This new study just revealed some bummer news about déjà vu

KRISTINE FELLIZAR
Hello Giggle
March 2, 2018

Anyone who’s ever experienced déjà vu can tell you that it’s kind of a creepy thing. Feeling like you’ve seen a situation in a dream before actually living it in real life can have you believing you’re psychic. So is there some kind of otherworldly, supernatural force at play here or what? Unfortunately, no. According to a new study from Colorado State University, déjà vu has nothing to do with fortune-telling abilities you may or may not have. It’s actually more boring than that (sorry!).

Anne Cleary, a cognitive psychologist at Colorado State University, found that déjà vu is nothing more than a “memory phenomenon.” Essentially, your brain just tricks you into thinking you knew what was going to happen or that you’ve been somewhere before, even if you haven’t. It gives you that “feeling” because that’s all it is. Déjà vu is just a feeling.

In order to make this conclusion, Cleary conducted a series of virtual reality tests. Participants were shown virtual reality scenarios using the Sims video game featuring locations like a junkyard or a garden.

Participants were walked through each scene while being asked to report if they were experiencing déjà vu.

As the study went on, participants were given different scenes that were spatially mapped, and they were walked through in a similar way to the previous ones. So when researchers asked if participants could predict what the last turn would be, some confidently said they could because they felt like they’d been in that scenario before. Some would answer correctly, but many would answer incorrectly.

In fact, people who felt déjà vu were “no more likely to actually recall the correct answer” than if they had just chosen randomly. So, unfortunately, experiencing déjà vu doesn’t necessarily mean you’re psychic. People were simply able to manifest a feeling of déjà vu, which made them feel far more confident in their answers.

According to Cleary, the reason why people come up with “psychic theories about déjà vu is the fact that they’re mysterious and subjective experiences.”

"Even scientists who don’t believe in past lives have whispered to me, ‘Do you have an explanation for why I have this?’" the psychologist said in a CSU article. "People look for explanations in different places. If you’re a scientist, you’re looking for the logical reason for why you just had this really weird experience.”

Well, now we know. Déjà vu is all about feeling like you can predict the future, as opposed to actually being able to. Bummer.

https://hellogiggles.com/news/new-study-revealed-bummer-news-deja-vu/

Déjà vu and feelings of prediction: They’re just feelings

Anne Manning
Colorodo State University
COLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCES
March 1, 2018

Most people can relate to the prickly, unsettling experience of déjà vu: When you’re in a new situation, but you feel like you’ve been there before.

For some, that eerie feeling has an added twist: In that moment, they feel like they know what’s going to happen next. Say you’re walking up a stairwell for the first time, but it feels familiar, like a dream state – so much so that you think, “At the top of the stairs, there will be a Picasso on the left.”

Anne Cleary, a cognitive psychologist at Colorado State University, has spent the last several years establishing déjà vu as a memory phenomenon – a trick of the brain akin to when a word is on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t retrieve it.

Building on previous experiments, Cleary has now shown that the prescient feeling that sometimes accompanies déjà vu is just that ­– a feeling. But it sure feels real.

A professor in CSU’s Department of Psychology, Cleary has a new paper in Psychological Science, co-authored by former graduate student Alexander Claxton, detailing how they recreated déjà vu in human subjects in order to examine the feeling of premonition during the déjà vu state. According to their results, participants were no more likely to actually be able to tell the future than if they were blindly guessing. But during déjà vu, they felt like they could – which seems to mirror real life.

Cleary is one of just a handful of déjà vu researchers in the world. Ever since she read Alan S. Brown’s book, The Déjà Vu Experience, she’s been fascinated by the phenomenon and wanted to experimentally unmask why it occurs.

Supernatural reputation

Déjà vu has a supernatural reputation. Is it recall of a past life, people have asked? Scientists, though, tend to attack questions through a more logical lens.

Cleary and others have shown that déjà vu is likely a memory phenomenon. It can occur when someone encounters a scenario that’s similar to an actual memory, but they fail to recall the memory. For example, Cleary and collaborators have shown that déjà vu can be prompted by a scene that is spatially similar to a prior one.

“We cannot consciously remember the prior scene, but our brains recognize the similarity,” Cleary said. “That information comes through as the unsettling feeling that we’ve been there before, but we can’t pin down when or why.”

Cleary has also studied the phenomenon known as “tip of the tongue” – that sensation when a word is just out of reach of recall. Both tip of the tongue and déjà vu are examples of what researchers call “metamemory” phenomena. They reflect a degree of subjective awareness of our own memories. Another example is the memory process known as familiarity, Cleary says ­– like when you see a familiar face out of context and can’t place it.

“My working hypothesis is that déjà vu is a particular manifestation of familiarity,” Cleary said. “You have familiarity in a situation when you feel you shouldn’t have it, and that’s why it’s so jarring, so striking.”

