Forums » Smalltalk » What is deja vu?

I've always been interested in this phenomena and a while ago I bookmarked this video and forgot about it.

If the brain interests you and you want to know about some fun happenings that go on when you experience deja vu among other things, watch it!

http://www.wimp.com/dejavu/

wish i could watch videos. i've had lots of ideas about deja vu and had a major one last night that had no logical explanation as i've never been in a situation even close. I do like one joke though: "what if deja vu means you just lost a life and you're restarting at your last checkpoint."

The video explains a couple of phenomena with the brain, including the feeling of falling when you're falling asleep, being unable to remember a certain word unless you think of something else etc.

Deja vu is most likely caused by the fact what you're seeing has to go through several stages in the brain. Before your brain recognizes the visual image, it passes through some other areas which store the memory. Then when the image arrives at the back of the brain and processes the image, the information stored prior to that is then recognized as a 'memory' and you get the feeling you've experienced this before.

It's very intriguing!

(But I do like the idea of a checkpoint. )

i've had a few deja vus that deny that. I knew the whole first half hour of a movie i had never seen and started saying it out loud before it happened. "he's going to eat tapir balls. They convince him to put a salve on his dingy thats hot and she runs out chugging water." etc. Derek was like "wtf" eventually cuz it JUST RELEASED. I'd had a dream about it three nights prior. Last night i deja vued on ashli screaming over a coyote howling and running into our room. as soon as the words popped out of my mouth to comfort her while i stared at the stars through tree branches in our tent, i deja vued even though i never camped in a tent, much less with my daughter, before. That one MIGHT be passable as the memory theory but Apocalypto was something eerie.

If it was a deja vu, you'd be watching the movie and as scenes happened, you'd only then get the feeling of "Haven't I watched this before?". By what you describe it sounds like you predicted what the movie was about/what would happen in it, which is something different than a deja vu. Predictive dreams are quite unsettling to me.

What you described with your daughter is a classic deja vu though! I experienced similar yesterday while chatting in Skype. A certain phrase I read triggered the feeling that I'd seen the exact same sentence while I was sitting in the exact same spot and position before.

predictive dreams/visions are always odd. I get upset that mine are always inconsequential things like that. Derek hates that he gets monumental ones that are just vague enough he can't do anything about it. Like when he saw haiti happen, knew how many months it would be in, but couldnt determine more than "a resort town with signs i mostly cant read. I dont know the language." he dropped the groceries he was carrying into the house when met by the news of it on the t.v. We had left on. it's always unsettling or annoying regardless of what it's about.

Maybe predictive dreams deserve their own thread. They're way different than the brain chemistry research being done on deja vu!

WOW. I just finished watching the video. That was incredible. So much good information. I had never heard of "blindsight" before. It has incredible implications.

I'm highly considering making a character with 'blindsight'.

I had exactly the same thought. It's a rabbit hole!

As a neurobiologist, I can say the explanation makes sense. I hadn't heard it before, so it's fun.

Rather than viewing the pathway as "unconscoius" to "conscious", though, I would think feedback loops in between (and to other areas?) could play a role. Also, this view doesn't allow for multi-sensory deja vu's (if those even exist, see below). So rather than the primary (visual) cortex, I would think the association cortices are important. In the classic view, the visual association cortex is purely visual and the auditory association cortex is purely auditory, for example, but by now people believe that the association cortices are multi-modal and integrate all kinds of sensory information and memories and the like.

Question, though... deja vu's... are they multi-sensory for you? I would think that they are, but now I have doubts. The deja vu's I've had are mostly pictures of places. There's no sound or smell or any other sense involved, except perhaps movement (which is a component of visual information). I mostly have deja vu's for places I drive by by car, thinking I've already been in that street before even if I have never before been anywhere near. So, just visual information there, and of course the usual belief that it is an actual episodic memory, but that's not a "sense" in this context. Minerva's example of looking up at the stars seems purely visual too. Are the rest of the feelings you get from it, along with the idea that it's a memory, just things your imagination fills in later? Or are there actual other senses? Hmmmm...

Did anyone ever have a deja vu in which more than one sense was engaged? Sanne, when you had the deja vu on Skype, was it the look of your screen that gave you the deja vu, or something you heard, or something you heard yourself say? All of the above?

Don't forget the audio parts, hun. It was a coyote howl, and it wasn't until I spoke reassurance to my daughter that the deja vu took place. that i had said that, after she heard that, while staring at the sky before... Even though i hadn't. It was the audio that triggered the deja vu.

Okay.
Well, then the explanation given doesn't cut it. Unless of course the imagination fills in the rest.

I can't say I've had any deja vu experiences that involved anything other than what I saw. I most often recognize text or pictures, but that's all visual. It usually triggers other feelings once I realize "I saw this before", but that comes afterwards while I'm trying to figure out where I remember it from.

I get deja vu in conversations sometimes, but I suspect there's just as many parts of the brain involved in language and concepts as there are in seeing, and a similar explanation would work excellently.

Most of my deja vu experiences seem to revolve around situations. I'll be doing some trivial thing and something will happen which causes me to get it; for example, just the other day I found a silver dime while going through my change jar. I'm an amateur coin collector, so I'd remember finding a silver dime and checking it out at my desk before, but I swear that for the whole rest of the day I was wondering why me handling a silver dime at my desk seemed so familiar.

It's fun to see how everyone seems to most often have one specific type of deja vu's. Maybe they have to do with what you're already very focused on, something you have affinity with. Perhaps with heightened attention, you'd be more likely to skip a step or look forward (or back) in the unconscious-conscious path from perception to awareness and additional input from memory. In Witness's case that seems to be a possible explanation!