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Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:43 PM
from the haven't-i-given-you-funding-before dept.
Biotech Science
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."
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  • Dupe! (Score:5, Funny)

    by taxman_10m (41083) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @12:45PM (#15785543)
    I've seen this story before.

    • Re:Dupe! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've seen your comment before!

      • Re:Dupe! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by orangesquid (79734) <orangesquid&yahoo,com> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @03:08PM (#15786578) Homepage Journal
        "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... ;)

        • Sequence of events... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Ayanami Rei (621112) * <rayanami@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:20PM (#15787264) Homepage Journal
          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. :-/
    • No you haven't, you just think that you did.

    • It's the Mind (Score:4, Funny)

      by Kelson (129150) * on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:07PM (#15785737) Homepage Journal
      Tonight on "It's the Mind [orangecow.org]", 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?

      *runs*

      • Re:Dupe! (Score:4, Funny)

        by Sancho (17056) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @02:00PM (#15786136) Homepage
        I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.

  • Dupe!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Red Flayer (890720) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @12:45PM (#15785551) Journal
    Oh wait... Never mind. My bad.
  • And here all this time I thought that persistent recurrent deja vu was an indication of my latent psychic powers.

      • less frequent now (Score:5, Interesting)

        by maddogsparky (202296) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @02:50PM (#15786478)
        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.

  • Good to know! Now maybe they can get to work on those other trifling brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease--you know the minor ones that don't mean anything.
    • Research is research. Understanding how the brain works is vital in progressing the state of the art. We will only be able to find a cure for Alzheimer's or MCD by pure luck unless we also happen to have a decent understanding of how the brain works. Science is not at all directed, as most people imagine, but much more like evolution; a hundred million different approaches all aiming for different goals, filtered through successful applications, and then repeated all over again.

      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?
      • 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.
    • Are you an engineer or marketing guy, or aspiring to be one? No more useless extra knowledge please!

    • Re:Great news! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CRCulver (715279) <crculver@christopherculver.com> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @12:53PM (#15785630) Homepage

      Good to know! Now maybe they can get to work on those other trifling brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease--you know the minor ones that don't mean anything.

      Actually, deja vu--along with similar phenomena like presque vu and jamais vu--is a major part of senility. Studying it could lead to a better understanding of getting soft in the head in general.

      If you like science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, specifically the volume Blue Mars [amazon.com] has these symptoms of senility as a major plot point. It's a sort of fate that might await us all as lifespans grow increasingly longer.

  • It's Official (Score:5, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack (534373) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @12:46PM (#15785564)
    Scientists have officially ran out of things to study
    • I do hope you're joking and not serious. Being able to understand how something works (like the brain) as well as how it works incorrectly (like deja vu) is pretty important in figuring out how to fix it when something really breaks (like Alzheimer's or dementia or psychosis).
  • All that work - and all they had to do was read Slashdot headlines for a few weeks.

    *rimshot*
  • all over again..

    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.
    • 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 co

    • Hypnoscience (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Attaturk (695988) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:16PM (#15785813) Homepage
      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.

      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.

  • Forget Deja Vu, we must study Vuja De. The strange feeling that somehow, none of this has ever happened before. That one REALLY creeps me out.

    Much love to George Carlin
  • 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?

    • Re:by mistake? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Znork (31774) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:25PM (#15785881)
      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.
  • Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting

    Want to test an experimental interface for comments?

    nuff said...

  • Works for me (Score:3, Funny)

    by phorm (591458) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @12:53PM (#15785635) Homepage Journal
    I'll just wait until my victims are in front of the billboard advertising McDonalds burgers and then blow them into kibbles. A few well placed meaty chunkss and perhaps a little arterial spray near the picture of some dude chomping on a burger should add to the overall effect of the ad, no?
  • When I was much younger, I used to experiment with certain substances.

    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).
  • To demonstrate...

    "Using hypnosis, scientists..."

    I rest my case.
  • Why bother recreating deja vu in the laboratory? Are they too cheap to pay the cover charge [dejavu.com]?

  • Of course it happened in a lab setting (Score:4, Funny)

    by Biff Stu (654099) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:03PM (#15785702)
    They needed to reproduce their results!
  • This was previously reported by another British group here: . [ibras.dk]

  • I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vishbar (862440) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:09PM (#15785750)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MarkByers (770551) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:10PM (#15785763) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Just the other day...

    > 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.

  • One explanation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ManoSinistra (983539) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:31PM (#15785923) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eno2001 (527078) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:39PM (#15785981) Homepage Journal
    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!!!

  • Erm, haven't I seen this before... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jpellino (202698) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @01:58PM (#15786114)
    From TFA: "Researcher Akira O'Connor presented the findings to an International Conference on Memory in Sydney, Australia."

    Let me get this straight: someone named "Akira" is futzing with mind powers?
    And very poorly understood ones (dejaa vu & hypnosis) at that?

  • Lame... (Score:3, Funny)

    by chinton (151403) <chinton001-slashdot.gmail@com> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @02:55PM (#15786504) Journal
    Now, not only can't geeky scientists get the girls, they have to fabricate a strip club in the lab. I can see the banner now:

    100s of brilliant scientists... And 3 stupid ones.

  • DUPE!!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zero__Kelvin (151819) on Thursday July 27 2006, @06:15AM (#15789877) Homepage
    "Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting"
    .... oh wait, I guess it isn't a dupe the more I think about it .....
    • You mean like when I see a copy of Dune on my book shelf? That's odd that only a novel object triggers this reaction.

      Dude, that's just genetic memory.

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