Reality
Reality in everyday usage means "everything that exists". The term "Reality", in its widest sense, includes everything that is, whether it is observable, accessible or understandable by science, philosophy, theology or any other system of analysis. Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas existence is often restricted to being (compare with nature).
In the strict sense of Western philosophy, there are levels or gradation to the nature and conception of reality. These levels include, from the most subjective to the most rigorous: phenomenological reality, truth, fact, and axiom.
Other philosophies, particularly those founded in Buddhism, have different explications of reality. Conceptions of reality in Buddhism include: dharma, paramattha dhamma, samsara and maya.
On a much broader and more subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the spiritual experience of an individual occurs on this level of reality.
When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people. Thus one particular group may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have a different set of truths that have reached consensus.
This lets different communities and societies have varied and extremely different notions of reality and truth of the external world. The religion and beliefs of people or communities are a fine example of this level of reality. This is well expressed in the famous quote by Henry Thoreau, "It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear." However, humans are fallible and are limited to individual experience. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility take away any assertion that the idea of truth, itself, exists.
Other views of truth assert that truth is that which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence, regardless of subjective inference. Truth can not merely be discerned by deductive reasoning but can only be more deeply understood by inductive study and skepticism.
A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead it is most often the observed phenomena of the natural world. The proposition 'the sun rises in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from.
The Galilean proposition in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the centre of the solar system is one that states the fact of the natural world. However during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer to the innumerable individual phenomenological realities. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.
This view of reality is well expressed by Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Axioms are self-evident realities, the existence of which is accepted as given and on which further conceptions are generated.The facts of a natural world would hold true only in the systemic construction of that world. Hence in a different system, the facts of another world might no longer hold valid. The fact that 'the sun rises in the east', might not be valid in a different solar system where the planet might be tilted in a different angle, or revolving in a different direction around its star, so that the star might rise on the planet's horizon in the west instead of the east. Hence the facts of a systemic entity might not be universal outside the realms of that system. However, exceptionally rare conceptions might be universal in ethos.
Mathematical formulations and propositions in mathematical logic are based on axioms, and hence these fields are often referred to as pure disciplines. The validity of the set theoretic proposition would hold true in any systemic process or universe. Its validity is self evident in ontological existence and works on the axiomatic level of reality.Some portion of ultimate reality may lie beyond our scope to examine or even imagine. Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially.
This idea was well elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Most of the cultural conflict in the world occurs when certain individuals or groups try to impose their phenomenological realities or truths on other people or communities.
"Reality", the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual discipline. It can help understand what we mean by "reality" to note what we say is not real but usualy if there is no original and related proofs it isn't reality.
In philosophy, reality is contrasted with nonexistence (penguins do exist; so they are real) and mere possibility (a mountain made of gold is merely possible, but is not real) unless they are discovered. Sometimes philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence itself, though ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as synonyms. They have in mind the notion that there is a kind of reality - a mental or intensional reality, perhaps - that imaginary objects, such as the aforementioned golden mountain, have.
Alexius Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while they do not actually exist. Most philosophers find the very notion of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the shibboleths and starting points of 20th century analytic philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of subsistence - of "real" but nonexistent objects.It is worth saying at this point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely what reality is not - some of them have positive theories of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition.
In ethics, political theory, and the arts, reality is often contrasted with what is ideal.One of the fundamental issues in ethics is called the is-ought problem, and it can be formulated as follows: "Given our knowledge of the way the world is, how can we know the way the world ought to be?" Most ethical views hold that the world we live in (the real world) is not ideal - and, as such, there is room for improvement.
Political theory is often an extension of the above. Few (if any) political views hold that the world we live in is the best possible world. Most political views argue that the world - or, more specifically, present-day society - could be improved in one way or another, and propose various means to achieve such an improvement.In the arts there was a broad movement beginning in the 19th century, realism (which led to naturalism), which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth, realistically.
This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these artistic movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average, ordinary, and natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary, improbable, and sometimes even supernatural.
Obviously, when speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher uses the term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not exist.In the arts, and also in ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often contrasted with illusion.
A painting that precisely indicates the visually-appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be realistic in that respect; one that distorts features, as Pablo Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are said to be unrealistic, and thus some observers will say, but with questionable grammatical correctness, that they are "not real."
