“This I have experienced before.” Who has not ever had the feeling of remembering situations that had not occurred before? Déjà vu, or paramnesia, is such a surprising phenomenon that many people even attribute it to reminiscences of previous lives. However, scientists work to unravel its secrets and explain them from logic.
Anne Cleary is a Colorado State University researcher who has been studying déjà vu for years to show that it is a memory-related phenomenon. It happens when a person finds himself in a situation very similar to another that he already knows, but cannot remember accurately. For example, Cleary and her collaborators have shown that déjà vu can occur when we are in a spatially similar setting to one we have previously been in.
“We cannot remember the last scene, but our brain recognizes the similarity between the two,” explains the researcher. “This gives us the unsettling feeling that we’ve been there before, but we can’t pinpoint when or why.”
This kind of brain shunt is a case of what researchers know as “metamemory phenomena.” Another example would be the sensation of having something “on the tip of the tongue”, or what happens to us when a face sounds to us but we cannot put it in context.
Déjà vu is not a premonitory phenomenon
When the researcher began to publish her work on the phenomenon of déjà vu criticism rained down on him. Many people told her that she was wrong, that déjà vu was not just a memory , because another of the characteristics of this event is the feeling of knowing what is going to happen next.
Does déjà vu really allow us to predict the future? Convinced that we are not facing a paranormal phenomenon, Cleary set out to prove it scientifically and has just published her conclusions in the scientific journal Psychological Science . In this article she details how she and her team managed to recreate the phenomenon of déjà vu to examine the sense of premonition it produces. According to the results, the participants were no better able to predict the future when they experienced déjà vu than when they tried to guess something blindly. But, during déjà vu, they really felt they could do it.
To demonstrate this, the scientist used virtual scenarios recreated with the video game “The Sims”. It was about different scenes (a junkyard, a garden), but with a similar spatial arrangement, as can be seen in the example in the photograph. In previous work, his team had already been able to recreate the feeling of déjà vu with the use of these scenarios. Now, they went one step further and showed the participants a kind of tour with a series of turns through the virtual stages.
By switching to a spatially similar setting, the researchers induced a sense of déjà vu in the participants. At the last moment, the course was cut off and volunteers had to try to predict where the next turn would take place.
As expected, people who experienced déjà vu were no more likely than others to be correct in their prediction, yet they all felt, while having déjà vu, that they were capable of doing it. In short, déjà vu doesn’t help us predict the future, but it does give us the feeling that we can.
Currently, Cleary and his team are conducting a series of experiments to further investigate this sensation. In particular, they want to know if people experience a hindsight bias , that is, if they remain convinced that they knew what was going to happen even after the events took place (and it is shown that they were not able to predict the future).
“I think the reason why people believe in metaphysical theories about déjà vu are these mysterious and subjective experiences,” the researcher reasons. “ Even scientists who do not believe in past lives have come to ask me, with a small mouth, an explanation for this feeling . People look for explanations in different places, and if you are a scientist, you need the logical explanation to these really strange experiences ”.
The psychologist explains some of her research on déjà vu in this 2017 TEDx talk.
