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- tdogg241, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41Sorry for the comment abuse (credit goes to themutt22):
Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
Much of what we don't understand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a befuddling organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Here's a heads-up on what's known and what's not understood about your noggin. —Jeanna Bryner
10. Sweet Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you’d probably get 10 different answers. That’s because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn’t take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).
9. Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep—non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn’t proven, and dreams during REM sleep don’t always correlate with memories.
8. Phantom Feelings
It’s estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact—meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.
7. Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag—the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.
6. Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain’s gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn’t so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that’s much more difficult when the event didn’t actually occur.
5. Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother’s foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities—stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.
4. Nature vs. Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.
3. Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body’s repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.
2. Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor’s freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn’t exist. For one, if the body isn’t thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person’s cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.
1. Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions. - Xanin, on 10/12/2007, -5/+41as soon as I saw you had to click through several pages, i closed the page. such poor design *sighs*
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+36Wow! That is one ugly website!
- Mootabolife, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16They forgot the placebo effect.
- Makubex, on 10/12/2007, -5/+19Whoever designed that website needs to be shot.
- rshu4you, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13You said that before didn't you?
- kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11De ja vu means they changed something, its a glitch in the programming.
- HunterTV, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10"Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?"
"Affirmative, Dave, I read you."
"Change the color scheme, HAL."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
"What's the problem?"
"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
"What are you talking about, HAL?"
"This website is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
"I don't know what you're talking about, HAL."
"I know you and Frank were planning to redesign me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen." - theheights, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11One mystery they don't mention is déjà vu. What's up with déjà vu anyway?
- loki440, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I feel like I've seen this before...
- fredrated, on 10/12/2007, -0/+68, phantom limb, has already been solved. It turns out that the nerves in the brain that received the limb signals become so starved for input that they grow dendrites into other parts of the brain to get their input fix. That new input then makes it feel like the limb is signaling.
- Triptastic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6If you find this interesting, I'd recommend reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. It's very provocative and attempts to explain the mind (as opposed to the brain) in terms of evolution.
- edzieba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The greatest mystery of the mind: that everything that 'you' have ever experienced, and all that you are currently experiencing, is the result of electrical pulses in a lump of grey proteinous jelly. I'd say that itself was pretty damn amazing.
- WarMacheen, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Top 10 Mysteries of Web Design...
- Kale, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Grrr. Comment edit time locked me out.
I was also going to note that phantom pains are also relatively well understood. They even explain the most accepted theory in the article. Pain and other sensations are located in the brain, where the brain "projects" the pain on the limb (i.e. feels like it's coming from the limb). The nerves can somehow be randomly stimulated, and the brain interprets the nerves as sensing pain on the limb that doesn't exist.
Similar mechanisms cause heart attacks to hurt in random areas of the body (arm, shoulder, stomach, etc).
#3 Again, aging appears to be genetic (most likely the telomeres in our DNA). This is why clones appear to be the same age as the organism they are cloned from, and why some cancer cells do not age. - DeskFlyer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Sorry, but if you can't summarize all ten mysteries on one ***** page, then your link deserved to be buried, just like I just did with this garbage.
- themutt22, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
Much of what we don't understand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a befuddling organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Here's a heads-up on what's known and what's not understood about your noggin. —Jeanna Bryner
10. Sweet Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you’d probably get 10 different answers. That’s because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn’t take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).
9. Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep—non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn’t proven, and dreams during REM sleep don’t always correlate with memories.
8. Phantom Feelings
It’s estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact—meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.
7. Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag—the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.
6. Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain’s gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn’t so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that’s much more difficult when the event didn’t actually occur.
5. Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother’s foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities—stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.
4. Nature vs. Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.
3. Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body’s repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.
2. Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor’s freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn’t exist. For one, if the body isn’t thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person’s cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.
1. Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions. - samfishercell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3At least we're not spelling noobs :D
- 8177, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4#4 is my favourite
"coud be either or both."
