A new round-up of déjà vu research. Stop me if you’ve heard this one …
But Dr. Brown and others argue that it is not necessary to invoke hidden conflicts or unusual brain conditions to explain many cases of déjà vu. Normal, healthy brain function suffices. For one thing, déjà vu appears to be more common when people are exhausted or stressed, conditions that are known to cloud short- and long-term memory (and that may also accompany jamais vu, the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them).
[…] Psychologists have long known, too, that people register impressions and images well before they are aware of what they have seen. The brain sends visual signals through at least two circuits, which move from the retina through the brain to the visual cortex via different routes.
It is an exquisitely tuned system, but common experience suggests many ways its functioning might be thrown off. The classic example, from Dr. Edward Bradford Titchener, a founder of the field, is when a person is about to cross a busy street, glances both ways and then is distracted by a shop window display: “As you cross then, you think, ‘Why, I crossed this street just now’; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, and the latter appears as a repetition of the earlier.”
[…] But the point, psychologists who study memory say, is that people take in a rich banquet of information without noticing it, or noticing and simply forgetting where it came from. It is entirely possible to read an Anne Rice novel and years later, after having forgotten the book, find that a first visit to New Orleans seems like a glimpse into a former life. Or to see one of the bar scenes from the movie “L.A. Confidential” and later walk into the Formosa Cafe for the first time and catch your breath.
That familiarity can come from internally generated images or impressions, too.
Interesting.