Do you ever feel like you've experienced the same situation before, even though it's impossible?
It can seem like you're reliving an event. For a long time, philosophers, neurologists, and writers have been confused by this phenomenon.
In the late 1800s, a lot of theories began to emerge about what might cause a repeat of something.
Maybe it was a type of brain problem, people thought. Maybe it was a hiccup in human memory. It wasn't until recently that the topic reached science.
Early in the millennium, a scientist named Alan Brown decided to conduct a review of everything that had been written about déjvu.
He was able to find a lot of what he was looking for had a supernatural flavor. Regular people were surveyed about their experiences with déj-vu.
Brown was able to get some basic findings from the papers.
Brown found that roughly two thirds of people experience the same thing at some point in their life. He found that a scene or place is the most common cause of déjvu.
There are hints in the medical literature of an association between déjvu and seizure activity in the brain.
Brown's review brought the topic of déjvu into the realm of more mainstream science because it appeared in both a scientific journal and a book for scientists. Scientists used his work to design experiments to find out what happens when you repeat something.
Prompted by Brown's work, my own research team began conducting experiments.
When there's a spatial resemblance between a current scene and an unrecalled scene in your memory, there's a chance that you'll get a repeat of it. The Gestalt familiarity hypothesis was called by psychologists.
You are going to visit a sick friend when you pass the nursing station. You are struck by the fact that you have never been to this hospital before.
If a previous situation with a similar layout to the current one doesn't come to mind, you could be left with a strong feeling of familiarity for the current one.
Virtual reality was used to place people in scenes. Some scenes shared the same spatial layout while others were different.
When people are in a scene that has the same spatial arrangement of elements as an earlier scene they don't remember, it's more likely that they'll get a repeat of it.
According to the research, spatial resemblance of a new scene to one in memory that fails to be consciously called to mind at the moment is a contributing factor to déjvu.
It doesn't mean that spatial similarity is the only cause. Many factors can affect a scene or situation. There are more possible factors involved in this phenomenon.
The professor of cognitive psychology is at Colorado State University.
His article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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