Quote:
Originally posted by recombinant
as far as I know, Deja Vu's come from a part of the brain called the hippocampus located in the temporal lobe. This is part of the declarative memory system. While it does not hold the all memories, it stores very recent ones and it recognizes that older ones exists. As far as the association of dreams and the hippocampus I am not sure, since it is offline when you sleep. Anyway, one theory is that in dreams the path for recall does not go through the hippocampus. Instead you pull memories from other different part of the brain. Sometimes we go to the neo cortex where abstract semantic knowledge is stored. These types of memories would be interpretive in nature.
To use your example, lets assume you really went to a gas station. Many types of memories would be generated by this event. One of the memories that may hit the neo cortex would be that you knew it was a gas station because you smelled gas.
Anyway, all that to say your dreams are based on your collection of memories of many different types. When we sleep we are sorting out those memories and putting them in there place. Occasionally we pull back different types of memories and get them mixed up. Deja vu's in sleep are puported to be just one of our several types of memory getting linked with a different, unassociated memory or imagined image in our heads.
BTW - I get them too! The real question is why do you get them during the day? :mrgreen: (its beleived to be a small seizures in that region that causes the glitch) Scary huh?
-wow thanks for that information.. :) Obviously I've got a lot to learn..