Unraveling the Mystery of D?j? Vu
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When you have a vague feeling that you have already experienced the present situation before, it is called déjà vu. Various studies indicate that 50 to 90 percent of us can recall having had at least one such déjà vu incident in our lives. A few people sense the inverse of déjà vu, called jamais vu. When they encounter a familiar person or place, they nonetheless insist they have never seen the individual or scene before. For much of the 20th century, psychiatrists espoused a Freudian-based explanation of déjà vu – that it is an attempt to recall suppressed memories. This ‘paramnesia’ theory suggests that the original event was somehow linked to distress and was being suppressed from conscious recognition, no longer accessible to memory. Therefore, a similar occurrence later could not elicit clear recall yet would somehow ‘remind’ the ego of the original event, creating an uneasy familiarity.
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Many who have experienced déjà vu share the conviction that the phenomenon must arise from some mystical power or as a sign of a past life and reincarnation. They reason that because logical thought and clear perception reign immediately before and after an episode, some paranormal force must be the only plausible explanation. Scientists, unsatisfied with such conjecture, have long sought clues about the physical causes behind déjà vu, but investigation has proved elusive, because déjà vu never announces itself in advance. Scientists have been forced to rely mostly on the recollections of test subjects. But enough accounts have been examined to allow experts to start defining what déjà vu is and why it arises.
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Cognitive psychologists have paid special attention to the unconscious process which is responsible for so-called implicit, or nondeclarative, memories. These are artefacts that we have long forgotten and do not retrieve consciously, although they have not been erased from our neural networks. Consider seeing an old cupboard at a flea market, and suddenly it seems strangely familiar, as does the act of viewing it. What you may have forgotten – or, rather, cannot retrieve – is that when you were a young child, your grandparents had a cupboard just like this one in their home. A related theory implies that we may perceive a person, place or event as familiar if at some earlier time in our lives we were exposed to just a partial aspect of the experience, even if it was within a different context. Perhaps, when you were young, your parents stopped at a flea market while on vacation and one vendor was selling old kitchen cupboards. Or perhaps you smell an odour that was also present at that flea market you attended as a child. A single element, only partially registered consciously, can trigger a feeling of familiarity by erroneously transferring itself to the present setting.
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These assumptions, which are founded on the unconscious processing of information, ultimately place responsibility for déjà vu on gaps in our attention system. Let’s say you’re driving down a hectic street and are concentrating on the flow of traffic. An old lady is standing on the sidewalk; you see her in your peripheral vision, but you are not really consciously aware of her. A second later you have to stop at a traffic light. Now you have the time to look around. As you glance at the old woman, stepping with difficulty off the kerb into the crosswalk, leaning heavily on her cane, she suddenly seems familiar, even though you don’t believe you have ever seen her before and you know you have not been at this intersection before. The first image of the woman, perceived during your distracted state, was immediately followed by a second image when you were fully alert. Because the information was received without conscious attention only shortly before, it is now falsely interpreted as a long-term memory.
