My good friend, Jeffrey Shepard, just sent me Yahoo’s big news story today. And before I dash back to the airport to cross the pond I cannot wait to share the origins of Déjà vu according to Yahoo News.
Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer reported that this new study “suggests only a small chunk of it (brain), called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for “episodic” memories—information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.”
We already knew that … “The brain cranks out memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus.”
The new finding though… helps explain “where déjà vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients,” according to MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa. The study is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.
It’s “like a computer logging its programs’ activities, the dentate gyrus notes a situation’s pattern—it’s visual, audio, smell, time and other cues for the body’s future reference.”
Check out what happens when its abilities are jammed?
This study show déjà vu as really a memory problem where,” our brains struggle to tell the difference between two extremely similar situations.”
It comes with age, and it also happens in people suffering from brain diseases like “Alzheimer’s, .which causes loss of or damage to cells in the dentate gyrus.”
Check out related stories …
If you’ve been to a mall in one part of the world and then seen a similar one in another and part of your brain thinks it has but the other parts knows it has not, you’ve seen the brain’s origins of déjà vu first hand. What do you think?
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