New investigations shed light on the phenomenon of déjà vu
Who has not had sometimes the disquieting sensation to be repeating a lived experience already, although in fact she is totally new? This phenomenon, baptized by Emile Boirac as déjà vu (“already seen” in French) for more of a century, has been waking up the curiosity of hundreds of scientists throughout history. Now psychologist Anne M. Cleary finishes finding a relation between déjà vu and the operation of our memory of recognition, the part of the memory that starts up when we recognize a friend in the street or listened to a well-known song.
Two types of recognition memory exist: the harvesting and the familiarity. First it takes part when, for example, we recognize a person in a store and remembered it to have seen before in the bus. The familiarity happens when a situation “sounds to us” but we did not remember in what previous moment happened.
In order to on approval put the operation of this last one, Cleary carried out a series of experiments in which the participants had to study a random list of words. Next they were put under a recognition test where there were words that already had studied, words new and others very similar in sound to the learned ones in the starting phase. Surprising, all the survey underwent a sensation of familiarity with these last words. According to Cleary, this suggests our brain stores to the fragment experiences or dispersed pieces. And that déjà vu takes place when some details of the present situation are looked like certain aspects of a previous experience. For example, when the forms of a street are looked like another one by which we have taken a walk. Or when the timbre of voice of a stranger who speaks to us is similar to that we listened previously.
In other words, in déjà vu we overlapped new and the past until the point to think that all a experience is repeated, but without the memory of comes a little while concrete us to the mind.
It leaves an answer