Deja vu seizure6/19/2023 Cleary herself has been contacted by several individuals reaching out for help with sudden chronic déjà vu. The case study, published in December in Epilepsy & Behaviour, highlights the fact that déjà vu can also be cause for concern. And that the parts of our brain that are responsible for navigating through spaces might be playing a critical role in our ability to recall our past experiences.” Research on autobiographical memory and human memory, in general, is starting to point towards the idea that scenes and places, in particular, might play a special role in our ability to remember our past. On her decision to use spatial layout to elicit déjà vu, Cleary explains: “There is something special about scenes and places when it comes to human memory, but also when it comes to déjà vu. ![]() While, on average, 41% of mirrored test-scenes were able to be identified by participants, Cleary and colleagues also found that participants were significantly more likely to experience déjà vu when they were “immersed in a scene that shared the same spatial layout as something viewed earlier, but they couldn’t retrieve the memory”. In this experiment, half of the test-scenes were designed to mirror earlier study-scenes in terms of spatial layout – so, for example, a garden scene would be created with hedge and wall placement mirroring that of rubbish placement in a junkyard scene. In one of Cleary’s earliest déjà vu experiments in 2012, published in Consciousness and Cognition, 24 participants were individually fitted with a virtual-reality visor and navigated through 32 study-scenes, followed by 32 test-scenes. ![]() “So what we are experiencing really is a sense of familiarity that is coming from a real memory, but we are failing to call to mind the source of that familiarity.” Using virtual reality to investigate déjà vu “The source memory framework is the idea that we might find a situation familiar to us, that we also recognise as new, because we’ve experienced it at some point, perhaps in a different context, or just something very similar to it,” she explains. Taken from the French language, déjà vu literally translates to “already seen”.īeing a memory researcher, Cleary was interested in memory-based déjà vu hypotheses. Déjà rêvé, for example, generally describes the feeling of having already dreamed something before experiencing it in waking life, while déjà goûté is the feeling of having already tasted something. While in English we lump all déjà events under one umbrella, the French have a number of categories of “already” experiences. Taken from the French language, déjà vu literally translates to “already seen”. Many of us are familiar with déjà vu – the odd feeling of having experienced something before, when you know differently. And he pointed out ways that scientists, using methods available at the time, could approach this”. The challenge he set, according to Cleary, was in “taking decades-old hypotheses from the literature that had never been tested before, and presenting those in terms that scientists could process and understand, as testable hypotheses that had actually never been tested, but could be tested. In his book, Brown called on scientists to evaluate existing theories of déjà vu using current methodologies and models. Cleary is a cognitive psychologist and was studying memory when she read Dr Alan Brown’s book The Déjà Vu Experiencein 2004. It’s fair to say that Dr Anne Cleary, a professor at Colorado State University, never intended to study déjà vu.
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