Since she began publicizing her results about déjà vu as a memory phenomenon more than 10 years ago, people around the world started responding. You’re wrong, they argued. It’s not just a memory. I also feel that I know what’s going to happen next.

Cleary herself doesn’t relate to this feeling, but she felt the need to suss out the claims. She read a study from the 1950s by neurologist Wilder Penfield, in which he stimulated parts of patients’ brains and had them talk about what they were experiencing. In at least one case, when a patient reported feeling déjà vu upon stimulation, Penfield documented concurrent feelings of premonition. Hmm, Cleary thought. There’s something to this.

Her hypothesis: If déjà vu is a memory phenomenon, is the feeling of prediction also a memory phenomenon? Cleary was further motivated by a recent shift in memory research, asserting that human memory is adapted for being able to predict the future, for survival purposes, rather than simply recollecting the past.

Recreating déjà vu in the lab

In previously published research, Cleary and her research group created virtual reality scenarios using the Sims virtual world video game. They made scenes – like a junkyard, or a hedge garden – that later spatially mapped to previously witnessed, but thematically unrelated scenes. For example:

deja vu scenes

While immersed in a virtual reality test scene, participants were asked to report whether they were experiencing déjà vu. Subjects were more likely to report déjà vu among scenes that spatially mapped onto earlier witnessed scenes. These foundational studies mirrored the real-life experience of “feeling like you’ve been there before,” but being unable to recall why.

In her most recent experiments, Cleary created dynamic video scenes in which the participant was moved through a series of turns. Later, they were moved through scenes spatially mapped to the previous ones, to induce the déjà vu, but at the last moment, they were asked what the final turn should be. In those moments, the researchers asked the participants if they were experiencing déjà vu, and whether they felt they knew what the direction of the next turn should be.

Cleary and her team were intrigued to note that about half the respondents felt a strong premonition during déjà vu. But they were no more likely to actually recall the correct answer – the turn they had previously seen in a spatially mapped, different scene – than if they were to choose randomly. In other words, participants who had the feeling of prediction were pretty confident they were right, but they usually weren’t.

Conclusion: no, déjà vu doesn’t help us predict the future. But it can manifest as a feeling that we can.

Cleary and her lab are conducting follow-up experiments now that even further probe this feeling of prediction. They wonder whether it’s the familiarity process that drives the feeling. They want to know whether people experience hindsight bias – that is, whether people will be convinced they knew what was going to happen, after the fact.

“I think the reason people come up with psychic theories about déjà vu is that they are these mysterious, subjective experiences,” Cleary said. “Even scientists who don’t believe in past lives have whispered to me, ‘Do you have an explanation for why I have this?’ People look for explanations in different places. If you’re a scientist, you’re looking for the logical reason for why you just had this really weird experience.”

Cleary gave a 2017 TedxCSU talk on her latest déjà vu research.

https://natsci.source.colostate.edu/deja-vu-feelings-prediction-theyre-just-feelings/

How one researcher is studying that tingly, universal, unmistakable and unsettling phenomenon known as déjà vu

Spatial resemblance + forgetting they’d been in a space with a
 similar layout = déjà vu.

Lauren Schenkman
Ideas.Ted.Com
Jun 16, 2017


Déjà vu — we all know it when we feel it, but can researchers make it happen in someone else? Psychology professor Anne Cleary figured out a way.

Most of us know the feeling. You’re introduced to someone, you watch a new movie, or you walk down a street in an unfamiliar city, and then suddenly, you’re struck by the uncanny sensation that you’ve been through this all before. You know it’s impossible — there’s no way you could have encountered this person, film or street — yet it all seems so familiar. We call this “déjà vu,” a French phrase meaning “already seen,” first used in the early 20th century. Some researchers estimate that two-thirds of the population has experienced this phenomenon, which also may be accompanied by the conviction that you know what will happen next.

Ever since humans were first unnerved by déjà vu, they’ve probably wondered what was behind it. A surfacing of psychic ability? A memory of a dream? A trick of the imagination? Anne Cleary, professor of psychology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins (TEDxCSU Talk: Deja vu), fell down the rabbit hole of speculation after reading The The Déjà Vu Experience, an academic book by Southern Methodist University psychologist Alan Brown. It covered several intriguing scientific hypotheses, including that déjà vu may be produced by random jolts of stimulation in the brain or by the brain re-playing information it had recorded just seconds before. But all the theories seemed to be just that — theories that were untested. Surveying them, Cleary says, “left me with the feeling that we were lacking in direct empirical evidence.” She decided to devise her own experiment, and it no doubt helped that she is familiar with studying slippery tricks of the mind — she has previously researched the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (where the word you want to say is frustratingly just out of reach).