But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward so-called realism and more recently photorealism that invite a different sort of contrast with the real. Trompe-l'¦il (French, "fool the eye") paintings render their subjects so "realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be deceived into thinking that he is seeing something, indeed, real - but in fact, it is merely an illusion, and an intentional one at that.In psychiatry, reality, or rather, the idea of being in touch with reality is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, since it has often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch" with reality.
The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and events that are not real. However, there is controversy over what is considered out of touch with reality, particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcefully instituting individuals for expressing their beliefs in society to reality enforcement.
The practice's possible covert use as a political tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th century psychiatric sentences in the U.S. of black slaves for 'crazily' attempting to escape.
In each of these cases, discussions of reality, or what counts as "real", take on quite different casts; indeed, what we say about reality often depends on what we want to say it is not.
A common colloquial usage would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real.
For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
But occasionally - and particularly in the case of those who have been exposed to certain ideas from philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields - it is thought that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality.
Such attitudes indicate anti-realism, that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not.
If we really do literally mean by "reality" simply "beliefs about reality," then our article about reality would necessarily, to be complete, have to outline every world view (this is how the German word Weltanschauung is usually translated) - every broadly different way of "seeing" reality.
In this sense, the topic of reality encompasses many other topics: perception, psychology generally, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, religion, sociology and anthropology, and topics in philosophy.
But there is a way to make the topic of reality less cumbersome for present purposes: restrict the discussion to theories about the general topic of reality itself. Thus, for example, a certain Christian world view would not count as a theory of reality, but the theory that the Christian world view is a "construction" of reality would count as a theory about reality.
It is theories about reality, in this sense, that philosophers discuss as part of metaphysics; such theories are also sometimes discussed in literary theory (which is, today, heavily influenced by Continental philosophy and heavily anti-realist) as well as in sociology and cultural anthropology.
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If - what is rarely done - a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view or Weltanschauung.
The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about" this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object the existence or essential characteristics of which is said to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about" that object.
One can also speak of anti-realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas. Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism.
Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events.
Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.
From Wikipedia
by Ellie Crystal
Reality is consciousness or programmed illusion. It is virtual, perceived through conscious awareness. We exist in a biogenetic experiment to experience emotion through the constructs of linear time. All and everything is created by a geometric architectural design following the patterns of sacred geometry. Reality appears to move in synchronized linear fashion creating the illusion of time, also known as the loops/cycles of time, wheel of karma, or the alchemy wheel.
Spiraling movement of consciousness - Phi
In the Golden Alchemy of Time.
Reality began with a tone (horns, cones, harmonics, soul notes) followed spiraling pulsating light which creates ongoing and endless grids in which souls can virtually experience. Grids have frequencies to which we attach to experience. Souls enter one or more grids and experience simultaneously.
Reality is never the same. Like the flow of the collective unconsciousness it is forever in motion creating new patterns to epxerience. Consciousness spirals like a slinky, mirroring the movement, or evolution, of DNA. The higher your consciousness moves up the slinky, the faster the vibrational frequency - the faster you can think, create, understand higher holographic archtypes of reality, and increase your manifestation in physical reality.
Your thoughts/consciousness begin at the top and spiral down to the physical realms which are so slow moving - you forget the nature of reality - that which is above.
Indigenous people have understood that reality is an illusion or dream from which we are about to awaken.
Prophecies throughout time bring the same message about this being the end of the cycles of time evolving into something more - non physical - the return to light and total understanding. Your intuition should also be telling you that something is changing or evolving that affects all of humanity. Physical reality is created by electromagnetic energy.
The current human objective in physical reality is to create healing, balance, higher awareness after which one can find out the truth behind the illusion and the true nature of reality and separate from the physical grid at zero point.
At the end of the day ... and it all happens in One Day ... reality is a consciousness hologram that had a beginning and now comes to its end. That's all there is folks! take a look around ... a really good look ... and decide for yourself.
Reality: A Mere Illusion (Part 1) Epoch Times - December 15, 2009
However, the reality that we perceive seems to be contrary to scientific logic, if we bear in mind that matter hardly exists. The construction blocks of visible matter are atoms, which are merely small nuclei lost in the middle of a great spacial emptiness, surrounded by nearly invisible particles (electrons) that orbit them at magnificent speeds. If our bodies were to be put under a powerful microscope, what would be seen would probably be a sea of sand grains in perpetual motion.
According to recent research in the field of quantum physics, all of what we know as matter‹the solid cement of what appears to be what our reality is composed of‹could be nothing more than quantum fluctuations in the middle of the empty universe.
