Lawngazer wrote:

There is one more variable in these conversations... What about drug use? It may have increased my feelings of deja vu. There is a probable positive correlation between my drug usage and feelings of deja vu. Meaning I felt it less after I quit using. Though, it didn't stop. I feel it maybe 2-4 times a year now at 22. As a teen I'd feel it maybe that many times a month, and maybe even more than that.

Drug use was briefly mentioned in a couple of the replies. However, is the decrease of Deja Vu experiences have to do with quiting drugs or could it be that you are getting olded and the experiences decrease with age.

Drug use could very well have an effect on the memory. How memories are stored and how memories are accessed in the mind.  Drug use has an effect on hormones,  endorphins and dopamine which can all effect memories and/or perceptions of events and memories.

Have A Nice ___________

Ok, lets consider the following:

What IF deja vu is just something we have already done in another dimension as tkerr stated earlier. Ofcourse the other dimension must have a different time frame than say this one. Lets say that the time difference in between the two dimensions is about 257 Earth hours ( estimate based on observation using proportion). What are the possibilities of those two dimensions ever interacting with one another? Is that interaction through dreams, or is it deep within our minds.

example: I am David in this dimension and I have a normal human brain. I am the same David in another dimension with the same human brain. If they are the same brain, doesn't that mean that they are already interacting? According to the reflexive property the answer is yes.

And as far as drug use goes, I don't think that there is a direct relationship. It could somehow effect the brain and its functions, but not directly.

Comment as you wish,

David

 

EDIT:

Another thing came into my mind seconds after posting this one:

As we all know, light needs time to reach us, correct? Perhaps the same concept applies to other dimensions. Maybe the memory of one brain in one dimension takes some time to travel to another brain of another dimension. But then the question infinite dimensions comes up and that would mean that there are many of the same minds. How could they possibly handle all that information if there are infinite dimensions?

 

well, i haven't had the patience to read through all of the posts, but i'll give you my opinion anyway. first, i agree that there are different "types" of deja vu. some may be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, others may be the resault of a paranormal ability. either way, two events that are precived as deja vu might acutally have causes that are mutually exclusive.

for example, a few years ago i was in a building that had posters taped to the walls. i was walking and talking with my friend, but i was distracted by one of the posters as we walked by it. i stopped, walked back to the poster, and said, "that poster is going to fall." my friend and i stood there for a few seconds, then the poster fell. this experiance could not have been caused by a chemical in my brain that made me think an event in "real time" was a memory that repeated its self-for that to occur, i would have "known" that the poster was falling as it happened, or after it fell i would have had a feeling that i knew it would do so before the actual event.

i like the idea of various aspects of conciousness being present in different dimentions-this theory is one that i have more or less agreed with for quite a while. i also belive that every person has the ability to tap into his or her own "psycic ability"-teh key being to have a clear, open mind. anyway, i'll try to read theough more posts and keep up with your developments.

Any scene perceived by a normal person, is actually seen independently by each of the two eyes. That is how we accomplish three dimensional vision. Let us speculate for a moment that the signal path to the brain has a slightly different length from the two eyes. If this was the case, then the brain would get the signals from the first eye, and promptly process them and record them into memory. A moment later, the signals would arrive from the other optic nerve. The brain would then receive this signal, and immediately note that it seems very familiar, being very similar (virtually identical) to an image already in memory. But it wouldn't be a memory from months or years earlier. It would have only been from a memory recorded a fraction of a second earlier! (The brain's memory does not keep "time stamps" on individual memories and has no way of identifying when they first were recorded there. Under normal circumstances, other related experiences that include time-information usually give a person a cue as to when a memory was from.)

Cosmo-David,

The idea of communication of sorts with parallel universes is alive and well if not universally accepted.  One interpretation of quantum mechanics involves a sort of leakage between universes, ours where a quantum event happens and another where it doesn’t;  the superposition of quantum states may be only the simultaneous (in different universes) existence of all possibilities.  It’s also been proposed that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon, so we might conjecture that a quantum consciousness could occasionally have access to other versions of our “normal” reality.

jsmoody said, “Timothy Leary once made a statement about the human brain being a filter.  That it has access to all knowledge in the Universe but that it can't handle that much data so the brain filters only the information we need.  He said that when he took LSD it was like the filter opened wider and all this chaotic information came flooding in.”  That was exactly my perception the first time I used a psychedelic drug (psilocybin), and I’ve been convinced ever since that, of necessity, we edit out much of what we perceive.

