Some Radical Theories on the Cause of Deja Vu

I think it's safe to say that most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of Deja Vu, and have most likely experienced it at one time or another.  I've experienced it quite frequently; that unsettling sense that what is happening has already happened before.  Now, it seems that no one has a really solid answer on what causes this.  Explanations range from an association with another memory that you can't quite recall, to a crossing of the wires between long-term and short memories giving you the false impression that you're remembering your current experience.  Some of the explanations are slightly more exotic, involving delays in the processing times between your two eyes, or perhaps a mild epileptic episode.  But we want something more, don't we?  Uncanny experiences beg for uncanny explanations.  So with that in mind, I figured I'd throw around a few more radical possibilities (for entertainment purposes only, of course.)

THE MOBIUS THEORY

Scientists have speculated that The Big Bang may be a re-occurring event.  At some point it is believed that the universe will collapse in on itself in something called "The Big Crunch."  Possibly this could lead to another Big Bang and the whole cosmic carnival could set up its shops and tents all over again.  If this is so, we tend to imagine these cycles as consecutive, one following after the other in time, but what if they are actually concurrent?  What if The Big Crunch simply leads right back to the same Big Bang that started it all?  Rather than a series of universes, you end up with time just endlessly looping back on itself.  If this is the case, the fabric of space-time might be getting warn out and warped in some spots like a cassette tape that's been played over and over.  Deja Vu would be our momentary experience of these warps as we pass through them.

THE REPLACEMENT THEORY

Some have speculated that when you die your soul might go to a sort of Purgatory, a limbo-like place which is neither Heaven or Hell, but some kind of vague waiting area in between.  It's believed that your soul has to do penance in this place in order to move on.  Now, no one has ever been exactly clear on what this "penance" is.  Perhaps we have to briefly re-experience certain crucial moments of our lives, moments that might have seemed inconsequential at the time.  We have to briefly re-enter our bodies at some point in our lives and subtly nudge ourselves in a slightly different direction that will make all the difference down the line.  Our living consciousness, and our afterlife consciousness are momentarily unified and in sync.  One slightly spills over into the other.  This gives our afterlife consciousness the tenuous ability to affect our actions, while simultaneously giving our living consciousness the disorienting sense that it's remembering what's happening which we call Deja Vu.

THE CONTROL THEORY

How can you truly know that the things that you remember are real?  What evidence do you have?  Well, you have the fact of the memory itself, and you have the external evidence around you that bears witness to the past.  You continually use the one to verify the other.  You remember taking the garbage out.  You go look out in the can, and its there.  So what if there was an agency that could control your life by reprogramming your memories, with say, like a sort of wireless modem in your brain?  And what if they had people on the ground that could clean up the details so that it fit these new memories?  Everything would fit perfectly, and you'd be none the wiser.  Perhaps, though, there is a slight sensation you experience when new memories are being downloaded, or your existing memories are being altered.  Your brain has no way of noticing that your memories have been changed because it can't use the old memory as a point of reference, so it misinterprets this sensation as a confused double vision of the current experience called Deja Vu.

 ...and no, I'm not completely insane.       

How I Wish Mood Rings Worked

Rachel Hoyt over at Rhyme Me a Smile is conducting some sort of Smiley Sociology Study which involves getting a broad cross-section of bloggers to write posts about mood rings.  It's like Gorillas in the Mist, but instead of gorillas and mist you have bloggers writing about novelty jewelery.  Afterwards, I imagine she'll tabulate her findings with lots of charts and graphs in her secret lab.  Then she'll take the results to the pentagon in a sealed envelope, so that they can figure out effective ways to use mood ring technology with soldiers in the field.  In other words, I don't have the slightest clue what any of this about.  However, I've always found mood rings to be somewhat interesting, so I figured I was up for the challenge.  I looked up some information to learn how mood rings work, and I was disappointed to learn that they work by nothing more mysterious than skin temperature.  Basically, it's like someone took that thermometer sticker off the side of your fish tank and made a ring out of it.  No, this just wasn't going to cut it for me.  So I bring you my explanation of how mood rings ought to work, if the world were truly a place of magic and wonder. 

