http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30927102

I experienced it for the first time in years in work a few weeks ago. Hard to know if it's your brain or just work being like that

Anyone here experience it much?

I'm sure I've read that before...

If you're ever stuck pondering the mystery of deja vu, simply remember that it's a mis-firing of your brain; actually remembering an event that really happened doesn't feel like deja vu

Yeah. I saw a thing where a guy was saying the best explanation they have is due to the way information gets to your brain.

When you see things you don't see with your eyes. You see with your brain interpreting the signal from your eyes. Normally that signal gets to your brain before the signal gets to the short term memory part of your brain.

With déjà vu it can happen the other way around where the signal gets to your memory before it gets to the visual processing bit. So when you process it you think you've remembered it from before.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I get it very rarely, and only for a few seconds at most.

I used to get it a lot as a child through to my early 20s. I'd dream about stuff and then it would come true some time later. No telling when, but it would be disturbing.

The earliest example was playing Top Trump against, leaning against a tree. The scene suddenly came back to my memory and I knew exactly what cards my friends were holding, what I needed to say to win the hand and what each of them would say.

Later, when I was working in a restaurant, a key word triggered the memory of what was about to happen. A waitress was about to come in and she would slip on the floor and fall down. There was nothing I could say or do, before I could move, the waitress came around the corner, slipped on the floor and landed on her rump.

I still get these sorts of dreams, but they are very rare these days. As I said, the peak time was in my teens, it would happen several times a month, that I had dreamed of something and then it would happen.

Did you ever spend a summer watching a spider create a web, lay eggs and then be eaten by the baby spiders? I ask because your brain appears to have implanted memories in your head that you think you predicted the future. I know about the unicorns by the way, you've done a man's job, sir.

I've had similar experiences to big_D where I used to have premonitory dreams. Around this time, I used to experience lots of lucid dreaming too.

These days, I have very vivid dreams, made more memorable/intense by consuming baked cheese, banana or walnuts before bed.

You didn't predict the future though, it's a memory implanted in your consciousness that makes you think you did. It's a feeling, an illusion. It's not rare, our brains do it all the time, consciousness is all about memories filling in the blanks. Our consciousness is a post-edited, polished, coherent version of what our millions of sensations are constantly feeding us. And our brains constantly get it "wrong".

I feel as though I need this explaining further.

I may have had deja vu before but I'm not 100% certain.

I've always suspected deja vu is the brain's pattern matching system being caught out. We use heuristics (rules of thumb, essentially) to process a lot of the data that comes into us, because even the human brain can't actually process all our sensory inputs properly in the fraction of a second we may need to react to it. A lot of the memory we store is not in concrete images or facts, it's patterns of things with a few important 'landmark' concrete objects tied to them. Deja vu, IMO, is simply a case where we we perceive the exact same pattern in a set of stimuli without it actually being the same event. This causes our brains to think 'oh, haven't we been here before'? The memory is triggered even though the event is new because it matched the established pattern and our brain takes a shortcut.

Just my theory though, I suspect it's very hard to come up with an experiment involving deja vu because it's so unpredictable.

Actually, deja vu was explained in this excellent documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KmNZNT5xw

I think I've seen that before.

Mark

I was just thinking it's called 'Dave' now, and it's more likely to induce nostalgia

D's top trump example includes an action prompted by a memory in advance of the cognitive edit. A multiple drafts of consciousness theory has to cover a lot more ground to explain that than it does a simple deja vu event.

It's a sham he didn't devise an experiment with pre-arranged keywords and a roulette table. He could have got rich and provided a statistical basis for his paranormal abilities.