Up to 97% of people claim to have experienced deja vu – that you’ve seen or experienced something before but you can’t place where or when. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Leeds, UK, lead by Akira O’Connor have replicated the phenomenon in the lab.
Deja vu is thought to have something to do with memory systems. When you recognize a familiar object or scene, two things happen:
- Your brain searches through its memory logs to see if it can find the previous version of the scene or event
- If it finds something, it identifies the scene or object as familiar
It is thought that when deja vu happens, this second process is triggered by mistake.
The researchers showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them and told them that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it. Green frames would make them think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.
The subjects were then taken out of hypnosis and presented with a series of words in frames of various colors. Some of the words were not in the original 24 list but still framed in either red or green.
Out of 18 people studied so far, 10 reported a peculiar sensation when they saw new words in red frames and five said it definitely felt like deja vu.
“This tells us that it is possible to experimentally dissociate these two processes, which is really important in establishing that they are indeed separate, says O’Connor
Source: New Scientist (7/22/06) “Why this might look familiar”
