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The Deja Vu Experience
Abstract
Most of us have been perplexed by a strange sense of familiarity when doing something for the first time. We feel that we have been here before, or done this before, but know for sure that this is impossible. In fact, according to numerous surveys, about two-thirds of us have experienced déjà vu at least once, and most of us have had multiple experiences. There are a number of credible scientific interpretations of déjà vu, and this book summarizes the broad range of published work from philosophy, religion, neurology, sociology, memory, perception, psychopathology, and psychopharmacology. This book also includes discussion of cognitive functioning in retrieval and familiarity, neuronal transmission, and double perception during the déjà vu experience.
... Estudos empíricos sugerem que 67% da população já experimentou o fenômeno do déjà vu pelo menos uma vez (Brown, 2004). De acordo com as estatísticas, esta é uma experiência comum, mas não acontece frequentemente: ocorre majoritariamente uma ou duas vezes por ano. ...
... Ela tende a ser particularmente frequente na juventude. Depois, sua frequência diminui gradualmente com o avanço da idade (Brown, 2004;Cleary, 2008;Brown e Marsh, 2010). A inclinação dominante na pesquisa contemporânea tende a tratar o déjà vu como uma experiência anormal, sem considerá-lo patológico. ...
... Brown contesta essa afirmação: estudos estatísticos mostram que a maioria das experiências de déjà vu está ligada a estados de resposta emocional neutra, mesmo que não o seja a sentimentos positivos (Brown, 2004). Esse resultado não é surpreendente se os casos de falso reconhecimento forem considerados formas genuínas de déjà vu, como Brown (e Marsh) parecem supor em seus experimentos (Brown e Marsh, 2008;2010). ...
A fenomenologia tem como objetivo analisar os momentos constitutivos de diferentes experiências, fazendo justiça às suas formas específicas de aparecimento. Ao fazer isso, ela pode tornar visíveis (e, portanto, corrigir) as suposições problemáticas consideradas válidas desde o início. Estas suposições distorcem e manipulam coerentemente os fenômenos de tal forma que os fenômenos são transformados em algo radicalmente diferente. O fenômeno do déjà vu é muito interessante, nesse sentido, por duas diferentes razões. O déjà vu é transformado em um fenômeno diferente no campo da ciência cognitiva: o déjà vu é comumente entendido como um simples erro de memória. Em segundo lugar, o déjà vu implica a repetição de uma experiência única e contingente. Essa lógica de repetição não é facilmente compatível com o logos das ciências empíricas, que se concentra na identificação de relações invariantes entre termos gerais por meio de pesquisa experimental e, portanto, exige uma abordagem diferente
... A puzzling association exists between the experience of déjà vu and the feeling of premonition. For example, reports of an association between these two feelings have emerged in survey studies of déjà vu (Brown, 2004;Moulin, 2018). Also, a report of an association between these two feelings can be found in early cortical stimulation work by Wilder Penfield, whereby a patient reported not only experiencing déjà vu when neurologically stimulated in the medial temporal lobe region, but also a strong sense of knowing exactly what would happen next (Mullan & Penfield, 1959). ...
... Unlike most memory paradigms, all of the test scenes in this paradigm are novel, yet some may seem more familiar than others. To the extent that the juxtaposition of familiarity and novelty are a central feature of the déjà vu experience (indeed, this is how déjà vu is usually defined; see Brown, 2004;Martin, Fiacconi, & Köhler, 2015;O'Connor & Moulin, 2010), the paradigm uniquely creates this on the test, potentially creating ideal circumstances for déjà vu. ...
... In the case of the déjà vu paradigm used in the present study, there is a deliberate construction of the juxtaposition of familiarity and novelty in a test phase, coupled with the uncertainty created by instances of retrieval failure. On top of this, the use of places is part of the paradigm because survey research (e.g., Brown, 2004) suggests that places are the most common elicitor of déjà vu, and many of the otherwise novel places used in the present study were familiarised through prior presentation of something similar. ...
... members of the scientific community from a variety of scientific disciplines (Brown, 2004;Sno & Linszen, 1990). Since the mid-19th century, several theories have been proposed to explain the déjà vu phenomenon, ranging from reincarnation and messages from the Gods to perceptual occlusion and delayed neural transmission (Berrios, 1995;Brown, 2004). ...
... members of the scientific community from a variety of scientific disciplines (Brown, 2004;Sno & Linszen, 1990). Since the mid-19th century, several theories have been proposed to explain the déjà vu phenomenon, ranging from reincarnation and messages from the Gods to perceptual occlusion and delayed neural transmission (Berrios, 1995;Brown, 2004). Some have had an experience that they interpret as being déjà vu, as it generated a bizarre sense of familiarity, whereas others who have never experienced anything similar may have a very vague understanding of the phenomenon in general and have difficulty even imagining what it could be like. ...
... New findings in cognitive science research have now provided some new insights into the déjà vu phenomenon, prompting growing interest among scientists (Brown, 2004). Scientifically based perspectives in the areas of cognition and neuroscience, for instance, have considerable potential for explaining and demystifying the déjà vu experience. ...
Surveys have been carried out enquiring about the incidence of déjà vu in several countries but not in India. In this study, a questionnaire was used to query 500 representative subjects in the Indian state of Kerala to ascertain the incidence frequencies of déjà vu experiences, precognitive dreams, and déjà rêvé experiences. The explanations favored for déjà vu experiences were also compared. The study found that déjà vu experiences are highly prevalent among Indians, but people with less education have no scientific knowledge of what these experiences are termed. Men reported déjà vu experiences slightly more frequently than women. The incidence of precognitive dreams is comparable to that in the West. All the participants in the study expressed a positive attitude toward déjà rêvé experiences. Intriguingly, older and more educated people were more likely to report déjà rêvé experiences, whereas Christians reported them less frequently than Hindus. Participants with a higher level of education were more inclined to believe déjà vu is a scientific yet unknown occurrence, and they were less likely to link déjà vu to reincarnation or soul transmigration. The questionnaire used in this study was rather straightforward; however, it might be improved and validated. The current study is restricted to Kerala's geographical areas. In the future, other parts of India could be studied and the results compared with those reported here.
... Déjà vu-the feeling of having experienced the current situation before despite that seeming impossible-has a long-appreciated link to some forms of epilepsy (reviewed by Brown, 2004, Cleary & Brown, 2022 [1,2]. Medical descriptions and this link were provided by John Hughlings Jackson over a century ago [3,4]. ...
... Déjà vu-the feeling of having experienced the current situation before despite that seeming impossible-has a long-appreciated link to some forms of epilepsy (reviewed by Brown, 2004, Cleary & Brown, 2022 [1,2]. Medical descriptions and this link were provided by John Hughlings Jackson over a century ago [3,4]. ...
... A potentially useful approach for examining this issue is a recently developed method for increasing reports of déjà vu among non-clinical participants in the laboratory [36][37][38]. In this method, based on early theories of déjà vu mechanisms [1], participants view a series of simulated virtual tours through various scenes. Later, they view a series of virtual tours with new scenes, some of which have the same spatial layout as earlier-viewed scenes despite otherwise being novel scenes (see Fig. 1). ...
Roughly two-thirds of all people report having experienced déjà vu-the odd feeling that a current experience is both novel and a repeat or replay of a previous, unrecalled experience. Reports of an association between déjà vu and seizure aura symptomatology have accumulated for over a century, and frequent déjà vu is also now known to be associated with focal seizures, particularly those of a medial temporal lobe (MTL) origin. A longstanding question is whether seizure-related déjà vu has the same basis and is the same subjective experience as non-seizure déjà vu. Survey research suggests that people who experience both seizure-related and non-seizure déjà vu can often subjectively distinguish between the two. We present a case of a person with a history of focal MTL seizures who reports having experienced both seizure-related and non-seizure common déjà vu, though the non-seizure type was more frequent during this person's youth than it is currently. The patient was studied with a virtual tour paradigm that has previously been shown to elicit déjà vu among non-clinical, young adult participants. The patient reported experiencing déjà vu of the common non-seizure type during the virtual tour paradigm, without associated abnormalities of the intracranial EEG. We situate this work in the context of broader ongoing projects examining the subjective correlates of seizures. The importance for memory research of virtual scenes, spatial tasks, virtual reality (VR), and this paradigm for isolating familiarity in the context of recall failure are discussed.
... Déjà vu experiences can be defined as any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past (Neppe, 1983). The percentage of participants reporting at least one déjà vu experience during their lifetime is often higher than 50% (Brown, 2004). Neppe (1983) listed 20 subtypes of déjà vu experiences like déjà vécu or déjà visité (see also Funkhouser and Schredl, 2014). ...
... Whereas the literature (see the extensive review of Brown, 2004) has focused on the phenomenology, the relationship to epilepsy and psychopathological conditions like schizophrenia, and possible explanations for the occurrence of déjà vu experiences, studies looking into personality correlates of déjà vu experiences are scarce. Funkhouser and Schredl (2010) found a high incidence of déjà rêvé among German students; about 95% of the sample reported to have had at least one déjà rêvé during their lifetime. ...
