David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Deja* Vu: If It All Seems Familiar, There May Be a Reason
September 14, 2004
By Benedict Carey, New York Times
Watching the summer's events unfold - war protests, an Olympics scoring scandal, numerous terror scares - some people may have felt that it was all very familiar, that they had somehow been through this before.
Yet psychologists say it is usually life's more mundane details - the click of a radiator, the play of the shadows on a tablecloth - that prompt that sudden and sometimes breathtaking sense of familiarity.
"The way the coffee cups were lined up on the table," said Gretchen Purcell, 24, a business consultant in the Washington area who felt this so strongly during a conference-call meeting last month that it made her laugh out loud. "The whole scene was so familiar I thought I knew what people were going to say before they said it. It was like I was in a movie I'd already seen."
French for just that ("already seen"), deja vu is the sort of fleeting, intimate experience that reveals itself more readily to novelists than to researchers. As recently as the 1990's, social scientists doing population surveys asked about it in the same breath as they inquired about poltergeists and contact with the dead.
But new research on memory has opened a promising window on the phenomenon, providing both possible explanations for the sensation and novel ways to create and measure it.
"It has been either ignored or considered too spooky or flaky for many scientists to touch," said Dr. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who reviews the history of the field in a new book, The Deja Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology. "But it is real, and by bringing it into the lab we can at least begin to understand it."
In surveys, about two-thirds of adults report having had at least one deja vu experience, and the odd sensation seems to occur most often in people with lively, frequently stimulated imaginations. People who travel a lot are more likely to report the experiences than homebodies, for instance, and those with college or advanced degrees report having it more often than others, perhaps because they have encountered its sweet strangeness in the literary accounts of Proust and Tolstoy - or are more likely to rent the movie "Groundhog Day." Rates seem to peak in young adulthood and to fall off gradually through retirement age, when, Dr. Brown suggests, many people live daily routines that really are familiar.
A century ago, when Freud's theories dominated the field of psychiatry, analysts cast deja vu as evidence of unconscious conflict, the ego defending itself against upsetting erotic urges for a mother figure or other hidden desires. And for decades, doctors have reported that sensations of deja vu occasionally precede the seizures suffered by people with epilepsy. Overactive circuits in the temporal lobe, which can cause seizures, may inappropriately stimulate regions of the brain involved in detecting familiarity, some doctors say.
But Dr. Brown and others argue that it is not necessary to invoke hidden conflicts or unusual brain conditions to explain many cases of deja vu. Normal, healthy brain function suffices. For one thing, deja vu appears to be more common when people are exhausted or stressed, conditions that are known to cloud short- and long-term memory (and that may also accompany jamais vu, the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them).
Debbie O'Leary, 40, a writer in Bloomington, Ind., said that some years ago she felt sensations of deja vu while sick at home, as if her life had become a scratched record, with the same chorus repeating.
"It was literally like my brain was stuttering, like the same tape kept replaying the same thoughts, the same motions," as if time were stuck, she said. "I think it was the fatigue, the fever."
Psychologists have long known, too, that people register impressions and images well before they are aware of what they have seen. The brain sends visual signals through at least two circuits, which move from the retina through the brain to the visual cortex via different routes.
It is an exquisitely tuned system, but common experience suggests many ways its functioning might be thrown off. The classic example, from Dr. Edward Bradford Titchener, a founder of the field, is when a person is about to cross a busy street, glances both ways and then is distracted by a shop window display: "As you cross then, you think, 'Why, I crossed this street just now'; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, and the latter appears as a repetition of the earlier."
In one of the first experiments to produce this unconscious familiarity, Drs. Larry Jacoby and Kevin Whitehouse, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, had 30 students memorize a list of words as if in preparation for a test. Shortly afterward, the students were asked to sit in front of a computer screen and watch as another series of words appeared, one at a time, and to flag the ones they had seen the first time around. All it took for the researchers to make an unfamiliar word look suddenly familiar was to flash it subliminally on the screen for a few milliseconds. The students' brains registered the word subconsciously, and they were highly likely to say it had been on the first list.
"The punch line," Dr. Jacoby said, "was that when we slowed it down so that they were actually aware of and could read the flashed word," the rate of inaccurately identified words plunged.
Word games fall well short of full-blown deja vu. But the point, psychologists who study memory say, is that people take in a rich banquet of information without noticing it, or noticing and simply forgetting where it came from. It is entirely possible to read an Anne Rice novel and years later, after having forgotten the book, find that a first visit to New Orleans seems like a glimpse into a former life. Or to see one of the bar scenes from the movie "L.A. Confidential" and later walk into the Formosa Cafe for the first time and catch your breath.
The familiarity can come from a variety of sources, some real and some not, said Dr. Kathleen McDermott, a colleague of Dr. Jacoby's at Washington University who studies memory.