In Ancient Egypt around 1438 B.C. some workers were digging in a rock quarry in the Nile basin when they discovered an odd looking rock crystal, a crystal which we know today as "morphite".  As it lay, the rock was black, but when the worker picked it up, he found that it turned a bright green.  The worker stood there mystified, staring at it, until another worker snatched it from his hand.  To the surprise of both men, the rock now turned blue.  Yet another worker came up and grabbed the rock from the other two men.  In his hand the rock now turned red.  The three men hurried to show their discovery to the slave master who was supervising the work at the quarry.  The slave master was quite impressed with the rock.  He quickly had the three workers executed, and then he posted guards around the spot where the rock crystal had been discovered.  At night the rocks were mined in secret, and taken by the cart load back to the Pharaoh's palace.

These rock crystals became known as "telling stones", and they were originally used primarily in court proceedings.  The accused would be brought before the Pharaoh and questioned with the telling stone in his right hand and his left hand raised.  If the stone turned a certain color at any time during the trial, the accused would immediately be taken away for execution.  It is from this ancient practice that the practice in modern court rooms of "swearing in" descended.  The telling stones long outlasted the ancient Egyptian dynasties.  In the middle ages, they were used by knights to locate the lair of dragons.  It was believed that the stone would turn a certain color in the proximity of a dragon, but in reality it was only registering the knight's increasing fear as he thought he was approaching a dragon's lair.  Finally, in 1884 H.M. Clausterfield had the idea of making jewelery out of the crystals and he coined the term "mood ring".  He placed a few dozen in the display window of his Manhattan shop, and they quickly became a sensation.   

But how do these "telling stones" work?  To answer this question requires a certain basic knowledge of brain bio-chemistry.  You see, the brain operates by generating a Neurological Electrical Resonance Field, or NERF for short.  It is this field which gives us the experience of consciousness or the mind.  Think of the brain as being like a television.  By itself it is just a solid piece of hardware, but when you apply electricity it becomes able to display sounds and images on the screen.  The sounds and images are not a part of the TV.  They are an ethereal construct who's existence is supported by the TV.  Likewise, the NERF is not a part of the brain and it can be no more found by the dissection of tissue than your favorite show can be found by disassembling the circuits and transistors of a TV.  The mind is just an electrical field, generated and maintained by the brain.

This field pulses at a variable frequency, depending on the mood and mental activity of the subject.  When the subject is in an agitated or distressed state, the field pulses at a very high frequency.  This is part of the body's natural defense mechanism.  The brain increases the energy output to the field in response to a sense of danger.  In this manner it compensates for the sense of danger by heightening mental acuity and alertness.  When the subject is in a relaxed and pacified stated, the field pulses at a much lower frequency, allowing the brain to preserve the chemicals it uses to generate the electrical energy for when it is needed. 

Naturally, these variations of frequency affect nerve impulses through-out the body.  There is an almost imperceptible vibration to the body that it is perfectly attenuated to this frequency.  The molecules of the body make tiny oscillations similar to the way a wine glass responds to sound waves.  Since this is a constant fact of our existence, we don't really notice it, but there is nowhere that this phenomenon is more acute than the epidermis.  As a result, the skin generates a separate field which is in tune with the NERF, known as the aura.  To certain highly sensitive individuals, this field is actually visible.  The light rays that pass near to the subject's body get distorted by this field, disrupting certain bands of the spectrum while accentuating others.  To our sensitive observer, it appears that there is a certain colored glow emanating from the subject.