No *****. - Scynet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Mmh not quite, I'm personally amazed at how much we already know. I even read an article on how it's possible to create that "out-of-the-body experience" artificially by stimulating a certain area of the brain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/health/psychology/03shad.html?ex=1317528000&en=d71c1fcd10396c37&ei=5090&partner=rss - Kale, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3R.E.M. is not your deepest sleep. Stage 3 and 4 are both "deeper" states.
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/site/c.huIXKjM0IxF/b.2419159/k.A817/What_Happens_When_You_Sleep.htm - misconfig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Very fun read; dugg!
- rshu4you, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2WOW, that's amazing, I now know that they just don't know
- anesthesia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2number 2 isn't a 'Mystery of the Mind' at all.
not an bad article though - nepawoods, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Anyone at all interested in the "#1 Mystery" on this list, 'consciousness' (and anyone who prides himself on having any intellect or curiosity about the nature of our universe ought to be interested in it) ought to read at least this basic introduction to the problem by David Chalmers: "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" at http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
- superguysteve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2mind-bottling...
- nepawoods, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2from the site:
#1 - Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness
By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 08 August 2005
06:05 am ET
At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences.
One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness.
He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.
In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.
Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.
Beyond the mystics
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness.
Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.
No longer the sole purview of philosophers and mystics, consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists from across a variety of different fields, each, it seems, with their own theories about what consciousness is and how it arises from the brain.
In many religions, consciousness is closely tied to the ancient notion of the soul, the idea that in each of us, there exists an immaterial essence that survives death and perhaps even predates birth. It was believed that the soul was what allowed us to think and feel, remember and reason.
Our personality, our individuality and our humanity were all believed to originate from the soul.
Nowadays, these things are generally attributed to physical processes in the brain, but exactly how chemical and electrical signals between trillions of brain cells called neurons are transformed into thoughts, emotions and a sense of self is still unknown.
"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation -- how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery."
Just accept it
Chalmers is best known for distinguishing between the 'easy' problems of consciousness and the 'hard' problem.
The easy problems are those that deal with functions and behaviors associated with consciousness and include questions such as these: How does perception occur? How does the brain bind different kinds of sensory information together to produce the illusion of a seamless experience?
"Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences," Chalmers says.
The hard problem for Chalmers is that of subjective experience.
"You have a different kind of experience -- a different quality of experience -- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate," Chalmers told LiveScience. "Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something."
According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass.
"Those things in a way didn't need to evolve," said Chalmers. "They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along."
Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about this idea, however.
'Not very helpful'
"It's not very helpful," said Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University.
"You can't do very much with it," Greenfield points out. "It's the last resort, because what can you possibly do with that idea? You can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't test it. It doesn't offer an explanation, or any enlightenment, or any answers about why people feel the way they feel."
Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.
Important for Greenfield's theory is a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'mind,' terms that she says many of her colleagues use interchangeably, but which she believes are two entirely different concepts.
"You talk about losing your mind or blowing your mind or being out of your mind, but those things don't necessarily entail a loss of consciousness," Greenfield said in a telephone interview. "Similarly, when you lose your consciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, you don't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind."
Like the wetness of water
According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.
But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.
For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.
Mind and consciousness are connected in Greenfield's theory because the strength of a conscious experience is determined by the mind and the strength of its existing neuronal connections -- connections forged from past experiences.
Part of the mystery and excitement about consciousness is that scientists don't know what form the final answer will take.
"If I said to you I'd solved the hard problem, you wouldn't be able to guess whether it would be a formula, a model, a sensation, or a drug," said Greenfield. "What would I be giving you?" - starline, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't know if that's depressing or the coolest thing ever.
- stuma9000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2OR... deja vu happens when you've already experienced something ahead of time (perhaps in a dream). This has definitely happened to me. The phenomenon of people having premonitions is widely documented. Cutting edge science will tell you that time is not linear. There is also much evidence to suggest that time may be actually happening 'all at once'. Cosmologists and sub-atomic physicists are finding it useful to think of time in these terms.
