The other day I went out to dinner with a friend. While we were waiting for food I suddenly had the feeling that all of this had already happened before. As he spoke I already knew what he was going to say and the way his hands moved were all familiar, even the people around us were all the same as some event in the past. I told him I was having Déjà Vu and all this made me think about cognitive psychology. So I looked it up and found that Déjà Vu might be a natural process of the brain or a minor malfunction of the brain. Not a lot has been discovered but there are a few hypothesis's out there that explain the phenomenon. My search brought me to
this site.
The author explains that Déjà Vu (or DV) might be caused when the areas of the brain involving memory retrieval and processing are falsely activated. In this moment everything that is perceived seems to be familiar. His observations of subjects experiencing DV describe that the patient claims "to recognize every single detail of a scene, as if comparing it to a photograph, and nevertheless one has no idea how it looks behind one's back or around the next corner".
Uriah Voth
6 comments:
This article, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081118122146.htm “The Science of Déjà vu,” describes a study on déjà vu, done by Anne M. Cleary, from Colorado State University. There are two types of recognition memory: recollection and familiarity. Déjà vu, when a situation seems familiar but we do not know when we saw or experienced it before, is considered a type of familiarity-based recognition, Recollection-based memory is knowing exactly when we saw or experienced something before. Anne M. Cleary tested familiarity-based recognition by showing participants a list of celebrity names. Next, they were shown photographs of celebrities and asked to identify if the celebrities in the photographs were on the list they saw earlier. Participants seemed be familiar with certain celebrities, even if they could not name them. Cleary’s results suggest that memories are stored as fragments and déjà vu can occur when there is a large overlap between a current situation and fragments of memories, which results in a feeling of familiarity. Anne M. Cleary teaches Cognitive Psychology at Colorado State University. Here is her website http://lamar.colostate.edu/~acleary/AnneCleary.htm.
A new study led by Andres Lozano ( Professor of Neurosurgery and Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience) may have found a trigger for the sensation of deja vu when conducting hypthalmic deep brain stimulation on obese individuals. The details of a personal memory were intensified by increase stimulation. This was reproduced again later in a double-blind fashion. While this was an unintended accident, this could lead us to a specific area to research to find more about deja vu.
Article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130092102.htm
I found an article that sort of reiterates the theory about recollection and familiarity, but also introduces some other studies and experiments that make it a little more understandable, at least to me.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/the-psychology-of-deja-vu.html
Its findings work to back up the idea that the things we experience are remembered in separate fragments, individual elements of the event. This could then hold the possibility to cause déjà vu when certain aspects of a previously experienced moment come together in a new situation .
I came across this article which explains the differentiations and categories of déjà vu. Four subcategories of déjà vu have been proposed by Vernon Neppe, the director of the Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute: epileptic, subjective paranormal, schizophrenic and associative. Although it seems like many researchers have concluded with their own divisions, the déjà vu experience can be generally be divided into two main categories: associative déjà vu and biological déjà vu. Studies have also been done that suggests chronic déjà vu may happen when one is experiencing a major psychiatric disorder. What I found interesting was that during this process, the person may actually create memories that have never happened.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/extrasensory-perceptions/deja-vu1.htm
In The Déjà Vu Illusion, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal, Alan S. Brown of the psychology department at Dedman College at Southern Methodist University explains the core causes of Déjà Vu. He mentions it may result from a change in neurological transmission, generally a slower rate of transmission, that causes a separation between identical messages received from two separate pathways. What he means is that a distraction from the perceived conversation or event causes the person to believe their are two perceptual events occurring simultaneously, giving that odd feeling that it's happened before. Rather, it's merely happened simultaneously in your brain along with a separate cognitive process, causing the brain to perceive the event as two separate things. The reconsolidating of these events are what causes "deja vu." Ways to spark deja vu include performing procedures that involve degraded or occluded stimulus presentation, divided attention, subliminal mere exposure, and hypnosis may prove especially useful in elucidating this enigmatic cognitive illusion
I think this is also related to our class about distorted memories and how we can build memories in our heads just like the example of not to ask questions like "does he have a beard?" in police investigations. I think when we believe that we already lived this moment before we can look at other events going on at that time as familiar and lived before.
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