The Déjà Vu Experience

Anne M. Cleary, Alan S. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000401707
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Déjà vu Experience, Second Edition covers the latest scientific discoveries regarding the strange sense of familiarity most of us have felt at one time or another when doing something for the first time. The book sheds light on this mysterious phenomenon, considering the latest neurophysiological investigations and research on possible reasons why déjà vu is often associated with a sense of predicting the future or knowing what happens next.

In addition to summarizing the major historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the déjà vu experience, this book aspires to stimulate additional research on this curious subjective phenomenon. Drawing on research from a range of fields including psychology, philosophy, and religion, it aims to demystify some of the more unsettling, spooky-seeming aspects of the déjà vu experience, elucidating possible mechanisms and underlying reasons for its occurrence. This edition has been thoroughly updated throughout to include over 200 new professional articles and book chapters related to déjà vu that have been published in the 18 years since the original book.

By placing the scientific study of déjà vu within its historical context and covering a broad range of perspectives on the subject, this title will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of Cognitive Psychology, specifically those focusing on Memory Phenomena.

Part I

The Study of Déjà Vu

1

Introduction

“Last Wednesday, I was at home with both my parents around. I was revising a term paper, around 1 am. I felt a sensation that told me that I had revised that paper before. I felt strange because the minute I highlighted the word ‘wander,’ I got a sense that it had happened already. I even said out loud the word ‘déjà vu’ when I received that sensation.”

“Last summer, I was in a program at Galveston. I was sitting with my roommate and we were talking about our problems. After a few minutes of talking, I experienced déjà vu. I don’t know if I had dreamed that experience or what, but it felt as if it was recurring.”

“We visited a discothèque in Downtown Disney, and were dancing with two girls from Brazil. Neither one of us had been there before, or had met the girls before. However, when a song played I felt as if I had lived the moment before. I couldn’t remember exactly when or where, but I knew it wasn’t my first time there and with them.”

Research suggests that most of us have had a déjà vu experience at some point in our lives. As illustrated in the above stories, you are suddenly and inexplicably overcome with a feeling that you have done this exact same thing once before – been in this place, engaged in this activity, said that phrase. However, it is impossible because to the best of your recollection, you have never been in this place before, been with these particular people, or engaged in this particular activity at any time in your past. Reduced to the simplest form, the déjà vu experience represents the clash between two simultaneous and opposing mental evaluations: an objective assessment of unfamiliarity juxtaposed with a subjective evaluation of familiarity.

From moment to moment in our routine lives, we are accustomed to our cognitive impressions matching our objective evaluations. When we enter our own bedroom, it feels familiar; when we visit the Bronx Zoo for the first time, it feels unfamiliar. The sense of familiarity is so automatic, and consistently in sync with objective reality that we pay little attention to it until the two dimensions fail to correspond with each other.

Déjà vu is widely experienced by the general public and oft-cited in the popular literature (Sno et al., 1992a). As Searleman and Herrmann (1994) point out, déjà vu is “…the most well-known anomaly of memory” (p. 326). Few memory phenomena are referenced by the general public, and this short list includes forgetting, memory blocks (tip-of-the-tongue state) and the déjà vu experience. One can personally verify the general infusion of the concept of déjà vu into our culture by the millions of hits from a web search using that term. While many of these sites do not refer directly to the memory anomaly, it nonetheless illustrates how the concept has become a mainstay of popular vernacular. Further confirmation of this widespread usage can be found in Microsoft’s Word software program. It will automatically add the appropriate accents if one simply types in the phrase “déjà vu.”

Although popular attention and usage alone do not justify doing research on a topic, it would also be ill-advised to ignore such a phenomenon. Neisser (1982) expressed a concern that “if X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X” (p. 4). While there has been some response to this criticism by the field as a whole, reflected in the appearance of new journal outlets for accommodating applied research topics (e.g., Applied Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition), there is still an unfortunate tendency for memory researchers to sidestep common experiences that may seem less amenable to experimental control.

A Brief Historical Context for the Study of Déjà Vu

Writings about the déjà vu experience are many centuries old, and one can find references to the phenomenon (if not by that name) as far back as the mid-1800s. There was a notable flurry of attention during the late 1800s in the areas of philosophy and medicine. French scholars engaged in a lively debate concerning whether the déjà vu experience reflected mental pathology or the temporary memory dysfunction of normal individuals (Berrios, 1995; Moulin, 2018). This intellectual conversation culminated in a special issue of Revue Philosophique in 1893 (Schacter, 2001). This topic became so “hot” and professionally important that some strange interpretations were proposed (e.g., Dugas, 1894) just so that scholars could participate in a zeitgeist of theoretical speculation and avoid the “humiliation” of being caught without one’s unique hypothesis about déjà vu (cf. Allin, 1896a).

As interest in déjà vu was beginning to work its way into the domain of psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, behaviorism was establishing a firm hold over psychological investigation. The déjà vu experience did not fit within this behavioristic empirical framework because there were no consistently observable behaviors or clearly identifiable eliciting stimuli associated with it. Thus, it was bypassed by the mainstream of psychological research in America, Britain, and Germany where the behaviorist influence was clearly dominant. Even with the emergence of cognitive psychology in the 1950s/1960s and its renewed interest in studying internal mental processes and subjective experiences such as imagery (e.g., Kosslyn et al., 1978; Kosslyn et al., 1979; Kosslyn & Pomerantz, 1977; Neisser, 1967; Pylyshyn, 1981; Shepard, 1978), déjà vu never made a successful inroad into mainstream cognitive psychology research until the 2000s. Prior to that, it seemed to be viewed as a “symptom without a psychological function” (Berrios, 1995, p. 123).

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