... As there are other forms of experience that are often confused with déjà experience, e.g. premonitions and anomalous familiarity -which includes cases of mistaken identity and conditions in some pathological disorders -and lack the startle and bewilderment that accompanies déjà experiences (Brown, 2004), future studies should include more precise definitions of déjà experience -even though the prevalence of these other experiences might be low. ...
... A puzzling association exists between the experience of déjà vu and the feeling of premonition. For example, reports of an association between these two feelings have emerged in survey studies of déjà vu (Brown, 2004;Moulin, 2018). Also, a report of an association between these two feelings can be found in early cortical stimulation work by Wilder Penfield, whereby a patient reported not only experiencing déjà vu when neurologically stimulated in the medial temporal lobe region, but also a strong sense of knowing exactly what would happen next (Mullan & Penfield, 1959). ...
... Unlike most memory paradigms, all of the test scenes in this paradigm are novel, yet some may seem more familiar than others. To the extent that the juxtaposition of familiarity and novelty are a central feature of the déjà vu experience (indeed, this is how déjà vu is usually defined; see Brown, 2004;Martin, Fiacconi, & Köhler, 2015;O'Connor & Moulin, 2010), the paradigm uniquely creates this on the test, potentially creating ideal circumstances for déjà vu. ...
... In the case of the déjà vu paradigm used in the present study, there is a deliberate construction of the juxtaposition of familiarity and novelty in a test phase, coupled with the uncertainty created by instances of retrieval failure. On top of this, the use of places is part of the paradigm because survey research (e.g., Brown, 2004) suggests that places are the most common elicitor of déjà vu, and many of the otherwise novel places used in the present study were familiarised through prior presentation of something similar. ...
A recent laboratory study by Cleary and Claxton [2018. Déjà vu: An illusion of prediction. Psychological Science, 29(4), 635–644. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797617743018] documented a relationship between déjà vu and feelings of premonition. During instances of retrieval failure, participants reported stronger feelings of prediction during déjà vu than non-déjà vu states, despite displaying no actual predictive ability in such instances. The present study further explored the link between déjà vu reports and feelings of prediction. Although feelings of prediction were more likely to occur during reports of déjà vu than non-déjà vu, they were not the sole defining feature of déjà vu, accounting for just over half of all reported déjà vu states. Instances of déjà vu that were accompanied by feelings of prediction were associated with greater feelings of familiarity than instances that were not. This was shown by a greater likelihood of reporting that the scene felt familiar and also by a higher rated intensity of the feeling of familiarity elicited by the scene when it did feel familiar. Though the present study was mainly descriptive in characterising the interrelations between déjà vu, feelings of prediction, and familiarity, the full pattern points toward the possibility that high familiarity intensity may contribute to the feeling of prediction during déjà vu.
... Déjà vu is an experience of familiarity combined with the awareness that this experience is inappropriate. According to a review by Brown (2004), questionnaire data shows that déjà vu occurs in the daily lives of 67% of the population. Its occurrence is typically once every couple of months and it occurs most frequently in young people. ...
... While there are many theoretical explanations of déjà vu (Brown, 2004), currently a key line of research focuses on the similarity hypothesisthe idea that the situation eliciting the déjà vu is in some way similar to a prior experience. For example, Cleary, Ryals and Nomi (2009) used the recognition-without-cued-recall (RWCR) paradigm to study déjà vu. ...
... Firstly, the researchers struggle to explain why participants would report experiencing déjà vu in the control condition at all, as it is not consistent with their explanation of déjà vu as familiarity evoked by similarity. Secondly, given that déjà vu is reported to only occur once in a couple of months in daily life (Brown, 2004), the 13% and 17% seems really high for a laboratory estimate. There are two possible explanations here. ...
... Consider déjà vu, a distinctive first-person subjective experience (Brown 2004;Fabb 2022). There is a routine in English of announcing the experience as it happens: ...
... Yet déjà vu is likely to be part of our "common biological substrate." Brown (2004) summarizes a large number of theories of déjà vu and groups them into four types of explanation, all of which involve aspects of nervous system functioning that are common to all humans: (1) cognitive processes go out of phase, (2) there is a dysfunction in neural transmission, (3) two components of memory become disassociated when familiarity is experienced in the absence of recall, or (4) a degraded perception is followed by a full perception. All humans have the potential to think about and name déjà vu, but the motivation for a mooring to emerge may depend on the inherent interest not just in thinking about our own and others' experience, but also in the idea that the experience, once identified, makes no sense because our fundamental knowledge of the world tells us that the same event cannot happen twice. ...
... the most common elicitor of déjà vu (Brown, 2004;Cleary & Brown, 2022). ...
... The paradigm that we present is an updated version of that used by Cleary et al. (2012) and . Cleary et al. used VR to examine a hypothesis of déjà vu known as the Gestalt similarity hypothesis (see Brown, 2004, or Cleary & Brown, 2022, for reviews), according to which déjà vu can result when a current scene has the same spatial layout as a previously visited place that fails to come to mind. Cleary et al. used the Sims game platform to create 64 pairs of identically configured but otherwise distinct scenes for use in a VR environment. ...
Episodic memory may essentially be memory for one’s place within a temporally unfolding scene from a first-person perspective. Given this, pervasively used static stimuli may only capture one small part of episodic memory. A promising approach for advancing the study of episodic memory is immersing participants within varying scenes from a first-person perspective. We present a pool of distinct scene stimuli for use in virtual environments and a paradigm that is implementable across varying levels of immersion on multiple virtual reality (VR) platforms and adaptable to studying various aspects of scene and episodic memory. In our task, participants are placed within a series of virtual environments from a first-person perspective and guided through a virtual tour of scenes during a study phase and a test phase. In the test phase, some scenes share a spatial layout with studied scenes; others are completely novel. In three experiments with varying degrees of immersion, we measure scene recall, scene familiarity-detection during recall failure, the subjective experience of déjà vu, the ability to predict the next turn on a tour, the subjective sense of being able to predict the next turn on a tour, and the factors that influence memory search and the inclination to generate candidate recollective information. The level of first-person immersion mattered to multiple facets of episodic memory. The paradigm presents a useful means of advancing mechanistic understanding of how memory operates in realistic dynamic scene environments, including in combination with cognitive neuroscience methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrophysiology.
... Shortly after Schacter published The Seven Sins of Memory, from which the quote above is taken, Brown published two seminal reviews: a paper in Psychological Bulletin (Brown, 2003) and a book (Brown, 2004) in which he presented a comprehensive review of the literature in a range of domains. A common thread through the literature was the reliance on non-experimental questionnaire research. ...
... This emphasis on the subjective not only adds to our understanding of the qualities of déjà vu, but also opens up new avenues for understanding the diverse range of subjective experiences associated déjà vu (e.g. links between intensity of experience and the feeling of prescience; Brown, 2004) across a range of non-clinical and clinical domains. ...
... An overview of 11 cross-sectional studies indicates that déjà vu (i.e. the 'mild form') lasts a second to minutes at most [8] and is reported by 30-96% of the general population [3]. Brown ...
... In psychiatry, manifestations are sporadically described in mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders [21]. Pharmacologically, déjà vécu is associated with the use of 5hydroxytryptophan [22], amantadine, and phenylpropanolamine [23], and probably also with the use of amphetamines, alcohol, and hallucinogens [8]. Ward et al. [10] reported on déjà vécu in multiple sclerosis, while as early as in 1927 Dawson [24] described a 41-year-old man with neurosyphilis who suffered from a depressed mood and hypochondria, and went on to develop a euphoric mood after malaria treatment (which was the state-of the-art treatment at the time). ...
... An overview of 11 cross-sectional studies indicates that déjà vu (i.e. the 'mild form') lasts a second to minutes at most [8] and is reported by 30-96% of the general population [3]. Brown ...
... In psychiatry, manifestations are sporadically described in mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders [21]. Pharmacologically, déjà vécu is associated with the use of 5hydroxytryptophan [22], amantadine, and phenylpropanolamine [23], and probably also with the use of amphetamines, alcohol, and hallucinogens [8]. Ward et al. [10] reported on déjà vécu in multiple sclerosis, while as early as in 1927 Dawson [24] described a 41-year-old man with neurosyphilis who suffered from a depressed mood and hypochondria, and went on to develop a euphoric mood after malaria treatment (which was the state-of the-art treatment at the time). ...
Déjà vécu is an extremely rare type of identifying paramnesia characterised by the ongoing sensation of having experienced things before. Having the delusional conviction that this sensation is true, patients frequently exhibit recollective confabulation. We here describe an 84-year-old woman with idiopathic, partial déjà vécu, where her symptoms were limited to people and events. An extensive psychiatric and somatic work-up ruled out cerebrovascular disease, epilepsy, dementia, psychosis, or intoxication as a potential underlying cause. Proposed to be a functional disturbance of the limbic system with involvement of a network that comprises at least the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, the pathophysiology of déjà vécu is in need of further elucidation. Our patient and her family were offered psychoeducation, which led to acceptance and improved coping. During the two-year follow-up, the déjà vécu sensations continued unaltered, but all involved were less bothered by them, with the patient’s functioning improving both personally and socially.
