Work by psychology researcher Akira O'Connor suggested false memories may not be to blame for the phenomenon known as “Déjà vu”. Instead, it could be a sign of the brain checking its memory.
When presenting the findings at an International Conference on Memory in Budapest, O'Connor said he thinks the frontal regions of the brain could be flipping through our memories, then sending signals if there's a mismatch between what we think we've experienced and what we actually have experienced.
"Brain regions associated with memory conflict, rather than false memory, appear to be driving the déjà vu experience," O'Connor wrote in a blog post about the findings.
"This is consistent with our idea of déjà vu as the conscious awareness of a discrepancy in memory signals being corrected. This, in turn, sheds some light on why déjà vu occurrence appears to decline with age despite the fact that memory errors tend to increase with age. If it's not an error, but the prevention of an error, this makes a lot more sense”. [
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Checking memories. Against what we know happened.
Feeling the conflict. And yet sensing… familiarity?
The solution to a problem which continuously evades solution might be the simplest and yet the hardest of solutions: That there is no problem. Human memory keeps creating more problems than the ones it solves. We are not to trust it. We do not know how it is formulated. More often than we would like to, it is lost. And yet, with this faulty memory, we are still here. Alive and kicking. Perhaps we should stop trying to remember. And try to be ourselves. Here and now.
I feel I have said that before…
But I do not care.
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