Bioblogical Waste

Thought of the Day: I'm glad they stopped producing those "flick your bic" lighters with the gay patterns and shit on them. I hope Bic fired whoever came up with that idea.

Updates Updates...
Since October the only blogy thing I've done was post that silly quiz thing. That's a shame because blogs should be kept active. So here I go.

Well school's pretty fun this term. I've opted to fuck computer science royally in the ass and pick up Earth Sciences in its stead. I'm having a good time learning the material, even though my physics course is a bit over the head of someone as mathematically challenged as I. I'll mull through it. In fact I had my first test in it today which I suspect I did moderately well in. So that's hot.

I had a discussion with Angela earlier about Deja Vu. Because I've had a few fairly recently and for some time I've had a sneaking suspicion that I know where the "already happened" feeling for me is coming from. At the risk of sounding like a loon... They're coming from dreams. Or, at least I think they are. That's partly why I did some research; to see if I'm going crazy. What I found out is that apart from some meager attempts by the french a few centuries ago (who apparently coined the phrase deja vu by the way) there hasn't really been a large basis for studying the occurance in a lab because of it's vague or elusive nature. The phenomenon isn't exactly frequent and even if it were, there's no real way to measure the effects of it.

The specific kind of Deja Vu (there's 3 types) that I'm talking about is more specifically called Deja Vecu (already experienced or lived through). And nearly one third of people admit to having the experience at some point in their lives. The experience is like not only having seen something before, or hearing it, but living it. You sense that you've lived the same moment twice, feeling all emotions you felt, thinking all the same things you thought, everything.

Some people believe theres some manor of psychic thing goin on there. No one really knows. But there are two other ideas that could be logical explainations. The first links to a study of memory wherein exists a theory that one of the tools the brain uses for recognizing a memory is speed. If a brain can very quickly encompass a scene or combination of stimuli it usually means it has done so before. So in odd cases where through some freak occurance, a person recieves a visual signal unusually quickly, the brain may unconsciously take it as something familiar.

The other theory I came across (much more poorly explained, I might add) was a concept linking deja vu to the improper firing of synapses in the brain. Two things the page mentioned were that scientists have found you can bring about deja vu by electronically stimulating different parts of the brain, and that many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy experience deja vu just before going into seizures.

The second one struck me because epilepsy is sorta in my family. I was wondering if that third of the population who experience deja vu have the potential to become full-blown epileptics. It was pretty interesting in any case, if a bit disappointing. I thought maybe we were all becoming psychics. :)

Too bad.