"It's well known that even if you imagine something now that may not have happened in the past, it can create a feeling of familiarity if it does happen later on," she said, adding, "You don't need objective outside information to create these situations; you can do so internally, on your own."
Dr. Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Marsh, a psychologist at Duke University, are taking this principle a step further, trying to produce in the laboratory a feeling that is closer to the kind of unexplained familiarity people know in life - that of arriving in a place for the first time and finding it surreally familiar.
In a continuing series of experiments, they have college students examine a sheaf of photographs, one at a time, trying to locate a small black or white cross. The pictures include distinctive scenes of the Duke campus, like the chapel, and of red-brick buildings at Southern Methodist, along with dozens of landscapes and other shots. A week later, the students return to examine the campus photos again, along with a different set of backgrounds not seen in the first experiment, and they are asked to say whether they have ever been to the places shown.
The expectation is that while the students focus on the crosses, the initial run through the photographs will imprint on their memories unconsciously, leaving impressions that later seem familiar. And so far, in the first preliminary run of 81 students, the predictions have held up. Duke students who had never been to Dallas said they believed they had been to the campus in the photos taken at Southern Methodist; many Southern Methodist students said they thought they had been to the campus in the photos taken at Duke, when they had not.
"The effect is not dramatic, but it is significant, and reliable," Dr. Marsh said, "and you have to keep in mind that the students see the pictures for only a second or so."
The researchers are now repeating the experiment, with a three--week lag between when the students first see the photographs and when they see them again.This and other work on memory's tricks does not rule out more literary or romantic explanations of deja vu, Dr. Brown said.
"The most likely thing we'll find is that deja vu occurs for a variety of reasons, perhaps different in each person, or in different situations," he said. "We are just getting started, to work toward an understanding gradually."
Several people in e-mail contact with Dr. Brown say they experience deja vu frequently, many times in a year. One of them, Suketu Naik, 26, a graduate student in Utah, has kept a diary of the sensations.
In one entry, Mr. Naik writes of attending a birthday party for a friend at a restaurant: "Everything, the conversation, the position of people, position of tables, plates were extraordinarily 'in place.' Most remarkable of all events. Very intense. Lasted for a long time. Which is odd - usually intensity and time are reciprocal. I could predict every single future event in this time period to utmost precision. Felt extraordinarily weird after this one. I sat there for the next minute to come back to reality."
But the evolving understanding of memory suggests he never really left.
September 14, 2004
By Benedict Carey, New York Times
Watching the summer's events unfold - war protests, an Olympics scoring scandal, numerous terror scares - some people may have felt that it was all very familiar, that they had somehow been through this before.
Yet psychologists say it is usually life's more mundane details - the click of a radiator, the play of the shadows on a tablecloth - that prompt that sudden and sometimes breathtaking sense of familiarity.
"The way the coffee cups were lined up on the table," said Gretchen Purcell, 24, a business consultant in the Washington area who felt this so strongly during a conference-call meeting last month that it made her laugh out loud. "The whole scene was so familiar I thought I knew what people were going to say before they said it. It was like I was in a movie I'd already seen."
French for just that ("already seen"), deja vu is the sort of fleeting, intimate experience that reveals itself more readily to novelists than to researchers. As recently as the 1990's, social scientists doing population surveys asked about it in the same breath as they inquired about poltergeists and contact with the dead.
But new research on memory has opened a promising window on the phenomenon, providing both possible explanations for the sensation and novel ways to create and measure it.
"It has been either ignored or considered too spooky or flaky for many scientists to touch," said Dr. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who reviews the history of the field in a new book, The Deja Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology. "But it is real, and by bringing it into the lab we can at least begin to understand it."
In surveys, about two-thirds of adults report having had at least one deja vu experience, and the odd sensation seems to occur most often in people with lively, frequently stimulated imaginations. People who travel a lot are more likely to report the experiences than homebodies, for instance, and those with college or advanced degrees report having it more often than others, perhaps because they have encountered its sweet strangeness in the literary accounts of Proust and Tolstoy - or are more likely to rent the movie "Groundhog Day." Rates seem to peak in young adulthood and to fall off gradually through retirement age, when, Dr. Brown suggests, many people live daily routines that really are familiar.
A century ago, when Freud's theories dominated the field of psychiatry, analysts cast deja vu as evidence of unconscious conflict, the ego defending itself against upsetting erotic urges for a mother figure or other hidden desires. And for decades, doctors have reported that sensations of deja vu occasionally precede the seizures suffered by people with epilepsy. Overactive circuits in the temporal lobe, which can cause seizures, may inappropriately stimulate regions of the brain involved in detecting familiarity, some doctors say.