However, I think that what Sandy and others have said is probably correct, that déjà vu is the illusion of memory rather than actual memory.  I experienced it when I was younger but like the other old geezers here    I almost never do anymore.

Much of what is being called déjà vu in this thread really sounds to me like precognition or clairvoyance.  I’ve experienced the former a few times, the latter never, but my ex-wife experienced both.  I never really believed in such things but the first time I saw her clutch her chest and gasp, then make a phone call to learn that a relative had died, well…. that opened my mind to possibilities.

Spacer wrote:

However, I think that what Sandy and others have said is probably correct, that déjà vu is the illusion of memory rather than actual memory.  I experienced it when I was younger but like the other old geezers here    I almost never do anymore.

i wonder, why does it seem that deja vu is experianced less as one grows older? could it be that the brain has developed to a point where it can overcome whatever error allows deja vu to occur?

crabbylion,

OK, I'll admit that as an older person I'm prejudiced, but I suspect that your question is actually an answer: as we get older deja vu becomes less common because our brains simply get better at absorbing and filing new experiences.

What fascinates me is the question of whether or not other bizarre mental phenomena also decrease in frequency --- do we have fewer precognitive dreams? Do we have fewer clairvoyant episodes?  If so, then such things may also be written off as developmental phenomena, but if not then maybe such phenomena reflect some sort of reality.

I wonder with this age correlation is there also a correlation between the parents of the person in question (the one getting deja vue). Perhaps the more worried parents are.. The power of love..awwwww

 

lol...Sorry, nothing really relavent to say. I'm tired, bord and in the computer lab. There hasn't been much since last time I was here like two months ago... Slackers.

Well, let me start off by appologizing for my lack of "activity" in this forum. Been busy doing some more testing with my Biology teacher.

As someone here mentioned before (forgot who) about the optical distance from one eye to the brain to the other... that seems very logical and interesting. But it can only explain this topic to a certain degree.

As someone else said.... something about the brain filtering data. My question would be: How are those data sent to and recieved by our brains? through waves? light? Where does the data come from? ...so many questions, but yet so little answers!!!!!!!

Cosmo,

Obviously, we know of only the 5 senses, which translate data into electrochemical signals that get routed to different regions of the brain.  The problem is that there seem to be phenomena that can’t be explained --- clairvoyance, precognition, etc. --- unless the “explanation” is that they don’t exist.

I’ve experienced ESP and have known others who have also had such experiences.  There are theories to explain such things but they’re metaphysical, not scientific.  Unfortunately, ESP is as slippery a concept as creativity or beauty, impossible (so far) to measure or explain.  If consciousness is a quantum phenomenon then that opens the door to the spooky world of the quantum, where particles “communicate” across space and time (although nobody knows how!) and reality may be affected by thought.

Hey Spacer,

 

As much as we science oriented folks may not like to admit it, there is a lot to think about in your post.  If something is contrary to good science it is pretty much bunk.  But good science reliably covers only maybe 30% of human experience  (and much less of objective reality).

 

That leaves a lot of room..........

PH

PH,

Thanks for the validation.   I'm also a science-oriented person, but as such I can't deny what I've experienced without reason.  My (admittedly few) paranormal experiences cannot simply be explained away.  Believe me, I've tried to do so.

I hope and believe that science may someday expand to include subjective experiences.  Maybe new technologies will allow us to study consciousness with greater precision and objectivity, and prove --- or disprove --- that what we now consider to be paranormal events are simply things that we cannot yet explain, following natural laws whose existence we don't yet understand. 

i thought i had deja vu yesterday.  i actually stood there saying to myself that this hapened before.  i have it often and its a strange feeling to me.

Spacer wrote:

I hope and believe that science may someday expand to include subjective experiences.

