I start to feel kind of fearful and I have this sense of dread and I start to feel really
sick to my stomach, and it starts building like there's something that's going to take
hold of me and I really don't want it to. So I try to focus on what's going on around me but
it starts invading my head more and more, and then I get to this point where it feels like
everything that's currently happening has already happened I can remember everything that's ever
happened and everything that will ever happen and it's all tied together and there's this like
extreme sense of oneness with the universe which is also quite sickening. And then it's gone.
Déjà vu is French for already seen and some researchers think about it as a memory system
glitch where the feeling of recollection becomes uncoupled from the act of actually remembering
something and so it feels like you're remembering even when you're not. Other researchers think that
it could also be a product of a memory retrieval failure so in this case there is actually
something familiar in your present circumstances but you just don't identify exactly what it is. So
let's say that you make a new friend and you go over to their house for the first time
and you're overwhelmed by this really spooky sensation that you kind of already know what's
behind every door and you're mostly right, like the bathroom's where you think it's going to be,
the exits are where you think they're going to be. What you don't realise is that it's a model home
built on exactly the same floor plan as the place that you used to go to daycare when you were a
little kid, so in this case you are remembering something even if you don't know it and patients
who suffer from really extreme déjà vu experiences may be able to help us understand how memory works
in normal circumstances. We presented in the scientific literature, a young man
who had a history of anxiety, some substance use, and he was stuck in what he described as
like a Donnie Darko time loop. He was acutely aware and he said he had to like really spend
a long time reasoning with himself that life wasn't repeating, and that he wasn't going mad.
I mean, one time was really scary because I twisted my ankle while walking down
one step and the next thing I know, like
I wake up on the ground, one of my friends is standing over me completely panicked. She said
that my eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was shaking, it actually took until grad
school for me to realise truly that these things weren't just how some people experienced déjà vu.
People who've devoted their whole careers to understanding déjà vu
are willing to go to some really intense lengths to study it.
We were attempting to induce déjà vu through virtual reality...
For more check out the Deeply Human episode on déjà vu, hosted by me...
Dessa.