A group of physicists led by Dr. Stephen Durr from the John Von Neumann Institute in Germany confirmed that the sum of the three subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons (called quarks) barely represent 1 percent of their total mass.
Such evidence suggests that the rest of the nuclear mass would be consist of gluons, ephemeral particles that bubble in the middle of the emptiness, which function to maintain the unity among the trio of quarks inside protons and neutrons. This fact suggests the hypothesis that our tangible reality might be mere fluctuations of emptiness or purely nothing.
The Other Truth
What we see with our physical eyes is greatly reduced to a convenient scope. Possessing a pair of eyes that could see only microscopic particles would make it impossible for us to move in a world with objects so large, as the objects with which we generally interact are composed of billions and billions of microscopic particles.
According to biologist Richard Dawkins, rocks only feel hard and impenetrable to our hands because they can¹t penetrate each other. For us, it is useful to have notions of hardness and solidity as it helps us navigate our world. Navigating in an illusory reality, we have to accept that somewhere in the universe another reality can be found. There could be a gigantic slumber, a crazy bubble, or God, if you will.
Since the reality of particles cannot be more than smoke and shadows, it could be that the real existence of all objects in the cosmos resides in one or more parallel spaces. Many scientists speculate that, just like a three-dimensional object can project a two-dimensional shadow over the ground, a multidimensional universe (like the case of the String Theory) could cast a shadow in three-dimensional space.
If this theory is correct, every object and organism in this world would not be more than a gross representation of objects and organisms in a more ³real² universe. Coinciding with this theory, the existence of an extracorporeal mind in another dimension might be the ideal explanation for why we have memory, as the atoms in our brains are replaced hundreds of time throughout the course of our lives. According to Dawkins, not a single atom that makes up our bodies today would have been in our bodies during an event in our childhood that we remember.
Steve Grand, author of ³Creation: Life and How to Make It,² suggests that matter moves from one place to another and reunites momentarily so that you can be you. Therefore, you aren't the matter of which you are made. This would imply that our real bodies are in the space that we cannot comprehend - while a virtual body, a mere container, would be what is in what we call reality.
Reality: A Mere Illusion - Part 2 Epoch Times - December 20, 2009
You and I, Only Holograms
Shadows and colors of light are crude projections of a 'more real' reality. The universe that we live in presents itself as something even more illusory, where bodies, minds, and planets are parts of a great magic trick without a magician or an audience.
Scientists in Hanover, Germany, working on the GEO 600, which is an instrument that detects gravitational waves, believe they have discovered a 'granulation' in space-time that indicates that our universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.
Those responsible for the GEO 600 believe that, in the same way a digital image loses resolution with significant increase in its size, the captured interference in the detector could be interpreted as the universe¹s limited resolution of what it¹s capable of providing to human eyes. There¹s an exact point where the hologram of reality begins to 'pixelize' itself.
The scientists suspect that the precision of the GEO 600, capable of detecting variations in longitudinal waves at the subatomic scale, served to discover the tiniest grains that compose the three-dimensional holographic universe, projected from the bi-dimensional confines of its interior.
The idea of a holographic universe isn¹t new. In the 1990s, scientists Leonard Susskind and Gerard Hooft suggested that the same principal that makes a two-dimensional image on a flat surface look three-dimensional could be applied to the entire universe.
Then, why do our senses perceive reality in such a distinct and 'voluminous' way if we appear to be no more than shadows on a flat screen? The problem could be that our human eyes and our powerful telescope lenses conform to the reality of such a hologram of the rest of the universe.
The second point to consider is that our organic brain can also be found in the illusion, never being able to interpret a universe with a greater or fewer number of dimensions than can be perceived.
Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, founder of the Center of Cerebral Research at the University of Radford in Virginia, thinks that our brains are holograms interpreting the hologram universe, mathematically constructing a reality interpreting frequencies that come from another dimension - a domain of significant reality that transcends time and space.
Nevertheless, the theory of a holographic universe of only two special dimensions conflicts with multidimensional theories arising from the roots of the superchord theory. Before this mark of a disparate hypothesis, many scientists already suspected that the universe is a hologram or illusion created by particles in the emptiness. However, all of the scientific efforts to comprehend the truth amid the mirage have become trapped in a frustrating array of unprovable theories.