... Despite this advance in understanding the basis of déjà vu, a remaining scientific puzzle is the purported association between déjà vu and feelings of premonition, or knowing what will happen next. People often report such an association from personal experience in surveys (Brown, 2004). Case-study research on déjà vu elicited by cortical stimulation also uncovered this association: Cortical-stimulation-induced déjà vu in a patient was accompanied by a feeling of knowing exactly what would happen next (Mullan & Penfield, 1959, as cited in Brown, 2004. ...
... This study presents a significant advance in understanding the peculiar association between déjà vu and feelings of premonition (e.g., Brown, 2004). The results suggest a link between the sensation of déjà vu and a bias to believe that one knows what will happen next. ...
Déjà vu is beginning to be scientifically understood as a memory phenomenon. Despite recent scientific advances, a remaining puzzle is the purported association between déjà vu and feelings of premonition. Building on research showing that déjà vu can be driven by an unrecalled memory of a past experience that relates to the current situation, we sought evidence of memory-based predictive ability during déjà vu states. Déjà vu did not lead to above-chance ability to predict the next turn in a navigational path resembling a previously experienced but unrecalled path (although such resemblance increased reports of déjà vu). However, déjà vu states were accompanied by increased feelings of knowing the direction of the next turn. The results suggest that feelings of premonition during déjà vu occur and can be illusory. Metacognitive bias brought on by the state itself may explain the peculiar association between déjà vu and the feeling of premonition.
... In Experiment 4 we looked at déjà vu reports exclusively. This decision was driven by the flexibility that exists in defining the experience, especially in lay use of the term [15,16]. In the Paramnesia condition, we gave participants the same definition of déjà vu as in previous studies but replaced the label "déjà vu", which the explanation defined, with "paramnesia". ...
... As experimenters however, we do have control over how we elicit these self-reports and as such it is crucial to fully appreciate whether our methods influence participant responding (see [2]). Déjà vu and TOT are distinct experiences with unique underlying mechanisms (for reviews see [1,15]) and the methodologies employed for their assessment have therefore developed largely independently of each other. We are not the first to argue that current methods could be improved. ...
Déjà vu and tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) are retrieval-related subjective experiences whose study relies on participant self-report. In four experiments (ns = 224, 273, 123 and 154), we explored the effect of questioning method on reported occurrence of déjà vu and TOT in experimental settings. All participants carried out a continuous recognition task, which was not expected to induce déjà vu or TOT, but were asked about their experiences of these subjective states. When presented with contemporary definitions, between 32% and 58% of participants nonetheless reported experiencing déjà vu or TOT. Changing the definition of déjà vu or asking participants to bring to mind a real-life instance of déjà vu or TOT before completing the recognition task had no impact on reporting rates. However, there was an indication that changing the method of requesting subjective reports impacted reporting of both experiences. More specifically, moving from the commonly used retrospective questioning (e.g. "Have you experienced déjà vu?") to free report instructions (e.g. "Indicate whenever you experience déjà vu.") reduced the total number of reported déjà vu and TOT occurrences. We suggest that research on subjective experiences should move toward free report assessments. Such a shift would potentially reduce the presence of false alarms in experimental work, thereby reducing the overestimation of subjective experiences prevalent in this area of research.
... Déjà vu refers to the illusory subjective experience that an objectively novel situation is familiar. Numerous theories concerning the origins of déjà vu have been put forward (for detailed reviews, see Brown, 2003Brown, , 2004Moulin, 2018), but progress in understanding the basis of déjà vu has been hampered by the lack of controlled experimental paradigms for inducing and exploring the phenomenon. However, that situation has begun to change, as researchers have begun to develop laboratory analogues of déjà vu to explore both cognitive (e.g., O'Connor et al., 2008) and neural (e.g., Urquhart et al., 2021) characteristics of the phenomenon. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory covers the science of human memory, its application to clinical disorders, and its broader implications for learning and memory in real-world contexts. Written by field leaders, the handbook integrates behavioral, neural, and computational evidence with current theories of how humans learn and remember. Following a section of foundational chapters, subsequent sections include chapters that cover forms and attributes of memory, encoding and retrieval processes and their interactions, individual differences, memory disorders and therapies, learning and memory in educational settings, and the role of memory in society. The handbook’s authoritative chapters document the current state of knowledge and provide a roadmap for the next generation of memory scientists, established peers, and practitioners.
... 95). Brown (2004) describes déjà vu as a "(…) 'pure' metamemory experience unconnected with the empirical world" (p. 5). ...
In this article we review the literature on the phenomenology of retrieval from the personal past, and propose a framework for understanding how epistemic feelings and metacognitive reflections guide the retrieval of representations of past events in the Self Memory System. Our focus is on an overlooked aspect of autobiographical memory, the phenomenology of the retrieval process, as opposed to the products of retrieval themselves. As we argue in the present paper, this is not some magical collection of phenomena, but centers on the feeling of familiarity derived from retrieval fluency during the process of retrieval. The relationship between retrieval fluency and retrieved content, interpreted metacognitively is what gives autobiographical retrieval its particular phenomenological “flavor.” To illustrate our point, we focus on two phenomena that only recently were considered alongside each other: the déjà vu experience and involuntary autobiographical memories. Our proposal is that the feeling of familiarity (i.e., this reminds me of something ) for the personal past acts to guide deliberate, conscious memory search. We argue that the critical concept in the phenomenology of retrieval is fluency—how readily information comes to mind.
This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory
Philosophy > Consciousness
Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief
... Déjà vu (DV) is an intriguing phenomenon that has attracted the attention of scientists for decades. From a psychological perspective, DV is a spontaneous metacognitive state combining conflicting mental evaluations-specifically, a subjective feeling of familiarity coupled with an awareness that this feeling is experienced inappropriately (Brown, 2004;Metcalfe & Schwartz, 2016). This fleeting feeling of erroneous familiarity is reported in up to 76% of the healthy population (Adachi et al., 2003) and is generally believed to reflect non-pathological irregularities in brain function among memory-related structures within the mesial temporal lobes (Illman et al., 2012). ...
The phenomenon of déjà vu (DV) has intrigued scientists for decades, yet its neurophysiological underpinnings remain elusive. Brain regions have been identified in which morphometry differs between healthy individuals according to the frequency of their DV experiences. This study built upon these findings by assessing if and how neural activity in these and other brain regions also differ with respect to DV experience. Resting-state fMRI was performed on 68 healthy volunteers, 44 of whom reported DV experiences (DV group) and 24 who did not (NDV group). Using multivariate analyses, we then assessed the (fractional) amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF/ALFF), a metric that is believed to index brain tissue excitability, for 5 discrete frequency bands within sets of brain regions implicated in DV and those comprising the default mode network (DMN). Analyses revealed significantly lower values of fALFF/ALFF for specific frequency bands in the DV relative to the NDV group, particularly within mesiotemporal structures, bilateral putamina, right caudatum, bilateral superior frontal cortices, left lateral parietal cortex, dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex. The pattern of differences in fALFF/ALFF measures between the brains of individuals who have experienced DV and those who have not provides new neurophysiological insights into this phenomenon, including the potential role of the DMN. We suggest that the erroneous feeling of familiarity arises from a temporary disruption of cortico-subcortical circuitry together with the upregulation of cortical excitability.
... Consistent with the increase of familiarity and reliving of scene memory in explicit memory, in déjà vu there is a sense of familiarity and reliving without any explicit memory of a prior experience (Rubin & Umanath, 2015). Brown (2003Brown ( , 2004 reports several studies, based on both self-reports and analyses of participants' descriptions, in which the most common trigger of a déjà vu state is the similarity with an earlier scene. In a direct test of the claim that déjà vu depends on a similarity in scenes that is not explicitly noted, Cleary et al. (2009) matched the configural layout, but not the contents, of two scenes. ...
I propose a model that places episodic, semantic, and other commonly studied forms of memory into the same conceptual space. The space is defined by three dimensions required for Tulving’s episodic and semantic memory. An implicit–explicit dimension contrasts both episodic and semantic memory with common forms of implicit memory. A self-reference dimension contrasts episodes that occurred to one person with semantic knowledge. A scene dimension contrasts episodes that occurred in specific contexts with context-free semantic information. The three dimensions are evaluated against existing behavioral and neural evidence to evaluate both the model and the concepts underlying the study of human memory. Unlike a hierarchy, which has properties specific to each category, the dimensions have properties that extend throughout the conceptual space. Thus, the properties apply to all forms of existing and yet-to-be-discovered memory within the space. Empty locations in the proposed space are filled with existing phenomena that lack a clear place in current theories of memory, including reports of episodic-like memories for events reported to but not witnessed by a person, fictional narrative accounts, déjà vu, and implicit components contributing to personality, the self, and autobiographical memory.
