The impossibility of unlearning: Deep down, we still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth

Maybe some of you remember believing it's Sun revolving around the Earth. The Sun is so small in the sky and we can't feel any rotation, can we? This kind of theory that people naturally hold without scientific education and cultural influence is called the naive theory. Later we came to school, learned that it's actually the other way around, our old theory got replaced and we can laugh at stupid Americans till the end of our days.

At least that's what our naive theory of learning predicts. However, it seems science will once again teach us otherwise. Recent study says it seems the naive childhood beliefs aren't replaced by new scientific facts but merely suppressed.

Unveiling the Mystery of Deja Vu

(study summary)

Study shows differences in gray matter between brains of people experiencing deja vu and control subjects. These are most prominent in hippocampi and surrounding areas, which have been linked to deja vu before. Due to structural similarities between "healthy" deja vu subjects and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients, authors of the study suggest deja vu experiences in healthy patients might be caused by "small seizures". 

The "error in the Matrix" hypothesis has a serious rival 

Deja vu is an eerie experience during which you get the impression a situation is familiar even though you know the feeling of familiarity is inappropriate. It occurs both in healthy subjects and as a manifestation of brain disease, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy. Various theories of how deja vu originates have been suggested, for example “the theory that a disruption of attention or perception leads to anomalous ‘dual’ processing of sensory information” - which would cause information to be processed both as a percept and as a memory.

Blink and forget everything: The case of Clive Wearing.

Imagine that with every blink of an eye, you forget almost everything you know, and you can´t remember anything new. You have a constant impression of being just awoken from a  long-term coma, and this happens every 30 seconds of your life. This nightmarish conception is exactly what happened to Clive Wearing, once a successful composer and musician. At the age of 47, he was struck down by a herpes simplex virus, normally a rather harmless one, which in Wearing resulted into a bad case of encephalitis. As a consequence, his both hippocampi (playing a major role in the transfer of information from short-term into long-term memory), but also surrounding areas of his temporal lobes as well as portions of his left frontal lobe got badly damaged, which has manifested in profound changes in his memory. Actually, it is the worst case of amnesia ever recorded.

Ever since his condition started, Wearing has been unable to form any new memories and recall majority of the past ones. This means he suffers from an extreme case of both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He can remember some fundamental facts, like the fact he has been married (but doesn´t know for how long) and that he has children (not knowing how many and who they are) (Sacks, 2007). Apart from these few facts, his long-term memory has been completely erased.

Clive´s wife Deborah has documented their life together, affected by this condition, in her book "Forever Today"