Spacer,

This is happening.  A great example is Minkowski space, the geometry of our existence (since even curved space in  GR always reduces to Minkowski space over small enough regions of spacetime).  If you accelerate yourself very quickly to .8c in the direction of Andromeda, that galaxy is immediately only 60% as far away as it was moments before when you were hanging out with 6 billion other folks on Earth.    Its still just as far for the other 6 billion people...

A million light years of missing space in your observations when compared to those of many many other competent observers...This  is a whopper of a subjective experience (even if its just a thout experiment). 

However when put in the context of a theory such that those 6 billion folks can calculate the Lorentz contraction you would experience, subjectivity is pulled into the realm of objectivity.  No more disagreement.

This is a heads up for me.  I tend to dismiss many things because there is no proof.  But absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Psuedoscience (science and theories based on made up assumptions that have been disproved or have no supporting data) is so pervasive that a science oriented person does and should develop a hefty skepticism.  But you have to live life and many experiences are just outside the scientific envelope right now.  We each have to bring these experiences into our world view the best we can...

Having some fun with speculation about the true nature of these experiences is just human nature but putting forth our speculations in a forceful way, presenting it as objective reality in some sense without the rigor of contextualizing within the data... is the seed for more pseudoscience.  Especially if someone with more credulity takes it and runs with it with religeous fervor. 

The battle against pseudoscience is going up hard against human nature.  We crave explanations and don't always discriminate between the well founded and the not so well founded.  THe more science literate we are as a population the fewer problems we will have with these lines getting blurred.

In the meantime, live and think...

PH

Everything in nature repeats itself, examine a pinecone:

112358....

This would mean the same is true in all universes, since on the simplest level everything is electromagnetic and so is the brain in a universe electromagnetic patterns would repeat every so often.  The first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1.  Every time a new sequence would start there would be a repeat there fore causing the brain to recall something that may or may not have happened in this or another universe.

I haven't paid serious attention to issues like deja vu and various forms of ESP even though I have experienced them just like many others. After reading all of the posts in this thread, I'll add a few comments: Neuroscience is still a young field, but it promises to be one of the more fascinating specialties. V.S Ramachandran is a noted neuroscientist who writes, in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciou5ness[sic] (p. 86):

"Several decades ago the American neurosurgeon Benjamin Libet and the German physiologist Hans Kornhuber were experimenting on volunteers exercising free will, instructing subject to, for example, wiggle a finger at any time of their choosing within a ten-minute period. A full three-quarters of a second before the finger movement the researchers picked up a scalp EEG potential, which they called the "readiness potential," even though the subject's sensation of consciously willing the action coincided almost exactly with the actual onset of finger movement. This discovery caused a flurry of excitement among philosophers interested in free will. For it seemed to imply that the brain events monitored by the EEG kick in almost a second before there is any sensation of "willing" the finger movement, even though your subjective experience is that your will caused the finger movement! But how can your will be the cause if the brain commands begin a second earlier? It's almost as though your brain is really in charge and your "free will" is just a post-hoc rationalization -- a delusion, almost -- like King Canute thinking he could control the tides or an American president believing that he is in charge of the whole world.

This alone is strange enough, but what if we add another twist to the experiment. Imagine I'm monitoring your EEG while you wiggle your finger. Just as Kornhuber and Libet did, I will see a readiness potential a second before you act. But suppose I display the signal on a screen in front of you so that you can see your free will. Every time you are about to wiggle your finger, supposedly using your own free will, the machine will tell you a second in advance! What would you now experience? There are three logical possibilities. (1) You might experience a sudden loss of will, feeling that the machine is controlling you, that you are a mere puppet and that free will is an illusion. You may even become paranoid as a result, like schizophrenics who think their actions are controlled by aliens or implants. (2) You might think that it does not change your sense of free will one iota, preferring to believe that the machine has some sort of spooky paranormal precognition by which it is able to predict your movements accurately. (3) You might confabulate, or rearrange the experienced sequence mentally in order to cling to your sense of freedom; you might deny the evidence of your eyes and maintain that your sensation of will preceded the machine's signal, not vice versa.