... People often experience feelings of familiarity toward a stimulus for which they are unable to recollect a specific prior encounter. In terms of phenomenology, the critical difference between such impressions of familiarity and déjà vu experiences is that the latter are characterised by a concurrent subjective sense of inappropriateness for the experienced familiarity (Brown, 2004;Moulin, 2017). Put another way, déjà vu can be conceptualised as reflecting a subjective memory conflict. ...
Déjà vu is characterised by feelings of familiarity and concurrent awareness that this familiarity is wrong. Previous neuropsychological research has linked déjà vu during seizures in individuals with unilateral temporal-lobe epilepsy (uTLE) to rhinal-cortex abnormalities, and to recognition-memory deficits that selectively affect familiarity assessment. Here, we examined whether bilateral TLE patients with déjà vu (bTLE) show a similar pattern of performance. Using two experimental tasks, we found that bTLE patients exhibit deficits not only for familiarity but also for recollection. Relative to uTLE, this broader impairment also involved hippocampal abnormalities. Our findings confirm rhinal-cortex contributions to the generation of false familiarity in déjà vu that parallel its contributions to familiarity on recognition-memory tasks. While they do not rule out a role for recollection in identifying this familiarity as wrong, the deficits observed in bTLE patients weigh against the notion that any such role is necessary for déjà vu to occur.
... Déjà vuthe jarring feeling of having experienced something before despite knowing otherwisehas a long-held association with perceptions of premonition. This has been documented in people's subjective impressions of past déjà vu experiences (Brown, 2004;Moulin, 2018). Perceptions of premonition may occur while déjà vu is being experienced. ...
Recent research links reports of déjà vu – the feeling of having experienced something before despite knowing otherwise – with an illusory feeling of prediction. In the present study, a new finding is presented in which reports of déjà vu are associated not only with a predictive bias, but also with a postdictive bias, whereby people are more likely to feel that an event unfolded as expected after the event prompted déjà vu than after it did not. During a virtual tour, feelings of predicting the next turn were more likely during reported déjà vu, as in prior research. Then, after actually seeing the turn, participants exhibited a postdictive bias toward feeling that the scene unfolded as expected following déjà vu reports. This postdictive bias following déjà vu reports was associated with higher perceived scene familiarity intensity. A potential reason for this association may be that high familiarity intensity as an event outcome unfolds falsely signals confirmatory evidence of having sensed all along how it would unfold. Future research should further investigate this possibility.
... 'Continuous déjà vu' to Funkhouser and occasionally to Neppe d3 [23] (in the past), is a better term than 'Chronic déjà vu'. which Brown [90] and Moulin [86] might prefer, as it does not imply necessary pathology, but I currently think that if such an entity exists, it is more likely to be more characterized as chronic not continuously. ...
Subjective psi experience (SPE) is a non-prejudicial term allowing non-prejudicial analysis. The qualitative nosological subtype of SPE deja vu involves distinct qualities: This grows, is intense, often frequent, and specifically involves time distortions past and future with predictive elements and a specific knowing.
... Many terms that needed clarification, and a glossary was needed, particularly as déjà is written with accents in French, so locating data was more challenging [35]. The 2004 book by Alan Brown [34] focuses effectively on the most common subtype of déjà vu, occurring in two thirds of the population, what Neppe has called associative déjà vu [53]. But this presents an incomplete picture of the phenomenological vastness of déjà vu, and its multiple subtypes, specific population occurrences and different causes. ...
The French term, 'deja vu', translates literally as "already seen". Neppe's 1979 definition is the universally accepted, carefully derived scientific one: deja vu is "any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past." Some historical firsts in the area are discussed, as well as some prioritized information about deja vu. The books available-Neppe's 4; Brown; Oesterle in German; and Jones- are mentioned, as well as Kohn's unpublished contribution. Studying deja vu provides us a window into understanding phenomenology, and how careful we must be in interpreting similar phenomena as from the same origin or cause. The detailed study of deja vu is the study of ensuring we cluster 'like with like' and do not confound this area with "like analyzed with unlike" phenomena.
... The percentage of people who experience déjà vu is probably somewhere between 30% (about 8 in a class of 30) and 100% (everyone in a class of 30) [1]. We are not sure about the exact percentage for two important reasons. ...
Young people experience déjà vu the most. Having said this, depending on how old you are, you may still have to wait a while until you have your first déjà vu experience. A very small number of people say they had their first déjà vu experience by the age of 6. More people report their first déjà vu experiences as having happened sometime before they were 10 years old. The reason it may take a while to have your first déjà vu experience is that you need to be able to work out whether the feeling of familiarity you have really is stronger than it should be. For many younger kids, this may be a tricky thing to do.
It has been often claimed that physicalism challenges the explanatory autonomy of psychological sciences. Most who advocate for such explanatory autonomy and do not want to renounce to physicalism, presuppose a causalist account of explanatoriness and try to demonstrate that, adequately construed, (causal) psychological explanations are compatible with (some sufficient version of) physicalism. In Sect. 1 we summarize the different theses and assumptions involved in the seeming conflict between explanatory autonomy and physicalism. In Sect. 2 we review the main attempts to make them compatible assuming a causalist account of explanation and argue that none succeeds. In Sect. 3 we introduce a recent, non-causalist account of scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized embedding (ASE) that has been successfully applied to other fields. In Sect. 4 we apply ASE to elucidate two paradigmatic cognitive explanations of psychological phenomena: déjà vu and action production. We conclude that ASE elucidates well the autonomy of the cognitive explanations of these phenomena independently of what finally happens with the causal exclusion problem and that it may be generalized to other psychological explanations.
The experience of déjà vu and the unheimlich, a peculiar fusion of familiarity and unfamiliarity, is closely linked to what was once very familiar. Delving into the unheimlich to illuminate my exploration of the continuity of ‘home’, I contend that a sense of ‘home’ endures by seeking familiarity through everyday objects, placing them similarly, or recreating past room layouts in unfamiliar spaces. Examining my series of drawings, The Darkness (2020–2021), crafted during the global covid lockdown amid my transition to a new living-place, I illustrate the evolution of my ‘home’ from an unfamiliar, empty space to a familiar haven filled with items evoking a sense of dwelling. These drawings depict both mental and physical aspects of adapting to a new residence, emphasising the nocturnal arrangement of objects. In the shroud of darkness, the familiarity painstakingly accrued throughout the day dissipates, forming a nuanced interplay of familiarity and strangeness that elicits feelings of both comfort and discomfort. Such an amalgamation creates an unsettling, yet homely atmosphere. Interrogating the relationships between objects and their ties to the concept of ‘home’ becomes a lens through which I investigate the unheimlich, offering a unique perspective for ongoing exploration.
Le déjà-vu est un objet qui révèle et problématise un passage épistémologique délicat entre sémiotique du discours et sémiotique de l’expérience. Une des options permettant de répondre à cette difficulté semble être de considérer une sémiotique écologique – plus englobante –, qui intègrerait l’historicité et la contingence au sein d’une adaptation « risquée ». Dans ce cadre, si le travail de la différence et de la répétition pose « l’émergence » devant la « réciprocité » et que le travail de la permanence et du changement révèle l’importance d’une « confiance » émancipée « d’authenticité », alors le travail de la multiplicité et de la singularité fait prévaloir la « plasticité » sur la « combinatoire ». Ainsi, en envisageant la vie du sens depuis les notions d’émergence, de confiance et de plasticité, cet effort dialectique permet de concevoir les significations comme l’excédent d’un processus adaptatif qui, dans l’entrelacs du conscient et du non-conscient sur fond d’imprédictibilité, vise une continuelle réduction de l’imprévisibilité.
The purpose of the current investigation was to look at the occurrence of déjà vu and jamais vu in a bilingual population, with an emphasis on the impact of language on these experiences. The study used a volunteer sampling method with 100 participants. Participant Recruitment Participants were recruited through two primary channels: Local High Schools Reaching a high school in the Local area. High school students between the ages of 15 and 18 with varied levels of English proficiency were encouraged to participate freely.
Curiosity during learning increases information-seeking behaviors and subsequent memory retrieval success, yet the mechanisms that drive curiosity and its accompanying information-seeking behaviors remain elusive. Hints throughout the literature suggest that curiosity may result from a metacognitive signal—possibly of closeness to a not yet accessible piece of information—that in turn leads the experiencer to seek out additional information that will resolve a perceptibly small knowledge gap. We examined whether metacognition sensations thought to signal the likely presence of an as yet unretrieved relevant memory (such as familiarity or déjà vu) might be involved. Across two experiments, when cued recall failed, participants gave higher curiosity ratings during reported déjà vu (Experiment 1) or déjà entendu (Experiment 2), and these states were associated with increased expenditure of limited experimental resources to discover the answer. Participants also spent more time attempting to retrieve information and generated more incorrect information when experiencing these déjà vu-like states than when not. We propose that metacognition signaling of the possible presence of an as yet unretrieved but relevant memory may drive curiosity and prompt information-seeking that includes further search efforts.
