The Deja Vu Experience

Most of us have been perplexed by a strange sense of familiarity when doing something for the first time. We feel that we have been here before, or done this before, but know for sure that this is impossible. In fact, according to numerous surveys, about two-thirds of us have experienced déjà vu at least once, and most of us have had multiple experiences. There are a number of credible scientific interpretations of déjà vu, and this book summarizes the broad range of published work from philosophy, religion, neurology, sociology, memory, perception, psychopathology, and psychopharmacology. This book also includes discussion of cognitive functioning in retrieval and familiarity, neuronal transmission, and double perception during the déjà vu experience.

Most of us have been perplexed by a strange sense of familiarity when doing something for the first time. We feel that we have been here before, or done this before, but know for sure that this is impossible. In fact, according to numerous surveys, about two-thirds of us have experienced déjà vu at least once, and most of us have had multiple experiences. There are a number of credible scientific interpretations of déjà vu, and this book summarizes the broad range of published work from philosophy, religion, neurology, sociology, memory, perception, psychopathology, and psychopharmacology. This book also includes discussion of cognitive functioning in retrieval and familiarity, neuronal transmission, and double perception during the déjà vu experience.

The Déjà vu Experience, Second Edition covers the latest scientific discoveries regarding the strange sense of familiarity most of us have felt at one time or another when doing something for the first time. The book sheds light on this mysterious phenomenon, considering the latest neurophysiological investigations and research on possible reasons why déjà vu is often associated with a sense of predicting the future or knowing what happens next. In addition to summarizing the major historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the déjà vu experience, this book aspires to stimulate additional research on this curious subjective phenomenon. Drawing on research from a range of fields including psychology, philosophy, and religion, it aims to demystify some of the more unsettling, spooky-seeming aspects of the déjà vu experience, elucidating possible mechanisms and underlying reasons for its occurrence. This edition has been thoroughly updated throughout to include over 200 new professional articles and book chapters related to déjà vu that have been published in the 18 years since the original book. By placing the scientific study of déjà vu within its historical context and covering a broad range of perspectives on the subject, this title will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of Cognitive Psychology, specifically those focusing on Memory Phenomena.

Déjà vu is one of the most complex and subjective of all memory phenomena. It is an infrequent and striking mental experience, where the feeling of familiarity is combined with the knowledge that this feeling is false. While until recently it was an aspect of memory largely overlooked by mainstream cognitive psychology, this book brings together the growing scientific literature on déjà vu, making the case for it as a metacognitive phenomenon. The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Déjà Vu reviews clinical, experimental and neuroimaging methods, focusing on how memory disorders and neurological dysfunction relate to the experience. Examining déjà vu as a memory phenomenon, Chris Moulin explores how the experience of déjà vu in special populations, such as healthy aging or those with schizophrenia, provides new insights into understanding this phenomenon. He considers the extensive data on déjà vu in people with epilepsy, dementia and other neurological conditions, assessing neuropsychological theories of déjà vu formation. Essential reading for all students and researchers interested in memory disorders, this valuable book presents the case for déjà vu as a ‘healthy’ phenomenon only experienced by people with sufficient cognitive resources to oppose and detect the false feeling of familiarity.

They're everywhere around us, but usually we choose to ignore them. They happen in space. They happen in time. They’re little moments of discontinuity in our experience, but they can become portals to the greater experience of our world as illusion, as the veil, as maya, as the collective dream – and the experience of ourselves as the dreamers. If we choose not to ignore them, but to follow them, like Alice down a cosmic rabbit hole, we might just begin to understand how it was that we got here in the first place. Offering unique ways to look at light, quantum physics, string theory, the universe existing as a single unified melody, the power of imagination, free will, the language of mathematics, death, and more, Renato successfully challenged me to consider not just “Who am I?” but “What am I?” — Patricia Reding, Readers’ Favorite J. G. Renato attempts to uncover the deeper meaning behind that often disconcerting déjà vu we’ve all experienced at some time or other. He skillfully uses this sense of stepping out of one plane of reality and seeing things from a different perspective to explore the whole nature of being, presence, and existence. Most crucially, he poses the thorny question of how spiritual phenomena can fit within a world obsessed by rationality and tangible productivity. … The key achievement of this slight volume is managing to be metaphysical while remaining lighthearted and fun. — Seamus Mullarkey, ForeWord Reviews

Memory Quirks explores the odd phenomena that challenge and upend our traditional understanding of human memory. Theory in memory research was developed to explain basic processes such as encoding and retrieval, recognition and recall, and semantic and episodic memory. However, the peculiar memory phenomena that we all occasionally experience often contradict standard theories of memory processing. Featuring research from leading international academics, Memory Quirks examines such topics as déjà vu, insight and creativity in memory, memory for past meals, the presque vu phenomenon, tip-of-the-tongue states, unconscious plagiarism, and borrowed, stolen, and long-term implicit memory. It also explains why these phenomena are important to understanding the entire spectrum of human memory. This fascinating book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, cognitive psychology and metamemory researchers, and those who wish to broaden their understanding of the complexities of memory.

Referring to a past that never was, déjà vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of déjà vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichéd celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time.Disturbances of cultural memory-screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions-disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp's analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner Müller, this exploration of the effects of déjà vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol's work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet.Peter Krapp, lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, coedited "Medium Cool," a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on contemporary media theory. He has published in the fields of German studies, media studies, and literary theory and, since 1995, has acted as editor of the Hydra Web site for theories of literature and media.

This volume seeks to assemble various works on the 'tip-of-the-tongue state' and related phenomena.