This brings us to our mood ring.  You see, the color changing properties of the crystal, which captivated the fascination of people as far back as Ancient Egypt, are actually nothing more than an illusion.  In it's natural state, morphite is black in color.  In fact, morphite is always black in color.  It just has a coating on it's surface that is sensitive to the brain's electrical field in the same way as the human epidermis.  Actually, it's far more sensitive.  While the aura is only visible to certain people, the same effect can be seen by anyone who looks at a mood ring.  However, although the effect differs in degree, it is the same by nature.  The oscillation of the morphite's surface coating is simply distorting the spectrum of light rays in close proximity to the ring, making it appear as if it's turning different colors.  Often the effect lingers on the ring after the wearer has removed it, because the oscillation takes time to relax back into its normal equilibrium and return the ring to its normal black appearance.

Well, there you have it.  I realize now that I could have perhaps looked deeper into how brain chemistry actually affects skin temperature.  I suppose that could have been interesting.  But hey, what's done is done, and it is what is, and whatever.  I hope it brightened up your Sunday a little, at least.                         

The Not-So-True History of Superstitions

I was thinking about superstitions yesterday, and how nonsensical and random they seem.  I figured that they must all have origin stories behind them.  Someone just doesn't wake up one morning and decide that opening umbrellas in the house is bad luck.  There has to be a historical event that set the precedent for these things.  One bad umbrella experience, and everyone from then on is forewarned that it's a bad idea.  So I thought it might be interesting, and might provide material for a post, if I looked up some of these stories.  Unfortunately, I found that most of these stories are actually pretty dull.  So I decided the hell with it; I would just make up some stories of my own.  I'm not sure what the point is, and anyone looking for actual information and enlightenment, should probably look somewhere else.    

 

                                                               WALKING UNDER A LADDER

In 1935 a shopkeeper named Henry Ferguson was on a ladder working on repairing a broken letter in his shop's sign.  As he was pounding in a nail, his hammer slipped and he smashed his thumb with it.  Preoccupied with the sudden pain, he dropped the hammer.  At that exact moment, Walter Montgomery, the manager of the local bank, was passing under the ladder.  Walter was late for an appointment, and he was in too much of a hurry to navigate around the ladder.  Just as he was checking his watch, the falling hammer hit him in the head.  He collapsed against the brick wall of the shop.  Seeing what had happened, Henry quickly climbed down from the ladder.  He stood panicking over the crumpled bank manager.  He was sure he had killed the man.  He looked about nervously.  It was early morning, and the street was deserted at that hour.  He had to act quickly.  He hoisted Mr. Montgomery's body up, and dragged it into the back of his shop.  He then locked up, and flipped the "open" sign to "closed".  He loaded Mr. Montgomery's body into the trunk of his car and drove far out into the countryside of a neighboring town, where he dropped the body deep in the woods.

As it turns out, Walter Montgomery had only been knocked out by the hammer, not killed.  Henry had just been in too much of a panic to confirm the man's vitality.  Walter regained consciousness hours later, long after it had grown dark out.  The nuzzling of a large grizzly bear brought him around.  His groggy eyes fluttered, but when he became aware of the bear standing over him, he shot up, wide awake.  Naturally this startled the bear, who began to viciously attack Mr. Montgomery.  It's a genuine miracle that he was able to escape with his life, but also a fairly fruitless one, as he died a few hours later.  He was spotted by a local farmer crawling out of the woods and taken to a nearby hospital.  In his dying delirium, he kept rambling on about how he had walked under a ladder and he had been transported across time and space to another dark land of ravaging monsters.  Although these were the lunatic ravings of a dying man, the legend grew from there.  The space beneath ladders came to  be considered inter-dimensional portals to unthinkable fates, and people avoided them with dread.     