This paper tackles the issue of the diversity of déjà experiences. According to the standard view in the neuropsychological literature, they should all be defined by means of a psychological criterion, by which they are experiences triggered by a perceived item and consist of a conscious clash between a first-order feeling of familiarity about the item and a second-order evaluation that assesses the first-order feeling as erroneous. This paper dismisses the standard view and contends there are two types of déjà experiences, labeled déjà vu and déjà vécu respectively. But it also takes issue with the rare proponents of a distinct déjà vécu type. Contrary to their achievement view, it argues that recollection is not involved in déjà vécu experiences as an actual mental state or a component thereof. In our ability view, déjà vécu involves the feeling that one could recollect past occurrences of a currently lived episode of experience.
Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu are phenomena that occur spontaneously in daily life. IAMs are recollections of the personal past, whereas déjà vu is defined as an experience in which the person feels familiarity at the same time as knowing that the familiarity is false. We present and discuss the idea that both IAMs and déjà vu can be explained as natural phenomena resulting from memory processing and, importantly, are both based on the same memory retrieval processes. Briefly, we hypothesise that both can be described as ‘involuntary’ or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and déjà vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval. We map out the similarities and differences between the two, making a theoretical and neuroscientific account for their integration into models of memory retrieval and how the autobiographical memory literature can explain these quirks of daily life and unusual but meaningful phenomena. We explain the emergence of the déjà vu phenomenon by relating it to well-known mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval, concluding that IAMs and déjà vu lie on a continuum.
Целью статьи является анализ состояния исследований нового для научной психологии предмета – феномена Мгновенного жизненного обзора (МЖО) и разработка перспективной программы его изучения. Феномен МЖО заключается в том, что, вспоминая об экстремальных ситуациях, люди иногда утверждают, будто бы в момент максимальной угрозы «вся жизнь в одно мгновение промелькнула у них перед глазами». Критикуется сложившаяся методология исследования МЖО на основе ретроспективных отчетов, так как она не позволяет диссоциировать механизмы переживания МЖО и воспоминания о нем. Фиксируется противоречивость литературных данных об условиях возникновения, составе и последствиях МЖО. Обосновывается понимание МЖО как мнемической иллюзии, связанной с взаимодействием трех факторов: 1) специфического модуса работы автобиографической памяти в условиях сильного стресса; 2) культурного образца переживания МЖО; 3) языковых средств перекодирования образа памяти в ретроспективное описание. Разработку метода имитации феномена МЖО в лабораторных условиях предлагается провести на основе генетического эксперимента в рамках методологии культурно-исторического подхода Л.С.Выготского.
What is the function of the past in visions of the future? For critics, futures built on recycled futures-past, at best, signal a failure of imagination and, at worst, foreclose much-needed alternatives. Against a backdrop in which the future is predominantly thought of as a threat, this paper offers a more nuanced account of the entanglement of past and future at lieux de futur, complex assemblages of imagination, relations to time, scales of the past, forgetting, and sense experiences. Utilizing fieldwork at the 2018 Future of Everything Festival and collected materials from Astana Expo 2017 this paper reconsiders the function of the familiar in visions of tomorrow through the concept of déjà vu (promnesia). Triggered by a single familiar element among what is presented as novel, déjà vu activates a sensation that one can see the future unfold before its full arrival. Promnesic futures thus act as a prophylactic against broader looming threats (e.g. climate change) by rendering them seemingly navigable.
Jamais vu is a phenomenon operationalised as the opposite of déjà vu, i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar. We sought to document that the subjective experience of jamais vu can be produced in word alienation tasks, hypothesising that déjà vu and jamais vu are similar experiential memory phenomena. Participants repeatedly copied words until they felt “peculiar”, had completed the task, or had another reason to stop. About two-thirds of all participants (in about one-third of all trials) reported strange subjective experiences during the task. Participants reported feeling peculiar after about thirty repetitions, or one minute. We describe these experiences as jamais vu. This experimentally induced phenomenon was related to real-world experiences of unfamiliarity. Although we replicated known patterns of correlations with déjà vu (age and dissociative experiences), the same pattern was not found for our experimental analogue of jamais vu, suggesting some differences between the two phenomena. However, in daily life, those people who had déjà vu more frequently also had jamais vu more frequently. Findings are discussed with reference to the progress that has been made in déjà vu research in recent years, with a view to fast-tracking our understanding of jamais vu.
The semiotics of phenomena like déjà vus and hallucinations constitute a limit-field of a theory of the sign, but one that offers opportunities to question the fundamental principles of the discipline while at the same time offering the opportunity to address their underlying cognitive processes. The article describes the cognitive nature of déjà vus and hallucinations, briefly reviews the literature about them, and reads them as cognitive perturbations in the light of a semiotics of mental simulacra related to perception, apperception, awareness, memory, and imagination. The article then uses such cognitive and semiotic modeling in order to develop a critique of present-day digital culture, in which the uncritical adoption of a mnemonic ideal based on digital memory jeopardizes one of the key features of embodied memory: imperfection and, as a consequence, the possibility to access aesthetic and temporal singularity. A collective memory prone to déjà vus and hallucinations ensues.
From the 1850s, Saint-Saëns regularly employed cyclic form: the practice of establishing large-scale relationships (especially in symphonies, chamber works, etc.) by reintroducing materials from earlier movements in later ones. Nonetheless, he became weary of such procedures following the Third Symphony (1886) for cultural-political reasons: Franck's most important cyclic works date from the 1880s, d'Indy declared la forme cyclique a historically determined canon, and period writers considered cyclic form a franckiste hallmark – all while Saint-Saëns's relationship with Franck's followers deteriorated.
In this essay, I argue that Saint-Saëns's First String Quartet (1899) ‘misreads’ his rivals’ approaches to cyclic form as exemplified by d'Indy's Second Quartet of 1897 (in which a four-note cell suffuses most themes) and Franck's Quartet (in which themes from previous movements climactically accumulate in the final coda). Saint-Saëns's themes abound with miniscule motivic connections, which catch listeners’ ears but seem too fleeting and insubstantial to register as binding elements comparable to d'Indy's pellucid cell. Such relationships straddle the threshold of apprehensibility, and they produce a distinctive affective quality: where d'Indy fosters perceptions of genetic relationships, Saint-Saëns elicits a sensation of déjà entendu. The final coda similarly teases by reintroducing fragments from the slow introduction, encouraging anticipation of a Franck-like apotheosis. What follows is a mirage of one: timbres and textures of previous movements return, but incipient citations of themes dissolve. Where Franck delivers a full-blooded synthesis, Saint-Saëns follows through with trompe l'oreille .
Saint-Saëns's misreadings of franckiste technique point to broader aesthetic conflicts. D'Indy enlisted cyclic form as a means to monumentality, which served the enseignement he esteemed as art's purpose. Déjà entendu and trompe l'oreille , on the other hand, register as classicising attributes which diverge from d'Indy's didactic objectives and which Saint-Saëns grouped under the rubric of ‘charm’, a conduit to what he considered an ideologically neutral ‘aesthetic sense’.
Attempts to generate déjà vu experimentally have largely focused on engineering partial familiarity for stimuli, relying on an ensuing, but unprompted evaluation of conflict to generate the experience. Without verification that experimentally-generated familiarity is accompanied by the awareness of stimulus novelty, these experimental procedures potentially provide an incomplete déjà vu analogue. We used a modified version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory procedure to generate both familiarity and novelty within a déjà vu analogue – we coupled experimentally-generated familiarity with cues indicating that the familiarity was erroneous, using this additional source of mnemonic information to generate cognitive conflict in our participants. We collected fMRI and behavioural data from 21 participants, 16 of whom reported déjà vu. Using univariate contrasts we identified brain regions associated with mnemonic conflict, including the anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex. This is the first experiment to image an analogue of the déjà vu experience in healthy volunteers. The increased likelihood of déjà vu reports to DRM critical lures correctly identified as “new”, and the activation of neural substrates supporting the experience of cognitive conflict during déjà vu, suggest that the resolution of memory conflict may play an integral role in déjà vu.
While occasional déjà vu is benign in the general population, rare neuropsychological cases with persistent déjà vu have been described in the literature. We report the case of MN, a 25-year-old woman, who suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in the right thalamo-callosal region and experienced recurrent déjà vu episodes. Through clinical interviews and memory tasks related to déjà vu, we assumed that source memory errors and an inappropriate feeling of familiarity (measured by the number of false recognitions) were critically involved in MN’s déjà vu. Based on this, we developed the first neuropsychological intervention dedicated to déjà vu. The rationale was to train MN to detect elements that could produce an inappropriate feeling of familiarity and to promote metacognitive awareness about déjà vu. This intervention was effective at reducing the frequency of déjà vu episodes in MN’s daily life, as well as the number of false recognitions in memory tasks. In addition to its clinical contribution, this single-case study contributes to the limited literature on patients whose déjà vu is not related to epileptic abnormalities and medial temporal brain damage, and provide supportive evidence of the role of an erroneous feeling of familiarity and of metacognitive processes in déjà vu.
