Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Deja vu

hummm... my very first thought was... can these people say what is going to happen next or in cases where they say they have been there before.. whats around the next corner... that would help sort out the people with a actual chemical imbalence(or whatever they say it is) and the people that are dreaming a possible future and only recall that dream when they are placed into that situation...Az

When deja vu is more than just an odd feeling

story link

Sufferers of chronic deja vu are sure they've really been there, done that. Sharon Kirkey reports.

Sharon Kirkey, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, February 13, 2006

British researchers are embarking on what they're calling the world's first study of chronic deja vu, a condition where people can recite details of situations or people they've never before encountered.

One retired electrical engineer who complained to his family doctor that he had an awful sensation of deja vu was told to go to a memory clinic.

"He said, 'Well there's no point. I've already been before', " says Dr. Chris Moulin, a psychologist and memory researcher at the University of Leeds.

Except he hadn't.

Another woman stopped playing tennis in the firm, but mistaken, belief she was playing the same rallies over and over again.

Another man insisted he'd already been to his friend's funeral.

The phenomenon, which may affect one in 200 people with memory problems, is unlike the fleeting, eerie feeling people get from time to time that they've experienced something before, and that they know what's going to happen next.

Instead, chronic deja vu sufferers are constantly overcome by the sensation something new has happened before. Depression is common, and some sufferers are initially misdiagnosed with epilepsy or labelled "delusional" and put on anti-psychotic drugs.

Social interactions become impossible, Dr. Moulin says, because people think they've met everyone before, "which means they're overly trusting of people, and possibly inappropriately friendly."

Since word of his study was published last month in a University of Leeds newsletter, Dr. Moulin has been inundated with e-mails from people convinced they have chronic deja vu; one Canadian woman said it described her mother perfectly. Another thought she was going mad until she read the story online.

Dr. Moulin says studying deja vu can help better understand the relationship between feelings and consciousness and states associated with memory and how memory functions.

One patient who travelled to Europe for the first time complained he'd been everywhere before.

"They're really quite striking. The most important thing for us, scientifically, is they're not confused by mundane, repetitive events. It's almost like the more novel and the more striking the event is, the more likely they are to get these sensations of deja vu," says Dr. Moulin. That suggests they're not making it up.

French for "already seen," deja vu was first described in the 1840s, and references in literature abound. In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens writes of the feeling "that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing have been said and done before," of knowing "perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it!"

In fact, deja vu is a common memory error, one thought to happen more often to younger people and those with a higher educational background.

Dr. Moulin explains it this way: Deja vu is a feeling or conflict of two opposing sensations -- one, which is the feeling of familiarity, the other the objective knowledge that you haven't encountered the situation before.

Our memory system is organized in such a way that when information is recalled and retrieved, it triggers a feeling that guides our behaviour, telling us whether what we're thinking is a memory, daydream or fantasy.

The temporal lobe, the portion of the brain behind the ears, is thought to be where deja vu originates. In normal deja vu, and in people with chronic deja vu, that area becomes overactive, triggering the sensation of remembering, Dr. Moulin says, "when you're not actually remembering at all."

In experiments, the Leeds team has begun inducing deja vu in healthy student volunteers. Volunteers are asked to remember specific words, and then hypnotized to forget them. Then they're shown the words again to provoke a feeling they've seen the words before. The researchers have been able to stimulate deja vu in half the volunteers. The next step will be to reproduce deja vu while their brains are being imaged to see what areas of the brain are activated, work that may lead to more effective treatments.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2006



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