At this stage this is still a "thought experiment" -- technically it is hard to get a feedback EEG signal on each trial, but we are trying to get around this obstacle. Nevertheless, it is important to note that one can do experiements that have direct relevance to broad philosophical issues such as free will. Leaving aside this "thought experiment" for the moment, let's return to the original observation on the readiness potential with its curious implication that the brain events are kicking in a second or so before any actual finger movement, even though conscious intent to move the finger coincides almost exactly with the wiggle.

Why might this be happening? What might the evolutionary rationale be? The answer is, I think, that there is an inevitable neural delay before the signal arising in one part of the brain makes its way through the rest of the brain to deliver the message: "wiggle your finger." Natural selection has ensured that the subjective sensation of willing is delayed deliberately to coincide not with the onset of the brain commands but with the actual execution of the command by your finger. And this in turn is important because it means that the subjective sensations which accompany brain events must have an evolutionary purpose. For if that were not the case, if they merely accompanied brain events, as so many philosophers believe (this is called epiphenomenalism) -- in other words, if the subjective sensation of willing is like a shadow that accompanies us as we move but is not causal in making us move -- then why would evolution bother delaying the signal so that it coincides with our movement?

So we have a paradox: on the one hand, the experiment shows that free will is illusory: it cannot be causing the brain events because the events kick in a second earlier. But on the other hand, the delay must have some function, otherwise why would the delay have evolved? Yet if it does have a function, what could it be other than moving (in this case) the finger? Perhaps our very notion of causation requires a radical revision ... as happened in quantum mechanics."

If you read the rest of Ramachandran's book, you will find that brain/mind interactions are extremely fascinating and very tricky. The excerpt above is intended to show one such example.

Before we can answer questions like "what causes deja vu" or "how did I know something was going to happen before it happened" we must be willing to concede the possibility that our mind -- our sense of self -- is an illusion orchestrated by a physical brain made up of neurons, chemicals, and electrical activity. In other words, we must be willing to concede the possibility that the person we feel we are is an elaborate simulation.

Airline pilots train on an elaborate cockpit simulator that projects realistic scenery through the windows and induces movement to mimic turbulence. The simulator itself, however, is not a simulation. It is real (but we can argue "what is real"). The simulator can have bugs. It can project a UFO across the screen. In the same way, our brains are real and physical, but their purpose is to create a simulation of "self". Wiring in the brain is extremely complex. The method by which neurons attach to other "relevant" neurons is very poorly understood, but there is the possibility for error.

Ramachandran's book examines several of these errors. He doesn't discuss deja vu or ESP, but premonition in particular might be relatively easy to explain. Here is a recent real experience:

One day a random thought entered my head. The thought was, "I haven't heard of any plane crashes in a long time." The very next day a Boeing 737 crashed with almost no survivors. This has happened at least 2 or 3 times.

Another example: I had a sudden and strong feeling of unexplained elation one day earlier this year. The next morning, as I always do, I checked my email and found a message from an ex-girlfriend. We hadn't spoken to each other in a year. It was an amicable but painful breakup, but I could feel her message before I even saw it. There have been several other examples of this type.

After thinking about it, my current conclusion (note I said "current" conclusion) is that when you know someone very well or when you know a situation very well you are able to predict or anticipate certain outcomes. We spend a lot of our quiet time trying to understand, identify, and become close to the people dearest to us, so we program ourselves to predict and anticipate their moods, their reactions, and their thinking patterns. If we do this successfully (and the more empathetic and sympathetic we are the better we are at it), we can, to some extent, feel them even when they aren't present. And when something bad happens to them unexpectedly, we can sometimes sense it in spooky ways that seem to defy explanation.

This may be a form of ESP or it may just be good predictiveness, but even ESP is just a placeholder until a real explanation comes along. ESP is just "extra-sensory perception". It simply means that we are experiencing something that does not appear to be coming through our five known senses. There may be something here or there may be nothing.

As for the email from my ex after almost one year of silence, my sense of unexplained elation could be due to a very good ability to predict her thoughts. Knowing human nature and knowing the circumstances of the break up, it is not farfetched to be able to predict what someone will do after a reasonable amount of postpartum silence.