The cognitive phenomenology thesis claims that “there is something it is like” to have cognitive states such as believing, desiring, hoping, attending, and so on. In support of this idea, Goldman claimed that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue phenomenon can be considered as a clear‐cut instance of nonsensory cognitive phenomenology. This paper reviews Goldman's proposal and assesses whether the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings actually constitute an instance of cognitive phenomenology. The paper will show that psychological data cast doubt on the idea that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings are clear‐cut instances of cognitive phenomenology.
This paper analyses the déjà-vu experience in order to deepen the understanding of the complex nature of time-consciousness from a phenomenological point of view. The paper is divided into two sections: the first section focuses on Bergson’s research on déjà vu in order to assess the validity of his position; the second section describes a specific form of déjà-vu experience from a phenomenological perspective. This investigation will question the widespread assumption according to which déjà vu should be conceived as a disturbance of the memory of the past. On the contrary, the author shows that the disturbance primarily pertains to the dimension of the future. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to focus on the coherent deformation of the immediate expectation of the imminent future.
The study examines the prevalence of déjà vu in healthy Czech adults and explores its relationships with a number of variables: age, sex, neuroticism, depression, the degree of irritability in the limbic system, perceived stress, and finally attachment avoidance and anxiety. The participants were 365 healthy adults ranging from 18 to 70 years recruited in the Czech Republic (mean age = 29.05; SD = 11.17) who filled out online questionnaires. Déjà vu experiences were reported by 324 (88.8%) of them. Persons who experienced déjà vu were younger than the persons who had not experienced it. We found that sex, levels of neuroticism, depression, perceived stress, and attachment did not serve as predictors of experiences of déjà vu phenomena. Finally, those who had reported déjà vu experiences reported more limbic system irritability symptoms. We discuss the possibility that déjà vu reports together with other studied variables mainly reflect the participants' willingness to report "extraordinal" experiences.
This essay identifies the banal temporality of endless war in both the affective disposition signaled by the POW/MIA flag and the conditions of apperception of the war planners who orchestrated the US war in Southeast Asia. To explore this banal time, the essay turns to Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir Memento (), a film that explores the interplay of memory, subjectivity, and violence. Memento’s ostensible opposition between memory as the return of origin and absolute temporal dispersal in fact gives way to a quite different conception of subjectivity’s temporal connectivity, based in routine repetition, habit, and conditioning—the “banal time” that Hannah Arendt sees as underpinning the banality of evil. In a reading of Homi Bhabha’s account of freedom as being based “in the indeterminate,” the banal time of Memento is shown to destabilize the opposition of grand narrative and temporal dispersal upon which contemporary theory has staked its political orientation. At the same time, the essay counters interpretations of Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil that reduce it to a dismissal of the perpetrator’s character or humanity. Rather, Arendt’s conception is shown to focus on the temporal conditions of possibility of responsibility, and to prioritize modes of connectivity that would overcome banal time.
Individuals with epilepsy are at increased risk of a number of psychiatric disorders including anxiety, depression, and psychosis. However, when considering the performance of people with epilepsy on neuropsychological tests, little attention has generally been paid to the role that comorbid psychological/psychiatric disturbance may play in influencing scores and test profiles. This chapter considers how patients with comorbid psychosis or depression might perform on standard tests batteries, and how mood might account for discrepancies between patients' self-reported cognitive difficulties and observed test scores. It addresses recent developments in understanding the cerebral substrates of psychosis and depression in people with epilepsy. It also considers the role of effort in test-taking performance, both in patients with epilepsy and also patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, and the extent to which the profiles of these two patient groups might differ in this respect. Some comments are made on potential clinical observations/interventions that might sensibly be considered with respect to psychological factors in patients with epilepsy undergoing neuropsychological assessment. Finally, the chapter considers clinically similar memory phenomena presenting in psychiatry and epilepsy settings and their key differences.
The Déjà Vu Experience Like the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience, déjà vu is a type of subjective cognitive state that most people can relate to or report having experienced at some point in their lives (e.g., Brown, 2003, 2004). Déjà vu is the sometimes eerie experience of feeling as if a new situation has been experienced before, despite knowing that it has actually never been experienced before. When on the platform at the train station in Beijing last summer, preparing to board the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, I had this strange feeling of having been there before and of having done that before, despite never having been to Beijing, or ridden on a bullet train, or taken a trip to Shanghai. From where did that feeling arise? What caused it? Though déjà vu has piqued human interest enough to appear in literature and personal musings for more than 100 years (e.g., Brown, 2004; Brown & Marsh, 2010), experimental scientific research on the phenomenon has been lacking, or at least slow to come about, compared to research on other cognitive phenomena, such as TOT experiences. Both the TOT state and the déjà vu phenomenon have long histories of anecdotal study prior to their becoming topics of laboratory investigation. In fact, though there was half a century of speculation regarding TOTs starting with William James (James, 1893), modern laboratory research on TOTs did not emerge until Brown and McNeill's (1966) groundbreaking piece on the subject. This illustrates some of the difficulty involved in bringing relatively infrequent subjective states of experience into the laboratory for empirical study. As for why déjà vu has taken longer to become an accepted laboratory topic than TOT experiences, Brown and Marsh (2010) suggest some reasons why this may be, including déjà vu's tendency to be associated with paranormal explanations, as well as the rarity with which déjà vu tends to occur according to survey research (Brown, 2003).
A 46-item paranormal belief questionnaire was given to 836 Australian psychology students. Paranormal items, derived from the popular media, were rated on a 5-point strength of evidence scale. Responses to the questionnaire were correlated and subjected to a principle axis factor analysis, followed by orthogonal and oblique rotation. A seven-factor Obliquely rotated solution, accounting for 38.49% of the variance, was chosen as most interpretable. The seven factor were identified as popular science, obscure unbelief, traditional religion, alternative treatments, paratherapies, functional psi, and structural psi. Results thus provide support for the multidimensional structure of paranormal beliefs.
A déjà vu experience is a dissociative phenomenon, which can be characterized as a subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present with an undefined past. This paper reviews empirical studies on déjà vu experiences and summarizes the most salient findings. Overall, the findings appear to be inconsistent and inconclusive. The authors conclude that the available empirical research is of limited significance due to various methodological and conceptual issues. In order to evaluate the clinical psychiatric relevance of déjà vu experiences, further research which also addresses its qualitative features is warranted.
The literature on disturbance of time-sense in brain disease and schizophrenia is reviewed and the subjective experience of altered time-sense reported by 45 out of 350 personally interviewed schizophrenics is analyzed. A review of the literature on the effect of brain damage revealed that some phenomena (déjà vu, reduplication of time, altered tempo to events) were linked with right hemisphere dysfunction, one phenomenon (incorrect sequencing of events) was linked with left anterior brain damage, and others (disrupted "biological clock", disturbed serise of rate of flow of current or past events) could arise from subcortical as well as focal cortical damage. The sparse literature on disturbed time-sense in schizophrenia suggested that there was a shared psychopathology in this respect with right hemisphere dysfunction. The phenomena encountered in the 45 schizophrenics are described and classified.
This was an investigation of the effects of a drive-related subliminal stimulus on subsequent Rorschach images. 60 male Ss were seen for an experimental and control session in a balanced design. Ss were divided into 5 groups on the basis of their recogniton thresholds for the drive-related stimulus and a neutral stimulus. For each group, different predictions were made as to how the subliminally presented drive stimulus would affect subsequent Rorschach performance. The results indicated: for the total group, there was a clearcut subliminal effect; the nature of this effect varied considerably among Ss with regard to the relative influence of drive-expressive and defensive reactions; the different ways Ss responded to the subliminal activation were systematically related to their threshold behavior. (23 ref.)
Older adults are often more susceptible to various illusions and distortions of memory than young adults. In the experiments reported here, we explored the question of whether normal aging was associated with a larger revelation effect, an illusion of memory in which items that are revealed gradually during a recognition test are more likely to be called old than unrevealed items that are shown in their entirety. Contrary to expectations, older adults were not susceptible to this memory illusion. A revelation effect occurred for young but not older adults, even when older adults were similar to young adults on measures of recognition and repetition priming. When data across experiments were combined, there was evidence for a negative revelation effect in older adults in which revealed items were less likely called old than unrevealed items. These results place boundary conditions on the claim that older adults are more susceptible than young adults to memory illusions, and imply that one or more mechanisms underlying the revelation effect are age sensitive.
