Have I already told you my Déjà Vu joke?

Have I Already told you my Déjà Vu joke?

That's one of my favourite, and it may take a few seconds for your and cogs and wheels to get turning before you get it. 

I'd tell you some more of my hilarious jokes but there really are just too many of them to write in one blog post.

 Déjà Vu:

1) An annoying word to write on an English keyboard. I'll probably start referring to it as 'IT'

2) A French term for already seen.

3) A bloody difficult thing to explain.

IT is one of those events that just pops out of nowhere. You'll be chatting with your friends, eating your once gain unpalatable penne whilst nursing an all too well-known hangover with a strong cup of Joe.

Out of nowhere you'll be hit with a sudden feeling that you've been in this position before. You feel like the conversation you are having with your (also) hover friends is like something from a Back to the Future film.

You just have to proclaim this sudden feeling to the world with this simple catchphrase: 

Surely we've all said this at least once?

And of course you'll be met with the same old responses: nods, eyes rolling, and the painful

"Anyway...".

Why Déjà Vu?

In my previous 'article' I mentioned that I like talk about ideas or theories in Psychology that make me as curious as George.

Déjà Vu does just that. However I couldn't explain it off the top of my head.

My family coined a term for when I try and explain something of the top of my head. It's called a Josh Mann. I may have read something off the news, an article, something from twitter or the deep, dark depths of Facebook and because it was on the internet I obviously believed it (because the internet never lies). I then preach it like it was the truest thing I ever saw. However I do try back it up, with varying success.

Because I could never really explain Déjà Vu I thought I'd do some 'research'.

The end result would hopefully be that I'd be successful in explaining this truly weird phenomenon we all experience. Although it doesn't shape our lives too much, and it occurs extremely irregularly, you might at least finish this thinking: "that was cool, but why is the brain so weird."

What causes Déjà Vu?

For years people have pondered over Déjà Vu. 

Some psychiatrists believe that errors in our brain cause us to mix up the present and the past. Parapsychologists posit that when we have feel this stranger sensation, we feel it because we are replicating a past-life experience.

Another theory suggests a mix-up problem between short and long-term memory. Events that have happened just recently bypass the normal processing mechanisms and end up in long-term memory straight away. This gives us the sort of feeling that we are recalling an event from the distant past though it's really not so distant. 

It is also possible that there is a delay in the transfer of sensory information from one side of the brain to the other. In Déjà Vu one side of the brain may get the information twice in quick, but not immediate succession. They would then get the feeling that what they'd just experienced had happened before. 

Déjà vu, Drugs and Epilepsy

The subheading above may sound like a student written play at the University of Warwick but Déjà Vu, drugs and epilepsy are very much entwined.

In 2001, the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience reported a case of a 39-year-old Doctor who, in order to get rid of the flu, had taken drugs that increased concentrations of the neurotransmitter Dopamine in the brain. Within 24 hours he was experiencing intense and frequent episodes of Déjà vu but upon soon after stopping his course, the episodes went away. 

The study of epilepsy has found a strong association between Déjà vu and the seizures experienced by those with medial-temporal lobe epilepsy. This form of epilepsy affects the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory formation and storage. Those with medial-temporal lobe epilepsy were found to have experienced Déjà vu when having a seizure. 

Déjà vu, like Epilepsy, may be the result of misfiring of neurons in the brain at random. This causes healthy people to experience something that hasn't yet occurred. When parts of the medial temporal lobe activate together there is a sudden activation of the system that helps us recollect information.

Don't worry if you think you Déjà vu too often. Most of us experience it and it's more common if you are 15-25 years old. 

It's just your brain's natural way of telling you that it has screwed up a little, but not that much.

Hope you enjoyed this short little blog, 

The First of Many... I hope?

Blog Numero Uno

Starting a blog was not the first thing that came to my head when I woke up this morning. It was more along the lines off: "Oh crap, I'm going to be late for this lecture". My alarm, which I thought was set to an early (for a student) eight O'clock in the morning, wasn't. My reason for waking up on this cold, frosty January morning was the primitive need to assuage my thirst.

I sluggishly rolled out of bed, drank a pint of water, thereby fulfilling stage 1 in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I then halfheartedly prepared for a day of  writing up lecture notes and eating cold, unpalatable penne pasta.  