Many vanguard theorists think that the disturbing breach in the field of quantum physics and relativity could explain historically argued phenomena in the scientific field, like those in which the mind doesn¹t seem to be associated to the brain - such as near-death experiences, remote vision, and precognition.
In whatever case, Plato¹s allegory of the cave would seem to be the most rational option now for explaining these vivid daily experiences that our brains interpret as being real appearances of the world.
Déjà vu: Where fact meets fantasy New Scientist - March 26, 2009
Déjà vu can happen to anyone, and anyone who has had it will recognise the description immediately. It is more than just a sense that you have seen or done something before; it is a startling, inappropriate and often disturbing sense that history is repeating, and impossibly so. You can't place where the earlier encounter happened, and it can feel like a premonition or a dream. Subjective, strange and fleeting, not to mention tainted by paranormal explanations, the phenomenon has been a difficult and unpopular one to study.
Now that is changing, spurred in part by Mr P and a handful of people who, like him, have dementia and experience continuous déjà vu, and also by the discovery that there is a group of people with epilepsy who have déjà vu-like auras before a seizure. They are making it possible for researchers to catch the process in action, bringing hope that the secrets of this strange and disturbing phenomenon could finally be unlocked. Surprisingly, not only is déjà vu proving an interesting window on the peculiar ways that our memory works, it is also providing a few clues about how we tell the difference between what is real, imagined, dreamed and remembered - one of the true mysteries of consciousness.
Speculations about past lives or telepathy aside, the first biological explanations of déjà vu were based on ideas that two sensory signals in the brain - perhaps one from each eye or each hemisphere of the brain - for some reason move out of sync, so that people have the experience of reliving the same event. "Mental diplopia", as it was called, is intuitively appealing but the evidence is stacked against it. Information from the two eyes mixes very early in visual processing, long before we perceive a scene. What's more, déjà vu - rather ironically as the term means "already seen" - can occur in blind people, according to Chris Moulin, a psychologist at the University of Leeds, UK, (Brain and Cognition, vol 62, p 264). Then there are the cases of people who have had their two cortical hemispheres surgically separated in an attempt to relieve intractable epilepsy. If the mental diplopia idea were correct you might expect them to have permanent déjà vu, yet there are no reports of this happening.
A second intuitive explanation is some sort of distortion in time perception. Somehow, incoming signals must get misinterpreted and labelled with an inappropriate time stamp, making the experience seem old as well as current. If the brain's memory system is like a tape recorder, it is as if the recording head has got muddled with the playback head. It is an interesting analogy, but it does not appear to have any anatomical basis in the brain.
Now another theory is gaining credibility. Perhaps déjà vu feels like reliving a past experience because we actually are - at least to some extent. Psychologist Anne Cleary of Colorado State University in Fort Collins came to this idea via an interest in memory problems. Keen to explain instances such as when something seems to be on the tip of the tongue, or when we recognize a face but can't place it, she started looking for parallels with déjà vu. "One particular theory of déjà vu is that it may be a memory process," she says. "Features of a new situation may be familiar from some prior situation."
Her first experiments seem to support this. In one, she was able to induce familiarity for images of celebrity faces or well-known places, even if the viewer couldn't place the image, simply by first presenting subjects with lists of their names. In another study volunteers reported familiarity with words that sounded similar to ones presented in an earlier list. Nevertheless, Cleary acknowledges that this can't be the whole story. "Déjà vu is unique in that it is not just another instance of familiarity, it actually feels wrong," she says.
How to account for this? One possibility is that déjà vu is based on a memory fragment that comes from something more subtle, such as similarity between the configuration or layout of two scenes. Say you are in the living room of a friend's new house with the eerie feeling that you have been there before, yet knowing you can't possibly. It could be just that the arrangement of furniture is similar to what you have seen before, suggests Cleary, so the sense of familiarity feels misplaced.
To test the idea, her team produced a large range of images showing scenes such as a bar, a bowling alley, landscapes or rooms from a house. Volunteers saw a subset of these, then they were tested on a new set, half of which were entirely novel and the other half resembling scenes from the first set in structure and configuration but not content. Not only did the similar layouts produce familiarity without recall, subjects also reported a sense of the inexplicable, having been told that all the scenes were different.
