Its Like Deja Vu All Over Again

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"It'southward like déjà vu all over again," famed New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra purportedly exclaimed as he witnessed his teammates Mickey Curtain and Roger Maris hit back-to-back dwelling runs. Of form, this isn't what about of us mean by the expression "déjà vu." All the same, that eerie feel of a novel outcome or location feeling familiar is quite common.

Despite the spooky feeling it elicits, in that location's nothing supernatural or paranormal about déjà vu. Psychologists now have a fairly skillful understanding of the memory processes involved in producing it. They tin even elicit déjà vu feelings in the laboratory.

Often, when people feel déjà vu, they likewise get a feeling of premonition. In other words, they non only sense that the situation is familiar, they besides feel they know what's coming next. This association between feelings of déjà vu and premonition is what Colorado Land University psychologists Anne Cleary and Alexander Claxton explored in a series of experiments.

A common situation in which déjà vu occurs is when a person enters a novel location, simply feels the place is somehow familiar. The déjà vu feel occurs considering some attribute of the novel situation does in fact coincide with something the person has encountered earlier.

For example, yous walk into your friend'south apartment for the first time and get an eerie sense of having been there before. It could be that the organization of the furniture resembles that of another room you're familiar with. Although you can't precisely recall that previous experience, there'southward enough of a memory trace for a sense of familiarity to occur. Information technology'due south this kind of incomplete memory recall that psychologists take advantage of when they try to elicit déjà vu experiences in the laboratory.

Incidentally, déjà vu equally a retentiveness phenomenon is related to the very mutual "tip-of-the-tongue" feel: There's a word you desire to employ, just you lot tin can't quite get it out. Yous know you lot know it, and you lot might even exist about to retrieve some aspects of it, such as how it starts or how it ends. And if someone tells you the word, you know correct away that'southward the 1. Both déjà vu and tip of the tongue are examples of incomplete retention recall, in that each creates a sense of familiarity fifty-fifty though the complete retentivity tin can't be brought to consciousness.

Because déjà vu is an incomplete memory recall for an upshot, it's quite reasonable that a feeling of premonition would occur with information technology. After all, if you sentinel a flick for a second time, yous often take a good sense of what's coming adjacent, because y'all've experienced it before. But of course, life isn't a movie that you can spotter over and over again. Each life effect is unique, even though it may bear superficial similarities to other events y'all've experienced.

Yet, as Cleary and Claxton indicate out, a feeling of knowing what's coming side by side during a déjà vu feel makes sense when y'all consider what memory is for. Although autobiographical retention records events in our lives, it's not at all virtually preserving the past. Instead, the brain stores memories in order to make predictions about future events. For instance, the last time I complimented my wife when she wore her red dress, she gave me a buss. She's wearing that ruddy clothes now, and so maybe if I tell how dainty it looks on her, she'll osculation me once more. That's the logic behind autobiographical memory.

To induce déjà vu sensations in the laboratory, the researchers asked participants to navigate through a series of virtual reality environments, such as a junkyard and an aquarium. After exploring 16 different virtual reality scenes, the experiment moved into the test phase. This fourth dimension, half of the environments were completely novel, but the other half were like in layout to a scene they'd previously navigated through. For instance, in the test phase, the participants moved through a hedge garden in which the hedges were distributed in exactly the same configuration as the piles of junk in the junkyard.

At a crucial indicate in the navigation, the virtual reality froze, and the participants responded to a series of questions. Outset, they stated whether the scene felt familiar or not, and if and so, which previous scene the current 1 reminded them of. They besides rated their sense of familiarity on a 0-10 scale. Next, they indicated whether they felt they needed to turn left or right at this juncture, and they rated their certainty on a 0-10 calibration. Finally, they were explicitly asked whether the scene had given them a déjà vu experience.

To summarize, the researchers were asking the following questions in these experiments:

• Do similar spatial layouts evoke déjà vu experiences?
• Do déjà vu experiences regularly lead to feelings of premonition?
• If so, are those premonitions accurate?

Hither are the results:

• Sometimes, participants were able to recognize that the novel scene had a layout similar to a previous scene. For example, some indicated that the hedge garden reminded them of the junkyard. This means that we tin can pick up on configurational similarities betwixt ane spatial location and another.
• Participants were more than probable to have a déjà vu experience when they were navigating through a novel scene that was configurationally similar to 1 they'd moved through before. In other words, even though they couldn't explicitly say which previous scene was similar to the present one, they still experienced a sense of familiarity. Thus, the data support the standard explanation for déjà vu.
• Participants were far more confident about their choice of turning left or right when they either indicated that they recalled the previous similar scene or said that they had a déjà vu experience. In contrast, if they said the scene was unfamiliar, they had low conviction in their prediction. This event seems to simply exist commonsense—but….
• The strength of the participants' confidence in their determination to turn left or correct had no relation to what the correct response was. In other words, their ability to predict a left or correct plough was at risk levels, fifty-fifty in situations they had navigated before.

To summarize, similar spatial layouts do sometimes elicit déjà vu experiences, which in turn oft trigger feelings of premonition. Thus, the researchers successfully recreated in the lab what people often report in their everyday life. Simply despite people'southward potent feelings that they know what's coming side by side, their actual ability to predict the future was poor in this written report, no incertitude due to the overload of like environments they'd only navigated through.

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Feelings of déjà vu and premonition seem chilling, fifty-fifty paranormal. Just when we understand the common tricks our retentiveness plays on the states, there'due south nothing unusual about either of these eerie experiences. As a cognitive psychologist, I've studied retention for over two decades. So when I started reading Cleary and Claxton'south article, I already had a pretty practiced thought what the results were going to be. It was like déjà vu all over once again.

References

Cleary, A. M. & Claxton, A. B. (2018). Déjà vu: An illusion of prediction. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/095679761774301877/09567976177430

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201804/it-s-d-j-vu-all-over-again

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