Finishing off my green eggs and ham for breakfast (just pesto and ham in an omelette, I know it sounds weird), I ran to catch the U1 bus, which as Warwick students know, hasn't always been the most reliable service (Disclaimer: it is improving!). 

After wrangling with one hundred other eager, and probably also late commuters, I settled into my module's core reading:  Influence, the Science of Persuasion by Dr. Cialdini, the "Godfather of Influence", who also has a pretty cool-looking website. See it here. 

I wasn't just reading his book because I was keen bean, but because the topic of influence absolutely fascinates me. Throughout the book Cialdini explains the various ways that the average Joe is influenced in daily life, and how you can avoid being influenced. On top of that, he gives people ideas in how they can influence other people. I find myself  often trying out some of these 'tricks'. When it works, the door-in-the-face technique, makes me beam with happiness.

Ask for something outlandish, or unreasonable. Due to its outlandishness, the victim of your persuasion technique would then most likely refuse. I wouldn't think that I would say yes if a random person asked me for £20 really

If denied, ask for something more reasonable. This reasonable request will now be more likely to agreed to than if it were asked alone. 

The door-in the face. Picture credit: buzzle

My favourite example, which I'm sure many of you have tried in the past (un)intentionally, is asking your parents for pocket money. You might have asked to get an extra £2 a week, and your parents will swiftly say no, so in the end you might say "well can I have 50p more a week then?". They may still say no, but you'd be much more likely to get that extra 50p than if you'd asked the question on its own. If you've succeeded then you could pocket an extra £26 a year, rougly equivalent to 260 Freddos circa 2006. 

Unfortunately for you lactose intolerant folks out there, just like me you would have had to make do with those sherbet straws.

Another one of my favourites is the foot-in-the-door technique, a relative of the door-in-the-face. This technique is similar as it involves compliance to requests, but differs as the request tends to gets larger after the initial one is accepted. You can read about it here (good old Wiki), or just scroll down.

Anyway. Why I decided to blog:

As part of that behaviour change module course credit, which I briefly mentioned before starting  to spiel off a few ways to become a clever Machiavellian, we have to write a blog. 

Before starting to write the blog, which by the way I haven't started, we first had to come up with behaviours that we would like to change. These behaviours have to be measurable and beneficial, for example finding ways to increase the number of people donating blood in the local area, getting people to live healthier, or getting people to car-share more so that traffic is reduced to and from campus (my own little suggestion).

To try make this blog at least good-ish, I started to looking at various sites that teach you how to write a good blog, even sites that screamed '10 TOP TIPS IF YOU WANT TO BE A BLOGGING STAR!'. I've seen some of my friends write blogs and they are great reads. After doing some perusing I actually thought; "yeah, I could do this". 

The people who know me know that I like to talk about random facts that I've read about. This Tuesday I found out from a lecture on human sexuality that the plural of penis isn't penises, it's penes. For some reason, I just had to tell a lot of people. I'm a fact guy who loves absorbing information from every front. Whether it's the plural of penis or the number of minutes in a year (525, 600), I love facts. 

A few Musical Theatre Readers will get this.

As a consequence of my fact loving and the FACT that I'm currently studying psychology, I thought that I would take advantage of my degree and write about some psychological ideas and theories that I find interesting.

My aim isn't to get famous from doing this, but just to do what blogging was sort of meant for: expressing views, spreading news and making people LOL from behind their screens, whether mobile or on a computer.

So buckle up. This is only the first blog out of what I hope is many. If you like learning about cool psychology things then this might be the blog for you. If you don't, then it's the perfect place to laugh at grammatical errors and unwitty humour.

If you haven't noticed, I use LOL a fair bit. You can watch the debate on LOL or HAHA below.

I'll be posting again when I find something cool-looking. However input would be highly valued. 

Like anything to do with Psychology? Let me know and I'll try and talk about it, backing it up with some facts and then maybe adding a little extra. Feel free to comment ask questions.

So yeah. My name is Josh Mann. I like Musical Theatre, I'm lactose intolerant and I eat weird things for breakfast. If you like Marvel, Game of Thrones or Star Wars then I could talk for hours. If you don't, I wont judge.

Thanks for reading.