Page "Déjà vu" Paragraph 5

The similarity between a déjà-vu-eliciting stimulus and an existing, but different, memory trace may lead to the sensation.

Thus, encountering something which evokes the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to déjà vu.

In an effort to experimentally reproduce the sensation, Banister and Zangwill ( 1941 ) used hypnosis to give participants posthypnotic amnesia for material they had already seen.

When this was later re-encountered, the restricted activation caused thereafter by the posthypnotic amnesia resulted in three of the 10 participants reporting what the authors termed " paramnesias ".

Memory-based explanations may lead to the development of a number of non-invasive experimental methods by which a long sought-after analogue of déjà vu can be reliably produced that would allow it to be tested under well-controlled experimental conditions.

Cleary suggests that déjà vu may be a form of familiarity-based recognition ( recognition that is based on a feeling of familiarity with a situation ) and that laboratory methods of probing familiarity-based recognition hold promise for probing déjà vu in laboratory settings.

A recent study that used virtual reality technology to study reported deja vu experiences supported this idea.

This virtual reality investigation suggested that similarity between a new scene's spatial layout and the layout of a previously experienced scene in memory ( but which fails to be recalled ) may contribute to the deja vu experience.

When the previously experienced scene fails to come to mind in response to viewing the new scene, that previously experienced scene in memory can still exert an effect — that effect may be a feeling of familiarity with the new scene that is subjectively experienced as a feeling of deja vu, or of having been there before despite knowing otherwise.

Another possible explanation for the phenomenon of déjà vu is the occurrence of " cryptomnesia ", which is where information learned is forgotten but nevertheless stored in the brain, and similar occurrences invoke the contained knowledge, leading to a feeling of familiarity because of the situation, event or emotional / vocal content, known as " déjà vu ".

Some experts suggest that memory is a process of reconstruction, rather than a recall of fixed, established events.

This reconstruction comes from stored components, involving elaborations, distortions and omissions.

Each successive recall of an event is merely a recall of the last reconstruction.

The proposed sense of recognition ( déjà vu ) involves achieving a good ‘ match ’ between the present experience and our stored data.

This reconstruction however, may now differ so much from the original event that we ‘ know ’ we have never experienced it before, even though it seems similar.