Déjà 👁👁Vu

Déjà Vu

Is A Sign That Your Brain Is Working Well
by Thibault Prévost

Déjà vu, that strange feeling that some people take to be the manifestation of a glitch in the fabric of the Matrix and that affects nearly every human being at least once during in their life, is a phenomenon that neuroscience is still struggling to explain.

So far, the few conclusions that researchers had managed to come up with accused the brain, this sublime machine to distort reality, of creating "false memories" or of simply lagging behind when we save too much information without focusing on them.

If déjà vu is so difficult to study, it is because we do not really know how to artificially reproduce it in a lab. A new study by Akira O'Connor (what an incredibly stylish name) and his team at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is  however proposing scientists a new method to better study these strange flashes of memory and provide new hypotheses about the role of déjà vu in brain functions.

An automatic scanning device

To achieve this, researchers read subjects a series of words semantically linked to one another other, but omitting the most important one in the list (for example, "pillow", "bed", "night", but not "sleep "). When they then asked the subjects if they had heard a word beginning with "s", they answered no, although “they report having this strange experience of déjà vu”, Akira O'Connor told New Scientist. Bingo.

Once the method properly developed, the team did an MRI of the brains of 21 subjects, to understand which areas are mobilised during occurrences of déjà vu. Contrary to what one might think, the hippocampus, that part of the brain that controls memory, is inactive while the frontal lobe, where the "zone of decisions" is located, is working full on.

According to Akira O'Connor, déjà vu would be a kind of automatic scanning tool used by our brain to "verify" our memories and to send "error reports" when conflicts are detected. A biological defrag tool, basically. And, according to Akira O'Connor and his team, this demonstrate a healthy brain. Unless, like the Wachowski sisters, you prefer the thesis of the glitch in the Matrix that is.

Neo: “A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.”
Trinity: “How much like it? Was it the same cat?”

New Scientist

Published on Aug 16, 2016

Scanning the brains of people experiencing déjà vu suggests that the phenomenon is a sign of a healthy brain that forms accurate memories.

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