                                                     
                                                      A BLACK CAT CROSSING YOUR PATH

Martha Price loved her black cat Midnight.  She was an elderly spinster and the cat was the sole companion of her twilight years.  One night she needed to fetch a jar of tomatoes from her cellar to prepare her dinner.  Pulling the chain for the light at the top of the stairs, she was dismayed to discover that the bulb had burned out.  She was forced to navigate the stairs in the dark.  Unfortunately, Midnight had made himself quite comfortable on the cellar stairs, three steps down from the landing.  Not being able to see the dark cat in the darkness of the cellar Miss Price's foot caught on the cat's flank and she tripped and tumbled down the remaining stairs.  She broke her neck and she lay dead on the cellar floor.  Midnight, momentarily perturbed by Miss Price tripping over him, simply settled back into a comfortable position and retained his post on the third step of the cellar stairs.

Three days later, Miss Price's neighbor Hiram Muller grew concerned that he hadn't seen the old woman leave her house at all, and he came by to check on her.  He searched the house, calling her name, but of course, no one answered.  Passing through the kitchen, he heard a soft meowing coming from behind the cellar door.  He opened the door and called for out for Miss Price into the darkness.  He tried the light chain, and he too found the bulb burned out.  He crept cautiously down the stairs, but his foot also caught on Midnight, who was still perched on the third step, evidently his favorite spot.  Hiram lay dead beside Miss Price with his neck broken as well.

In the end six bodies with broken necks lay in a heap at the bottom of Miss Price's cellar stairs before the feline impediment was finally removed.  Midnight let out an irritated meow at being disturbed from his spot, but he was soon pacified with a warm saucer of milk. and a can of tuna fish  From that day forward it was considered bad luck to have a black cat cross your path, especially on a dark set of stairs.  Midnight, of course, returned to his favorite spot on the third step as soon as he was done eating.

                                                                     
                                                                        BREAKING A MIRROR

There was a golden-framed mirror which had been a priceless heirloom in the Romanov family for eight generations.  Although the Romanov fortune had dwindled to a meager subsistence, they had still managed to hold onto the mirror.  In 1867, the current Romanov family lived in a simple hovel, but the mirror was still hanging on the wall in the main hallway.  The elegant mirror seemed grossly out of place in the modest home, but Elliot Romanov paused before it every day with pride as he considered his reflection and straightened his hair.  In the most darkest and humble times of his life, the mirror served to remind him of his elevated heritage.  It was the one thing that kept him from feeling like a mere commoner.    

One night Elliot's boss, Mr. Sterns, came by for dinner.  The man had actually insinuated his own invitation and insisted on coming.  He was a large, obnoxious, and imposing man who treated Elliot like a worm.  Elliot hated the man and he suffered his company all through dinner.  Mr. Sterns got uproariously drunk and he behaved worse that usual.  He grabbed Mrs. Romanov inappropriately and he hollered at the Romanov children.  But the worst affront came as he was leaving for the evening.  He stumbled as he was putting on his coat and smashed head first into the Romanov's priceless mirror, shattering it into a million pieces.  He grumbled irritably as though the Romanovs had done him a disservice in the placement of their mirror, and then he left without offering an apology.  Elliot stared at the shattered mirror, mortified. 

He vowed revenge on Mr. Sterns, but it had to be a covert and secret revenge, as he couldn't risk losing the job that provided for his family.  He proceeded to conduct a campaign of small annoyances and inconveniences in Mr. Sterns' life.  He placed a nail in Mr. Sterns' shoe when he wasn't wearing them.  He loosened the wheel of his carriage so that it came off on a muddy road.  He broke his fountain pen, causing Mr. Sterns to get an ink stain on his shirt.  Mr. Sterns never suspected that Elliot was the source of these minor grievances.  Elliot just smiled placidly at his boss's suffering.  This went on for seven years until one night when Elliot was trying to procure a wasp's nest to leave in Mr. Sterns' desk.  As Elliot dislodged the nest, a couple of the bees stung him.  Elliot didn't know until that moment that he was highly allergic to bees.  He was found dead the next morning.  Soon after, Mr. Sterns was greatly relieved when he found that his string of bad luck had finally broken.       

So there it is.  You learn something new every day.