hippocampus responsible for beer goggles ?

Long-term memory storage. There was a really neat story about an old guy who had to have his hippocampus removed in a serious operation. But then his brain "reset" every 30 minutes or so. He described it as "waking up for the first time." Eventually he thought he should record this in his diary. Every day in his diary showed about 30 listings that said "10:30am: Today I woke up for the first time." When he went back to his diary later to write it again, he knew for a fact that he had not written the previous entries because he had only woken up just then....

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... ;)

Scary thought...

[mpv1145]

If they can "incorrectly trigger" this "second process", I wonder if the Deja Vu feeling could someday be intensified to trick people into believing they have actually seen something or been somewhere before.... instead of just thinking, "Weird, I just had Deja Vu."

Re:You've just experienced Vuja De!

[Kesch]

I may (or may not, although all signs point to 'may') have forgotten to add the ending to verr- which would make it verrai for the purposes of the post. Verr being the irregular future simple stem of the verb voir. I also think that there is a strong likelyhood that I put the French words out of order. To redeem my poor French I hereby submit this correction.

Déjà Verrai: The feeling this is not the last time you will undergo this experience.

Re:Whenever I get deja vu

[sedman]

I have been able to remember more than a few seconds during a deja vu experience. In at least one case, I what the other person in a conversation I was having would say for several exchanges back and forth. For my part, I played it straight from what I remembered I said to see how long it would keep going.

Most of my deja vi experiences seem to come from having dreamt the situation before. As to what that mean, I have no idea. Maybe it's just my minds way of making me think the misfire makes sense and I really did not have a dream of the event.

Re:One explanation

[vaccuum]

Alot of the times that I've gotten deja vus I don't only get the feeling "this has happened before" but also "I think I've thought about this happening before". That second feeling always spooks me out more than the first besause you really feel like sometime in the past you've been able to see into the future.
Is it plausible that hippocampus continues to "mis-fire" for long enough for one to "remember" remembering what just happened? If that's what's going on in my head deja vus will feel far less spooky after learning this... which would be nice :)

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. :-/

betchyall'dunno'sup

[Twisted64]

"betchyall'dunno'sup"

With some transliteration:
I wager that of all of you, not one knows what is going on. Here. :)