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I think I’ve been here before… Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
Haven’t I see this before?
We’re all familiar with déjà vu — that uncanny feeling that you’ve been here before or experience something before, when you know you have not:
Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving us with an spooky sense of pastness.
But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.
Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of "fact checking" for the memory system.
De-synchronizing with reality is pretty much a daily occurrence here at Thursday Things. But déjà vu is only the warmup act…
The Opposite of Déjà Vu Exists, And It's Even More Uncanny
The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.
Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with "new eyes".
It's an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling. When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: "While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like 'appetite' but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong."
That has happened to me! I didn’t know there was a word for it, much less a French word. When there’s a French for something going on in your brain, you know things just got weird.
Read the article to get the full discussion, but it seems that one trigger of jamais vu is repetition of a word or phrase over and over, or prolonged staring at a familiar object. In both cases, at some point the brain may suddenly register the familiar as unfamiliar:
Our unique contribution is the idea that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a particular feeling – jamais vu.
Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive. It helps us "snap out" of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check.
It makes sense that this has to happen. Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.
But can you have déjà vu about experiencing jamais vu?
And what’s the French word for that?
Is is supposed to glow like that?
The frontiers of physics are ever expanding as scientists probe to understand the fundamental structure of our universe at both the macro and sub-atomic levels. Those inquiries often meet when the subject is black holes.
The problem with studying black holes — well, one problem — is that all known black holes are, thankfully, a safe distance away from Earth, far away in space.
Solution - simulate a black hole in your lab!
Physicists Simulated a Black Hole in The Lab. Then It Started to Glow.
Using a chain of atoms in single-file to simulate the event horizon of a black hole, a team of physicists in 2022 observed the equivalent of what we call Hawking radiation – particles born from disturbances in the quantum fluctuations caused by the black hole's break in spacetime.
Come on, physicists! What is the first rule of laboratory physics experiments?
Don’t break spacetime!
Is that so hard to remember?
The simulated Hawking radiation was only thermal for a certain range of hop amplitudes, and under simulations that began by mimicking a kind of spacetime considered to be 'flat'. This suggests that Hawking radiation may only be thermal within a range of situations, and when there is a change in the warp of space-time due to gravity.
It's unclear what this means for quantum gravity, but the model offers a way to study the emergence of Hawking radiation in an environment that isn't influenced by the wild dynamics of the formation of a black hole. And, because it's so simple, it can be put to work in a wide range of experimental set-ups, the researchers said.
"This, can open a venue for exploring fundamental quantum-mechanical aspects alongside gravity and curved spacetimes in various condensed matter settings," the researchers wrote.
Well, that seems harmless enough…
Get the science details here: ‘Thermalization by a synthetic horizon’ Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043084 – Published 8 November 2022
Maybe try unplugging it? Photo by Amos from Stockphotos.com on Unsplash
Godzilla alert!
This news item caught my eye last week. On the surface, it is a seemingly unremarkable occurrence. But I think we all know this is just the pre-credit sequence.
New island emerges near Japan after underwater volcanic explosions
A new small island the diameter of a football field emerged from the Pacific Ocean near mainland Japan in late October after underwater volcano eruptions, a Japanese researcher said on Wednesday.
The small, rocky island appeared about a half-mile off the Iwoto Island coast, formerly known as Iwo Jima, Fukashi Maeno, associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, said. Maeno said he confirmed volcanic activity in the area last month.
Somebody with atomic fire breath just woke up from hibernation. Brace yourselves, Tokyo!
Be on the lookout! Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash
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