Cleary was most interested in the hypothesis that déjà vu occurs when we encounter a scene that’s similar to a prior one that we can’t consciously remember. Our brains spot the resemblance, however, and that information is transmitted to us as a tingly feeling. Cleary’s friend Elizabeth Loftus (TED Talk: How reliable is your memory?), who is a memory researcher, had told her about how she once went to a woman’s house for the first time and was struck by a déjà vu so powerful that she believed she knew what was around the corner of the house (and she did). After a while, Loftus realized she had been there by chance years ago when she attended a wedding reception as the guest of a friend. When she asked her hostess about the event, the woman found an album with photos from that day — and they included Loftus.

How do you create déjà vu in the lab, to learn more about it? Using life-simulation video game The Sims, which allows people to build virtual spaces and rooms, Cleary and researchers constructed pairs of spaces that differed in outward details but were nearly identical in spatial configuration. Among them were a doctor’s office reception area that had a similar layout to an aquarium, a bowling alley that resembled a subway station, and a store laid out like a bedroom.

In the first part of one of Cleary’s déjà vu experiments, subjects — wearing virtual reality goggles — entered the game in one room (for instance, the aquarium). They stayed there for a few seconds, and then researchers zapped them into another space. Each space had its own distinct layout. In the second part of the experiment, subjects were zapped through another series of spaces, some entirely new and some with layouts that mimicked spaces from the first part. For each of the spaces in the second half of the experiment, subjects were asked several questions, including, Had they been in this scene before? Were they experiencing any feelings of déjà vu? Did this scene resemble a previous scene? And if it did, could they identify the previous scene or describe it?

Spatial resemblance + forgetting they’d been in a space with a similar layout = déjà vu. For example, when subjects who’d been in the bowling alley entered the subway station but failed to recognize it had the same layout as the bowling alley, they were more likely to report feeling déjà vu. And the degree of similarity affected how intensely they experienced that prickly sensation. In the second part of the experiment, some subjects were zapped into one of the same spaces — not just a spatial replica but the exact same space — that they had visited in the first part. If they forgot they had been there, they were even more likely to say they felt déjà vu. In general, the experimental subjects who reported déjà vu had no conscious awareness they’d been in similar-looking places. “We seem to have access to the feeling, but not much else,” Cleary says.

She also examined why people often feel, during a déjà vu experience, that they know what they will see next. Using the same scenes from The Sims, Cleary created videos, shot to convey a first-person perspective, that traveled through a series of virtual rooms. Since she wanted to be able to control the gaze of her subjects, the participants — a different group from the ones in the previous experiment — watched videos on computer monitors without VR headsets. For the first part of the experiment, they watched a video that walked them through virtual rooms by taking a particular sequence of turns. In the second part, they watched a different set of videos in which the camera took an identical set of turns through scenes. Half of the time, those scenes spatially resembled scenes from the first video.

So, in the first part, a subject would watch a video of walking into the subway station, looking right, taking one step forward, then glancing left. In the second part, the subject would watch a video that followed the exact same path — entering, looking right, then taking a step forward — but in the bowling alley (the subway station’s layout twin). However, the second video stopped right before the final move. Next, subjects were asked if they were experiencing déjà vu and if the scene reminded them of an earlier one. (The results, which have not yet been published, appeared to match those of the previous experiment in that subjects were much more likely to report déjà vu when they were in a scene that mapped onto a previous one they couldn’t recall.) Finally, subjects were asked: How strongly did they feel that they knew what the next turn would be? And what did they think the next turn would be? Cleary was not surprised to learn that subjects who experienced déjà vu frequently reported being able to predict the next turn.

But despite their belief in their predictive ability, subjects were frequently wrong. In fact, their accuracy was no better than if they’d chosen randomly. Nevertheless, “people have this strong feeling that they know the direction of the next turn despite not having that predictive ability,” Cleary says. “Maybe this happens because what they’re experiencing feels familiar, so they’re mistaking that feeling for confirming evidence they’re right.” She is designing an experiment to test that hypothesis.

The takeaway: We can study things that once seemed inexplicable and impossible to reproduce in a lab. As Cleary says, her studies are preliminary investigations: “They’re not the end of the story.” But she believes her work can teach us a larger lesson, one that has nothing to do with the workings of déjà vu: that we can use science to study even phenomena we assume are too mysterious to explain. All you need to do is design an experiment and then carry it out. “I don’t think there is much that’s out of the reach of science,” Cleary says. While people may wonder if there are significant differences between real déjà vu and lab déjà vu, she believes that this same question can be asked about many phenomena that are studied in labs. Scientific research begins under controlled conditions, where variables can be introduced and experiments can be created, executed and later replicated. Based on the conclusions, scientists can then go on to develop better and better experiments. Unravelling the mysteries of déjà vu does not take the wonder out of the phenomenon. “Looking for an explanation,” Cleary says, “is the interesting part.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lauren Schenkman is a journalist and fiction writer. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the Hudson Review, and she was formerly a reporter and editor at Science magazine.

https://ideas.ted.com/how-one-researcher-is-studying-that-tingly-universal-unmistakable-and-unsettling-phenomenon-known-as-deja-vu/