But Dr. Brown and others argue that it is not necessary to invoke hidden conflicts or unusual brain conditions to explain many cases of deja vu. Normal, healthy brain function suffices. For one thing, deja vu appears to be more common when people are exhausted or stressed, conditions that are known to cloud short- and long-term memory (and that may also accompany jamais vu, the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them).
Debbie O'Leary, 40, a writer in Bloomington, Ind., said that some years ago she felt sensations of deja vu while sick at home, as if her life had become a scratched record, with the same chorus repeating.
"It was literally like my brain was stuttering, like the same tape kept replaying the same thoughts, the same motions," as if time were stuck, she said. "I think it was the fatigue, the fever."
Psychologists have long known, too, that people register impressions and images well before they are aware of what they have seen. The brain sends visual signals through at least two circuits, which move from the retina through the brain to the visual cortex via different routes.
It is an exquisitely tuned system, but common experience suggests many ways its functioning might be thrown off. The classic example, from Dr. Edward Bradford Titchener, a founder of the field, is when a person is about to cross a busy street, glances both ways and then is distracted by a shop window display: "As you cross then, you think, 'Why, I crossed this street just now'; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, and the latter appears as a repetition of the earlier."
In one of the first experiments to produce this unconscious familiarity, Drs. Larry Jacoby and Kevin Whitehouse, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, had 30 students memorize a list of words as if in preparation for a test. Shortly afterward, the students were asked to sit in front of a computer screen and watch as another series of words appeared, one at a time, and to flag the ones they had seen the first time around. All it took for the researchers to make an unfamiliar word look suddenly familiar was to flash it subliminally on the screen for a few milliseconds. The students' brains registered the word subconsciously, and they were highly likely to say it had been on the first list.
"The punch line," Dr. Jacoby said, "was that when we slowed it down so that they were actually aware of and could read the flashed word," the rate of inaccurately identified words plunged.
Word games fall well short of full-blown deja vu. But the point, psychologists who study memory say, is that people take in a rich banquet of information without noticing it, or noticing and simply forgetting where it came from. It is entirely possible to read an Anne Rice novel and years later, after having forgotten the book, find that a first visit to New Orleans seems like a glimpse into a former life. Or to see one of the bar scenes from the movie "L.A. Confidential" and later walk into the Formosa Cafe for the first time and catch your breath.
The familiarity can come from a variety of sources, some real and some not, said Dr. Kathleen McDermott, a colleague of Dr. Jacoby's at Washington University who studies memory.
"It's well known that even if you imagine something now that may not have happened in the past, it can create a feeling of familiarity if it does happen later on," she said, adding, "You don't need objective outside information to create these situations; you can do so internally, on your own."
Dr. Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Marsh, a psychologist at Duke University, are taking this principle a step further, trying to produce in the laboratory a feeling that is closer to the kind of unexplained familiarity people know in life - that of arriving in a place for the first time and finding it surreally familiar.
In a continuing series of experiments, they have college students examine a sheaf of photographs, one at a time, trying to locate a small black or white cross. The pictures include distinctive scenes of the Duke campus, like the chapel, and of red-brick buildings at Southern Methodist, along with dozens of landscapes and other shots. A week later, the students return to examine the campus photos again, along with a different set of backgrounds not seen in the first experiment, and they are asked to say whether they have ever been to the places shown.
The expectation is that while the students focus on the crosses, the initial run through the photographs will imprint on their memories unconsciously, leaving impressions that later seem familiar. And so far, in the first preliminary run of 81 students, the predictions have held up. Duke students who had never been to Dallas said they believed they had been to the campus in the photos taken at Southern Methodist; many Southern Methodist students said they thought they had been to the campus in the photos taken at Duke, when they had not.
"The effect is not dramatic, but it is significant, and reliable," Dr. Marsh said, "and you have to keep in mind that the students see the pictures for only a second or so."
The researchers are now repeating the experiment, with a three--week lag between when the students first see the photographs and when they see them again.This and other work on memory's tricks does not rule out more literary or romantic explanations of deja vu, Dr. Brown said.
"The most likely thing we'll find is that deja vu occurs for a variety of reasons, perhaps different in each person, or in different situations," he said. "We are just getting started, to work toward an understanding gradually."
Several people in e-mail contact with Dr. Brown say they experience deja vu frequently, many times in a year. One of them, Suketu Naik, 26, a graduate student in Utah, has kept a diary of the sensations.
In one entry, Mr. Naik writes of attending a birthday party for a friend at a restaurant: "Everything, the conversation, the position of people, position of tables, plates were extraordinarily 'in place.' Most remarkable of all events. Very intense. Lasted for a long time. Which is odd - usually intensity and time are reciprocal. I could predict every single future event in this time period to utmost precision. Felt extraordinarily weird after this one. I sat there for the next minute to come back to reality."
But the evolving understanding of memory suggests he never really left.
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, my explanation is not very scientific either.