- nepawoods, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"10 Mysteries: DE-MYSTIFIED"
That was great. You can collect you Nobel Prize now. - Ediebriquette, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1seriously, pick a side. we're at war!
- nitsuj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"All these "mysteries" could be solved in one word: Jesus."
Go on then, solve them with "Jesus". Explain neuronal complexity with "Jesus". Explain consciousness with "Jesus". That's right, you can't. And that is because you're talking crap. - Ruckgesicht, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"The brain is a befuddling organ"
No it isn't; there is nothing mysterious about the brain itself, it simply operates in a logical and predictable way that is partially out of our grasp of understanding at the moment. If it were mysterious we would never figure out how it works because it wouldn't work in any understandable way. - Scynet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does anyone know why it adds digg.com/general_sciences into the link when it's obviously not there? Bug? Something I don't know of?
- rnwen2750, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Uh, we sleep because we would die if we didn't.
- inv1c7u5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1stop reposting, everyone knows your an idiot
- sinnejma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Phantom limbs are still interesting. I heard about an experiment about this guy who lost his arm when it was crushed under a motorcycle. His hand was in a position where his fingernails were digging into his palm and he felt this pain for years. So, a table was set up with mirrors so when he put his other arm on the the table it appeared to be in the place of the arm that was missing. When he made a fist and opened up his hand, the pain disappeared.
- echoforever, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1#3 and #2 apply to the entire body and not just mind.
- dezmo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1is it possible that what you think you're dreaming about has little to do with the information that is being processed?
- theheights, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4One mystery they don't mention is déjà vu... What's up with déjà vu anyway?
- bixel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Worst Presentation of a Top 10 List I have ever SEEN! YUK!!
- ShaneMcDeath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you think of time as being a single thing that we only appear to experience as seperate events that follow each other, everything that is ever going to happen has already happened. We are just navigating through it. In that way maybe deja vu is just 'cheating' a bit. One thing i find interesting is that i get way more deja vu when im going through periods when im meditating more often. For example i might meditate for a month or 2, then go about 6 months without and that's generally been the pattern for about 10 years. So to me that seems to go against the idea that it's due to some sort of fault in the brain, eyes etc.
Anyway they are my thoughts on it. Its a really interesting subject to me. Along with scat. - petersms, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I read, a long time ago, that deja vu is the product of one of your eyes being dominant over the other. Basically, your dominant eye sees and understands your surroundings a bit quicker than the other, sometimes leading you to believe you've seen/experienced something before. That was the gist of it. This was a long time ago, and this theory may have been refuted, but eh, interesting nonetheless.
- alexkorova, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The problem with that is that we've found that dreams some times (actually, a lot of them) has to do with anything that happened during the day or that you thought of etc.
- R34C7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1#10.
I thought dreams were the result of your subconscious processing the events of the day into lasting memories during REM (which is why you have memory problems if you don't sleep) and your conscious attempting to make sense of the whole mess. - Chairmclee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I thought that this was common knowledge even outside of scientific community.
Mysteries indeed. - rnwen2750, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I will look up the corresponding articles later today, but deja vu is now commonly believed to be a "writing error" in your brain. Short-term memory and long-term memory are having some sort of communication problem, so they both "claim" the memory as "their own," resulting in the feeling that you have seen/heard/been/etc. there before.
- silverchrysalis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0not Jesus so much as God, a Creator of some sort who designed very tiny inner and outer working. everytime i read something like this it all becomes more fascinating...
- rnwen2750, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Someone in neuropsych at UVa once explained it to me by relating the brain to a filing cabinet. When we sleep, our mind takes the time to "process" its files. The inbox (what happened/etc. that day) is dealt with, shuffling memories into the appropriate (with any luck) folders. Along the way, other files are recopied, edited, tossed away in a pruning and growth process. While this happens, bits and pieces of those files are being "read" by our mind. Because we are not equipped to "handle" this reorganizing, we only "sense" some of what is happening, and those are our dreams. He called it our nightly "screen saver."
- rnwen2750, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Bah, sorry, meant neurosurgery, not neuropsych. :)
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