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Even The Blind Get Deja Vu
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Dec 07, 2006 09:10 PM
from the again-for-the-first-time dept.
from the again-for-the-first-time dept.
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?"'"
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Is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot the article is sure to turn up in the near future.
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Very Likely (Score:3, Funny)
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No, it's not just you. I'm pretty sure it's a dupe. Later on somebody will make a post about Soviet Russia, then some East vs West war will break out, a few people will make some tenuous geek jokes and I vaguely remember there being one or two posts that actually discussed the subject matter (although they clearly hadn't RTFA)
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Coincidental? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://dejavu.movies.go.com/ [go.com]
dept (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't that slashdot's motto?
Crazy! (Score:5, Funny)
My Deja Vu is More Than Just Images (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My Deja Vu is More Than Just Images (Score:5, Funny)
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It's a remarkably stupid piece of research... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
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News to me (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Divide by zero? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Divide by zero? (Score:5, Funny)
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I think I've done that... (Score:2)
No big surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Cool trick you can do with Deja Vu.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Sucks when that happens.. but my secret for getting out of that is meditating and taking deep breaths, and concentrating on the breaths themselves and thinking about how each breath is a gift.. how lucky we are to be alive... etc. Now I look forward to the times where I have to take a moment to stop myself from holding back my involun
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I wrestled with sharing it.. only because I knew it would... I dunno, encourage people to try it and then get stuck, doh- BUT I thought about how long it took me to find the meditation technique and that there might be others out there, who like I was, were toiling for years with this problem. Meditation works. You'll find a way out.
Weird how the human condition allows for these things huh? Talk about a fucking software bug.
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How do you know that you have successfully done this? By definition, you can't remember having done it.
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Re:Cool trick you can do with Deja Vu.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cool trick you can do with Deja Vu.. (Score:5, Funny)
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There's another way to erase memories... (Score:2)
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 lev
Thought this would be a deep philosophical article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thought this would be a deep philosophical arti (Score:2)
Not that interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
I would have agreed once. . . (Score:2)
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
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Deja Vu? (Score:3, Informative)
k.
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Yeah, except they don't see the black cat repeat. They just hear the same meow twice.
Great timing... (Score:2)
the blind? (Score:3, Funny)
(Tin) Foiled Again! (Score:2)
--I know. Occam would have a fit. But Occam was also a monk who
Temporal lobe epilepsy (Score:2)
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. =)
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Doctor says here's your problem
userdel root
ahhh feels better already. But I agree with the link to psycho-motor seizures. I had a lot of things like this between the ages of about 14 and 19, then a grand mal, then got put on to tegretol which fortunately got the problem mostly under control.
Incidently, you must have had a few CT scans in your time. Did the dye they put in ever send you totally high? To this day I am still
direcct recording to long-term memory (Score:2)
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.
Spacial Recognition is needed to think (Score:2)
signal lag causes it.. (Score:2)
I dont "see" anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Possible explanation (Score:3, Informative)
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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