Finally, as for a previous poster's experience of knowing a second in advance that a painting hanging on the wall will fall, it could be due to the neural delay mentioned in the excerpt above. The brain's senses saw the painting fall and partially informed the conscious mind right away, then fully informed the conscious mind after the normal one second neural delay. This caused the subject to wonder why he knew something a second before it happened.

kkkzzz,

Amazing! I’m sure I read about the readiness potential recently --- or is this déjà vu?

Seriously, I did, but don’t remember where.  Scientific American?  There was a theory as to its purpose but I don’t remember what it was.  (I being really helpful , aren’t I?  Now I’ll have to find the article.)  As clever as the neural delay conjecture is, I’m pretty sure that our nervous systems are much faster than that.

The few precognitive dreams I’ve had occurred the night before.  For example,  I dreamed of an airliner with a crack in its roof, just above a door, and tried to warn the crew.  The next day there was news of an airliner in Hawaii that had lost part of its roof in flight.   My ex-wife was a no-BS psychic --- she didn’t read palms or anything but got impressions that gripped her with a physical force, and that always reflected some reality remote in space and/or time.  Once she went into an almost trance-like state and drew a y-shaped pattern on a pad of paper, and we tried to figure out what it was.  A few days later the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and that y-shaped trail of smoke made by the boosters breaking away and separating was exactly what she’d drawn.  The obvious problem is that such experiences don’t make sense until afterward.  I never saw anything identifying the time or place or airliner involved, and she never understood until afterward that she was seeing the destruction of a space shuttle.

Then there’s the weird coincidences: I once waited in a car and killed time doing a crossword puzzle.  One clue was about a movie title:  “The Taking of  ____ 1-2-3”.  I couldn’t think of it, put the puzzle aside, and turned on the radio, and immediately heard an ad for a movie on a local TV channel: “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3”.   That kind of thing has happened more times than I can count.  Ever suddenly think of a person and the phone rings and it’s that person?  Ever go to dial someone’s number but when you pick up the phone that person is already on the line, having called you?

I’ve tried to explain away these things but my logic just can’t be stretched far enough to do the job.  In fact, I spent most of my life explaining away things that have no “rational” explanation, before admitting that there are phenomena for which science just can’t explain.   “Coincidence”?  To me, that has all the semantic content of “spontaneous remission” --- in other words, zero.  Both expressions really mean that there is no explanation.

I believe in science.  I also believe in Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap”.  In the case of UFOlogy and the paranormal, that number is probably even higher.  But I think that there are nuggets of truth buried by otherwise rational people that really deserve being examined.

Also:  your musings on the nature of consciousness are extremely interesting, probably because I agree with them.   I firmly believe that consciousness is indeed an artifact, a program running on our neural nets, a place where inputs are filtered and summarized and real-world outputs are organized.  The consciousness is like the CEO, receiving reports and recommendations but insulated from the gritty details --- does it really need to know how fast the heart is beating, or that the ears are picking up echoes of sounds in the foreground?  No, all it needs are summaries:  the body is operating nominally, the sound space is normal, there are no nearby threats or impediments, all systems are “go” for moving across the room.

This is a very efficient system but it has its downside:  the CEO thinks it is the company.   The consciousness thinks it is the mind, but the real mind is far deeper and broader and more powerful than that, and no doubt possesses abilities of which the consciousness is unaware.   

kkkzzz wrote:

One day a random thought entered my head. The thought was, "I haven't heard of any plane crashes in a long time." The very next day a Boeing 737 crashed with almost no survivors. This has happened at least 2 or 3 times.

Make that 4 times. A day after posting this, an Armenian Airbus A320 crashed in the Black Sea.

Spacer,

I agree with you. There are examples of precognition that involve two people who know each other, and there are examples that involve completely remote persons and locations.

The problem is in determining when we're dealing with a coincidence and when we're not! For example, when I was posting the example of a plane crash two nights ago, I realized that there hadn't been a passenger plane crash in quite some time. And very unfortunately, an A320 crashed a day later. The A320 is about the size of a Boeing 737.

Coincidence?