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The Most Alien Place on Earth
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People on the Yemeni island of Socotra speak an indigenous language called Soqotri. Many female Socotrans have DNA that is found nowhere else on Earth. Also, a third of the island's plant life is found nowhere else on the planet. Socotra has been described as "the most alien-looking place on Earth."

http://goo.gl/maps/jpbA

Filed under: DNA Flora Interesting Language Socotra TIL Wikipedia Yemen
 

A dèjà vu is a RAM error
Remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions of the medial temporal cortex.

When these cooperating processes get out of sync, we can experience déjà vu, the feeling that a situation is familiar even though it has never happened before. This feeling can occur when a brand-new situation is very similar to other events stored in our memory. Déjà vu is a stronger version of this kind of memory error.

Evidence for a neural mechanism for déjà vu comes from studies of patients who experience it chronically. The patients refused to read a newspaper or watch TV because they felt as if they had already seen it all before. They found it difficult to shop for groceries because they thought they had just purchased those items.

These patients had damage to their frontal and temporal regions. Harm to these areas likely caused the patients’ familiarity circuitry to fire frequently, even when they were in a novel situation. In undamaged brains, déjà vu likely occurs because of processing errors in these same regions.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-going-on-in-the-brain

Filed under: Brains Déjà vu Interesting Neurology
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