scientists identify cause of déjà vu
i’ve heard this before

It’s an eerie experience that just about everyone has had more than once: you walk into a room or find yourself in a conversation, and suddenly you have the overwhelming sense–even though you know it’s impossible–that you’ve been here before. Psychologists call it déjà vu–”already seen,” in French–but despite the phenomenon’s universal familiarity, no one has offered a convincing explanation for why it happens.

But the mystery may have been solved, by a team of neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Researcher Thomas McHugh and several colleagues have uncovered a specific memory circuit in the brains of mice that is probably the cause of this weird sensation, which turns out to be a sort of memory-based analogue of an optical illusion. Although neuroscientists have realized for some time that memory is made up of many different components–long and short term, episodic (that is to say, memories of events) and fact based, and that it takes place in different parts of the brain–McHugh’s research, first reported in the online edition of Science, adds another intriguing clue to the phenomenon.

Explaining Déjà Vu - TIME - for the rest of the story.

KEN’S COMMENT - I’m fairly certain that Deja Vu is a FEELING.  These researchers have identified a neural circuit associated with memory formation the activation of which appears correlated with a situation manufactured by the researchers.  The SCIENCE must be the part of the experiment where the researchers HYPOTHESIZE that each of the mice used in the experiment are actually experiencing  deja vu.

The problem seems to be that MD PhD researchers think that fundamental understandings regarding human cognitive-emotional systems are somehow exclusively associated with low level functioning. By failing to appraoch these problems simultaneously from the top-down and the bottom-up, the researchers are lacking the ground required to understand the figure (pattern) that materializes.

They perform half-ass magic leading to half-truths that are then published in respected periodicals. The appearance that these researchers have had some notable achievement is as superficial and subjective as an optical illusion, or in view of their research, the feeling of deja vu.

The difference here is that the researchers fail to realize their sense of achievement is in fact just deja vu!