The revelation effect is the tendency to give higher proportions of positive responses to recognition test items that are distorted. Two plausible explanations of this response bias were tested. The 1st 3 experiments showed that the sense of familiarity leading to the revelation effect is not created because of the extra time or effort spent on the distorted items. The magnitude of the effect was neither correlated with the time taken to reveal the distorted items nor influenced by the Ss' efforts in revealing such items. The next 4 experiments showed that the sense of familiarity is not created because of priming of target words during the act of revealing. High-frequency words (presumed to be more highly associated to other words) and categorically or orthographically similar words did not elicit greater revelation effects than those elicited with low-frequency words and categorically or orthographically dissimilar words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Replication is made of L. J. Jacoby and K. Whitehouse's (see record
1989-31882-001) findings that short duration context stimuli induced false recognition of test stimuli when the 2 events matched one another, but that the reverse was true of longer duration context stimuli (i.e., matching led to fewer false, as well as true, old responses). Although they claimed their results supported unconscious perception, short exposure in the present article was clearly supraliminal, that is, 80 undergraduates judged the relation between context and test stimuli far in excess of chance. Two specific, nonsubliminal mechanisms that could produce the Jacoby-Whitehouse effect are that lengthening the context stimulus duration makes it more likely that test and context stimuli will be perceived as a group; form an integral, rather than separable, composite; or both. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Proposes the following criterion for calling a memory task redintegrative: In free recall the probability should be high that an S who recalls part of a unit recall the whole unit. 4 tasks that met the criterion and 2 tasks that did not were examined. The redintegrative tasks showed that whatever part of a unit was best remembered in free recall was also the best cue for eliciting the whole unit; it had the greatest redintegrative power. This consistency appeared in memory for single words, phrases, sentences, and 2-digit numbers. Results are related to the issue of associative symmetry and to other matters of verbal behavior. (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A schizophrenic patient with different forms of experiences of inappropriate familiarity is described. The authors discuss traumatic experiences as aetiological factors in déjà vu experiences and reduplicative paramnesia. Finally, the differential diagnostic problem in psychotic and dissociative phenomena is stressed.
the déjà vu experience is a subjective phenomenon that has been described in many novels and poems. Here we review over 20 literary descriptions. These accounts are consistent with the data obtained from psychiatric literature, including various phenomenological, aetiological and psychopathogenetic aspects of the déjà vu experience. The explanations, explicitly formulated by creative authors, include reincarnation, dreams, organic factors and unconscious memories. Not infrequently, an association with defence or organic factors is demonstrable on the basis of psychoanalytic or clinical psychiatric interpretation. The authors recommend that psychiatrists be encouraged to overstep the limits of psychiatric literature and read prose and poetry as well.
The déjà vu experience is a common phenomenon, occurring in pathological as well as nonpathological conditions. It has been defined as any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past. The authors discuss the epidemiologic data, clinical features, and etiology of the phenomenon of déjà vu. They also review the different hypotheses on the psychopathogenesis of the déjà vu experience and introduce an explanation based on the hologram as a mnestic model.
The aim of the present study was to outline the development of the deja vu-research and to present an own study about the occurence of deja vu-experiences and their qualitative features. Methodological problems and different explanation models were presented for this study and other recent studies. A German version of theInventory for Deja Vu Experiences Assessment (IDEA) (Sno et al., 1994) was used among a sample of 224 college students and the frequency of different experiences and their relation to age and gender was shown. The results show that deja vu experiences are more closely related to day dreams than to jamais vu experiences, which are associated to de personalization and derealization experiences. Moreover, deja vu-experiences and day dreams were found more often than jamais, vu experiences as Well as: depersonalization and derealization experiences. The results were discussed on the basis of the meaning of deja vu for the personality.
Some dreams are presented which in content seem closely related to the immediate situation facing the dreamer at the time of recalling the dream. The question is raised if the sense of pastness of such dreams is not like that of the déjà vu. An attempt is made to correlate the occurrence of dreaming and the déjà vu phenomenon in 58 patients seen in psychotherapy. All 10 who reported as not dreaming also reported as not having experienced the déjà vu; dreaming generally correlated with experiencing the déjà vu. These findings are discussed from the point of view that dreaming may also be a product of the awakening or awake state.
Random samples of dormitory residents at three colleges in Xi'an, People's Republic of China, were polled regarding frequency of deja vu, night paralysis, extrasensory perception, communication with the dead, out-of-body experience, and belief in a "sixth sense." The Chinese students (N = 314) revealed incidence of these experiences, and faith in a "sixth sense," equivalent to, or higher than those found in Western populations. Since Chinese students engage in no formal religious practices, this finding suggests that such experiences are not totally a product of religious faith, but are universal in some sense.
While amnesia literally means loss of memory, in clinical practice it has a more limited application. It refers to a person's verbal statement that he does not remember a particular event, person, place, or period of time. A further definition is that the situation is one with which the patient should be familiar as to where he lives, the kind of work he does, and why he came to the hospital. The term is not used to characterize poor performance on a memory test, or for loss of memory for actions (apraxia) or reading (alexia). Patients with amnesia may do well on standard memory tests and have no difficulty in reproducing previously learned acts.In the literature, amnesia following injury to the brain has been attributed to many types of neural deficit representing thinking in various disciplines and emphasizing certain aspects of the clinical picture.
Using national sample data from the General Social Surveys, this study assesses cultural source theories of reported paranormal
experiences. The reported paranormal experiences of extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, contact with the dead, and mysticism,
but not déjà vu, are found to have an invariant and stable factor structure across the 1984, 1988, and 1989 General Social
Survey data. Déjà vu is more frequent among younger and more highly educated respondents, but it is unaffected by sex, race,
income, marital status, and religious preference differences. Other reported paranormal experiences are higher among women
but are unaffected by age, race, education, income, marital status, and religious preference differences. The effects of age
and education on déjà vu and the effect of sex on other reported paranormal experiences are consistent across 1984, 1988,
and 1989 General Social Survey data. The findings of this study suggest that cultural source theories and deprivation theory
have little empirical support in explaining reported paranormal experiences.
This review is based on neuropathological contributions which have either a direct or indirect relation to mental disease or are of major general interest. Notwithstanding these restrictions the field which had to be covered remains vast, and no claim can be made that the survey of the literature is complete, although it is hoped that it is, to some extent, representative. In order to counteract this defect, recent reviews or comprehensive papers on special problems have been recommended, whenever they were available. They will enable the reader to trace references which for lack of space had to be suppressed. For the same reason of economy, a number of quotations have been made from reviews. This does not mean that the original papers have not been consulted.
Significant relationships were found between creativity and the belief in psychical phenomena in 110 undergraduates in a creativity class. Scores on a test of belief in ESP were related to creativity in class projects, to scores on the What Kind of Person Are You? test, and to scores on the Personal-Social Motivation Inventory. Sensation-Seeking Scale results correlated significantly with ratings of creativity in class projects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Provides a theoretical motivation for the empirically tested operational definition for
déjà vu, namely, any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past. Reasons are given for the rejection within the definition of other terms, and déjà vu is differentiated from flashbacks, pseudopresentiment, actualized precognition, and cryptomnesia. The 21 kinds of déjà vu, including 10 new terms introduced by the author, are mentioned. The metaphorical journalistic use of the term is briefly discussed. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined childhood traumas and parental encouragement of imagination as correlates of the occurrence of out-of-body experiences (OBE) and déjà-type experiences via a postal survey of 106 students (aged 19–55 yrs). Results show that, in comparison to nonexperients, Ss who experienced an OBE had higher prevalence during childhood of intrafamilial sexual abuse, death or serious illness of a close friend, extrafamilial sexual abuse, numerous and substantial periods of isolation from friends or playmates, and assault. Intrafamilial physical abuse during childhood was a predictor of déjà-type experiences. The findings are discussed with particular reference to studies of dissociative experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A nationwide sample of members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) was surveyed in 1975–1976 regarding psi and psi-related experiences. A polling instrument developed and used by J. Palmer (see record
1980-06507-001) in a survey of townspeople and college students in Charlottesville, Virginia, was used. Over 400 persons responded to the ARE questionnaire. Since ARE members represent a special population of individuals attracted to such an organization because of their personal interest in psi, the high incidence of claimed psi experiences in the poll was not surprising. This atypical sample differed somewhat from Palmer's sample, which was more representative of the general population, but numerous correspondences were observed, including a tendency to report many occurrences of a particular type of experience and to have more than just 1 or 2 types of experience. Mystical experiences, dream recall, and lucid dreams were strong correlates of psi experiences, while demographic variables were not. Several internally consistent indices of psi experiences were constructed on the theory that a general psi sensitivity trait exists. These measures revealed high multiple correlations with predictor variables. The strongest correlate was a composite measure of mystical experience. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Discusses the incidence of the déjà vu experience as being dependent on the operational definitions of déjà vu, the measuring instrument, and the recall and recognition of the déjà vu experience by the S. 16 studies of déjà vu are reported chronologically, and it is argued that only one used adequate sampling and that 2 studies by the present author (1979, 1981) were the only ones that used an adequate screening questionnaire for déjà vu. A more adequate study of incidence should use a large, randomized sample for the general population in a prospective study of incidence and frequency in the individual. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
115 UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ANSWERED QUESTIONNAIRES ON FEELINGS EXPERIENCED BEFORE DREAMING, HALLUCINATIONS, EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (ESP), AND BEING "OUT OF YOUR BODY." NEITHER SEX NOR ACADEMIC TRAINING INFLUENCED RESPONSES. ESP WAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO THE STUDENTS, AND SOME CLAIMED TO HAVE THIS ABILITY; AT LEAST 30% INDICATED BELIEF IN ESP POSSIBILITIES. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although psychiatric literature abounds in allusions to the phenomenon of ‘déjà vu’, few communications were devoted to an analysis of this interesting psychological state. After a short review of the ‘déjà vu’ conditions, the author proposes a model consisting of two channels. Under normal conditions, the first deals with the reading of information already stored, and the second, the engrammic channel, will store future information. The ‘déjà vu’ condition is produced when the reading channel and the engrammic channel meet in the same area. This mechanism can explain the various etiological possibilities of ‘déjà vu’, ranging from more or less ordinary cases such as fatigue or anguish to the most important etiology which is a psychotic process.