Although the familiarity idea appeals to many, Moulin, for one, is not convinced. His scepticism stems from a study of a person with epilepsy that he conducted with Akira O'Connor, now at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. This 39-year-old man's auras of déjà vu were long-lasting enough to conduct experiments during them. The researchers reasoned that if familiarity is at the root of déjà vu, they should be able to stop the experience in its tracks by distracting the man's attention away from whatever scene he was looking at. However, when he looked away or focused on something different, his déjà vu did not dissipate, and would follow his line of vision and his hearing, suggesting that real familiarity is not the key. The fact that an epilepsy aura can cause déjà vu at all suggests that it is erroneous activity in a particular part of the brain that leads to misplaced feelings of familiarity, suggests Moulin.
Hypnotic Dissociation
But how? Moulin and O'Connor think déjà vu is the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall. We know that we can have a sense of familiarity for a face or name without actually remembering where we know it from. Using hypnosis, O'Connor and Moulin have been able to create a more mysterious sense of familiarity that leads people to draw parallels with déjà vu. One group of people was given a puzzle to solve. Then, while under hypnosis, they were told they would be given the puzzle again, but would not recall it. Another group did not do the puzzle but were told under hypnosis that they would be given it later and that they would experience feelings of familiarity but not understand why. Both situations produced a sense of eerie familiarity, which some people likened to déjà vu. Moulin and O'Connor hope that their ability to induce a déjà vu-like state in the lab will help them probe the phenomenon. They also believe these experiments support the idea that familiarity and recall are dissociable, and that you can have a sense of familiarity without actually having any prior experience of something.
Studies of the brain also support the idea that separate circuits mediate recollection and familiarity, according to John Aggleton and Malcolm Brown of Cardiff University, UK, who recently reviewed brain imaging and animal studies (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 10, p 455). They point out that different parts of the medial temporal lobe, at the side of the brain, are responsible for different aspects of memory recall (see illustration). The curved tube-like hippocampus, which runs through the centre of the lobe, mediates recollection, particularly of autobiographical memories. Meanwhile, the studies show that the surrounding parahippocampus, particularly the perirhinal cortex, may provide the feelings of familiarity.
This fits well with the evidence from brain scans of Mr P and others like him, who show huge degeneration of neurons in the medial temporal lobe, and the fact that it is epilepsy originating in the medial temporal lobe that leads to déjà vu auras.
It is possible that both Moulin and Cleary are correct. The perirhinal cortex may store information about spatial relationships, rather than time, place and sequence of events, and so normal familiarity feelings could come largely from layout and configuration, backing Cleary's findings.
Indeed, there may be many ways to produce false familiarity, according to psychologist Alan Brown of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, author of The déjà vu experience (Psychology press, 2004). His own experiments indicate some other possibilities.
For example, he has induced the feeling by distracting volunteers while they saw a glimpse of a scene and then moments later giving them a good look. "If you take a brief glance when distracted, and look at the same scene again afterwards, it can feel like you've seen it before but much earlier," says Brown. He has also induced it by showing people images of things they had forgotten. "Just as a stomach ache can hurt the same way but be caused by lots of different processes, it could be the same way with déjà vu," he says.
The real problem with explaining déjà vu, however, is not how we can get familiarity without recognition, but why it feels so disturbing. "We'd get it all the time if it were just familiarity with real experiences," says Ed Wild from the Institute of Neurology in London. He suggests that mood and emotion are also important contributors to the sensation of déjà vu. We need the right combination of signals, not just the layout of a scene but how we feel at the time, to believe something is familiar when really it is not.
A Matter of Degree
Moulin agrees it may be matter of degree. The regions thought to mediate recall, familiarity and emotions are all extremely closely linked. A small amount of stimulation could produce a mild sense of familiarity, while a stronger stimulus could spread into neighboring emotion regions producing a more disturbing feeling, or even the striking sense of doom or premonition some people report with déjà vu.
Cognitive neuroscientist Stefan Köhler from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, believes the role of emotion is even more central in generating the sense of weirdness that accompanies déjà vu. He recently had the chance to image the brain of a person cured of epilepsy with déjà vu auras by removal of a large tumor that was triggering the seizures. The excised areas consisted of parts of the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, but also included the amygdala. It suggests that this region, which is known to be heavily tied up with emotion, was also involved in creating the déjà vu. Köhler speculates that without the appropriate emotional arousal, perhaps the brain cannot recognise a person or place we have encountered before as truly familiar. On the other hand, inappropriate emotional arousal may make us believe something is familiar when actually it is not.