Caucasian-American, African-American, Chinese, and Japanese college students were polled regarding déjà vu, night paralysis, ESP, contact with the dead, out-of-body experiences, and belief in ESP. Hypotheses derived from the cultural source theory suggest that religiosity and scientific training affect the reporting of these episodes. Although the incidence of reported experiences varied cross-culturally, knowledge of a respondent's religious preference, self-reported religiosity, or scientific training provided little predictive ability regarding frequency of anomalous experience or belief in ESP. An alternative model suggests that dissociative faculties and related traits regulate the incidence of anomalous experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments on the “recovery effect” are reported. In Exp. I, Ss' recall of a briefly flashed stimulus was tested before and after fantasy generation. Postfantasy recall was greater than prefantasy recall to an extent that significantly exceeded corresponding increases in recall obtained by control Ss. One group of control Ss did not generate fantasy, while the other produced fantasy but copied an experimental S's first recall attempt instead of seeing the stimulus. When the number of responses emitted in postfantasy recall was equalized for all groups, however, the difference in recall increments disappeared between the fantasy and nonfantasy group, suggesting that fantasy augments response rates rather than sensitivity to the stimulus trace. Exp. II confirmed this inference. A recognition indicator with confidence ratings was employed, from which ROC functions were extracted, allowing direct measures of pre- and postfantasy sensitivity. No sensitivity increments were found in either the fantasy or the nonfantasy group, though fantasy affected confidence ratings and, therefore, hit and false alarm rates.
Among 104 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy treated in our clinic between 1992–1995, thirteen patients with repeated dreamy states were evaluated for affective manifestations of dreamy states and their relationship with psychotic states. The types of dreamy states were classified as déjà vu, jamais vu and reminiscence. The affective experiences during dreamy states were evaluated as positive, negative or neutral. As a result, seven patients had déjà vu and/or reminiscence: seizure manifestations in four of these patients were affectively evaluated as positive (familiar and/or pleasurable), and three as neutral. Six cases had experience of jamais vu: five of them were affectively evaluated as negative (mostly fear), and one as neutral.
Psychiatrically, only four patients with jamais vu accompanied by feelings of fear had mental disorders: a chronic paranoid‐hallucinatory state in two cases, a chronic paranoid state in one case, and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms in one case. Other patients who had positive or neutral affect did not demonstrate psychiatric disturbances. Thus, most patients with jamais vu were accompanied by negative affect of fear, and those patients with jamais vu tended to show more psychotic symptoms than those with reminiscence or déjà vu, which were associated with positive or neutral affects. Based on these results, we discuss the possibility that repeated negative feelings associated with jamais vu are one of the causes for developing epileptic psychoses.
An explanatory mechanism is discussed that leads to a so-called sufficiency theory of certain psychological phenomena, such as standard recognition as opposed to déjà vu, imagined novel experience, jamais vu, disturbed recognition, incorrect recognition, and hallucination—experiences that have not been explained before in a satisfactory scientific manner. Sufficiency theory, in general, means that a proposed structure of plausible mechanisms is sufficient but may not be uniquely necessary to explain, understand, and predict the behavior of the phenomenon under study.
Three sisters had recurrent dreams of typical theme with identical imagery in some instances. Their father also had painful dreams of typical theme, while their paternal great grandmother had disturbed sleep with presumed painful dreams. All three sisters had phobias and headaches. One of Sister 3's children had headaches and another a convulsion. Thus, symptomatology involved four generations. The EEGs in all three sisters had bilaterally abnormal patterns, maximal in temporal and occipital areas. During sleep, abnormalities favored Stage 1, Stage 2, and REM. The waking EEG reported in the son showed similar abnormalities. The frequent typical dreams of the present kindred may reflect a cerebral dysrhythmic factor. This is supported by the EEG abnormalities and, in one instance, a convulsion. Temporal systems may be involved in view of the dream disturbance and, in two of the sisters, the deja vu episodes. The etiology of the kindred's symptomatology is most economically explained on a genetic basis. A dominant mode of inheritance of a cerebral alteration (dysrhythmic factor) through four generations is hypothesized.
A prolonged period of depersonalization resolved in this 16-year-old boy with only supportive therapy. Reasons for the depersonalization and withholding of other treatment are discussed. Observations are shared of the very intriguing phenomenon of derealization and allied conditions, psychiatric syndromes which are appearing with increasing frequency among so-called "normal adolescents" who indulge in drugs or other experiences which alter the state of consciousness, and among adolescents who survive disasters or harrowing experiences.
The less an individual is conscious of time, the more likely he is to be free of psychopathology. Under normal circumstances, time remains implicit and largely unconscious; but it tends to dominate consciousness in schizophrenia and borderline conditions as well as in normal people under stress. This exaggerated awareness of the sense of time is experienced as an affectless state. When consciousness becomes dominated by affect, the sense of time speeds up and then recedes, until all awareness of time is lost. Distortions in the sense of time reflect defensive operations with reference to unconscious fantasies that are characteristic of one's internal object relationships. Depending on the effectiveness of the defense in blocking the destructive intent and allowing for the fulfillment of the libidinal yearnings of such fantasies, time distortions tend to be experienced as pleasant (creative, blissful, ecstatic) or painful (boring, frightening, depressive).
The belief that one can read others' minds has long been considered a symptom of psychosis, despite reports in the parapsychological literature of veridical telepathy. All patients admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit were screened for paranormal beliefs, and those claiming telepathic abilities were tested in a free-response ESP task. Eighteen per cent of the inpatient population claimed telepathic abilities; of the nine patients who completed the task, none performed above chance expectations. Higher frequencies of paranormal experiences than those reported previously in the psychiatric literature were attributed to the context of the study. Schneider's first rank symptoms and a belief in telepathy discriminated schizophrenics more reliably than other paranormal experiences. Possible psychodynamics of delusions of telepathy were discussed in view of the predominance of women and younger men reporting them, as were the possible effects of such research on patients' delusions.
Five episodes of micropsia, which were precipitated by oedipal masturbatory fantasies, are described in the analysis of an adult male. Traumatic visual events and testicular retractions during the oedipal and latency years predisposed the ego functions concerned with visual perception to later involvement in conflict. The micropsia itself is seen as defending against castration anxiety by means of a series of unconscious fantasies of denial. These fantasies cause a regression to an earlier mode of visual perception (and to micropsia) characteristic of latency. The defensive modifications of the functions of the ego itself seen in micropsia are closely allied to those seen in the dèjá vu experience and in depersonalization.
It is proposed that certain deja vu experiences may be the result of a sudden partial decathexis of the current situation, and a concomitant recathexis of primitive experiences which readily allow certain symbolic representations to force themselves into conscious awareness as a discrete and circumscribed experience in the perceptual ego, carrying with it only a strong sense of the familiar rather than discrete memories. The drive investment that cathects the current situation or object to be 'familiarized' (deja vu) may be derived in substantial part from the 'face gestalt configuration' of the symbiotic and, later, nonsymbiotic mother, described as an early crucial organizer of the psyche. Certain deja vu experiences may be initiated by anxiety (often castration anxiety) induced by the current reality situation. They could but not necessarily be dynamically similar or related structurally to other deja phenomena. It is speculated that there may be certain dynamic parallels between the deja vu, the dream screen of Lewin, and the Isakower phenomenon.
AMNESIC agents, such as electroconvulsive stimulation, can cause loss of
memory for events that occurred before treatment1. Usually as
the interval between learning and convulsive treatment is increased, the
resulting retrograde amnesia is diminished1-3. This temporal
gradient of retrograde amnesia can sometimes cover several
years4. Clinical descriptions of the amnesic syndrome suggest
that information about the temporal sequence of events can be more
severely impaired than other aspects of memory5,6. Thus, an
amnesic patient may describe a past event accurately but be unable to
report when the event occurred. We have administered a new remote memory
test based on former one-season television programmes to psychiatric
patients receiving bilateral electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and report
here that memory for temporal order is markedly affected by ECT. ECT
caused retrograde amnesia for order information about programmes
broadcast from 1 to ~7 yr before treatment, but not for programmes
broadcast from 8-17 yr before treatment.