The final element of déjà vu, a sense that it feels impossible, probably comes from the reasoning parts of our brain. According to Köhler, when our rational knowledge tells us one thing, but our emotional instincts tell us another, it can feel very wrong. This final element is missing in people with dementia, including Mr P, who accept their experiences as perfectly normal. Köhler suspects this may be because neurodegeneration in these individuals has caused a disconnection between the temporal lobes, which are generating sensations, and the frontal lobes which are continuously interpreting them.
Our brains are looking for associations all the time. Déjà vu is interesting, says Kohler, because it points to a brain mechanism that helps you interpret what you are doing. When you are having a memory, you have the sensation of recollection. It feels like having a memory, and doesn't feel like daydreaming or current reality. "Déjà vu is a fault in a kind of cognitive process that is going on in the background all the time. When it goes wrong, it's very striking," says Moulin. At the extreme, patients with permanent déjà vu - dubbed déjà vécu, for already experienced - actually make up stories to make sense of it (New Scientist, 7 October 2006, p 32).
While déjà vu is starting to divulge some of its secrets, there is still a long way to go before we understand how we actually decide what is real, imagined, dreamed or experienced, and how these various tags lead to such different conscious experiences. One anecdotal finding that came to light while working on this article is that people who think a lot about déjà vu are more prone to it. I had déjà vu about reading about déjà vu, and researchers have had déjà vu about having déjà vu. It certainly retains mystery enough to justify further study. After all, says Wild, "déjà vu is one of weirdest brain experiences that normal people have".
Stranger and stranger yet
About 10 per cent of people claim never to have experienced déjà vu, while some individuals report having it regularly.
Children first get it at around age 8 or 9, suggesting that a degree of cognitive maturity is required.
Déjà vu happens less as you get older and more when you are tired, anxious or stressed.
It is particularly prevalent in people with certain conditions known to produce problems in time perception, such as schizophrenia and epilepsy.
Although there is no gene for déjà vu, it is possible that certain versions of genes associated with epilepsy make some of us more prone to it.
Just reading this article could give you déjà vu.
Shadows and colors of light are crude projections of a ³more real² reality. The universe that we live in presents itself as something even more illusory, where bodies, minds, and planets are parts of a great magic trick without a magician or an audience.
Scientists in Hanover, Germany, working on the GEO 600, which is an instrument that detects gravitational waves, believe they have discovered a ³granulation² in space-time that indicates that our universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.
Those responsible for the GEO 600 believe that, in the same way a digital image loses resolution with significant increase in its size, the captured interference in the detector could be interpreted as the universe¹s limited resolution of what it¹s capable of providing to human eyes. There¹s an exact point where the hologram of reality begins to ³pixelize² itself.
The scientists suspect that the precision of the GEO 600, capable of detecting variations in longitudinal waves at the subatomic scale, served to discover the tiniest grains that compose the three-dimensional holographic universe, projected from the bidimensional confines of its interior. You and I, Only Holograms
The idea of a holographic universe isn¹t new. In the 1990s, scientists Leonard Susskind and Gerard Hooft suggested that the same principal that makes a two-dimensional image on a flat surface look three-dimensional could be applied to the entire universe.
Then, why do our senses perceive reality in such a distinct and ³voluminous² way if we appear to be no more than shadows on a flat screen? The problem could be that our human eyes and our powerful telescope lenses conform to the reality of such a hologram of the rest of the universe.
The second point to consider is that our organic brain can also be found in the illusion, never being able to interpret a universe with a greater or fewer number of dimensions than can be perceived.
Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, founder of the Center of Cerebral Research at the University of Radford in Virginia, thinks that our brains are holograms interpreting the hologram universe, mathematically constructing a reality interpreting frequencies that come from another dimension‹a domain of significant reality that transcends time and space.
Nevertheless, the theory of a holographic universe of only two special dimensions conflicts with multidimensional theories arising from the roots of the superchord theory. Before this mark of a disparate hypothesis, many scientists already suspected that the universe is a hologram or illusion created by particles in the emptiness. However, all of the scientific efforts to comprehend the truth amid the mirage have become trapped in a frustrating array of unprovable theories.
Many vanguard theorists think that the disturbing breach in the field of quantum physics and relativity could explain historically argued phenomena in the scientific field, like those in which the mind doesn¹t seem to be associated to the brain - such as near-death experiences, remote vision, and precognition.
In whatever case, Plato¹s allegory of the cave would seem to be the most rational option now for explaining these vivid daily experiences that our brains interpret as being real appearances of the world.
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