The Tease of Memory - Psychologists are dusting off 19th-century
explanations of déjà vu. Have we been here before?

Additional information: Three modern attempts to explain déjà vu
By DAVID GLENN

In the summer of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne visited a decaying English
manor house known as Stanton Harcourt, not far from Oxford. He was
struck by the vast kitchen, which occupied the bottom of a 70-foot
tower. "Here, no doubt, they were accustomed to roast oxen whole,
with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl," he
wrote in an 1863 travelogue, Our Old Home.

Hawthorne wrote that as he stood in that kitchen, he was seized by an
uncanny feeling: "I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that
somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The
height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as
familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen." He
was certain that he had never actually seen this room or anything
like it. And yet for a moment he was caught in what he described
as "that odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly remember
some previous scene or incident, of which the one now passing appears
to be but the echo and reduplication."

When Hawthorne wrote that passage there was no common term for such
an experience. But by the end of the 19th century, after
discarding "false recognition," "paramnesia," and "promnesia,"
scholars had settled on a French candidate: "déjà vu," or "already
seen."

The fleeting melancholy and euphoria associated with déjà vu have
attracted the interest of poets, novelists, and occultists of many
stripes. St. Augustine, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Tolstoy all
wrote detailed accounts of such experiences. (We will politely leave
aside a certain woozy song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.)

Most academic psychologists, however, have ignored the topic since
around 1890, when there was a brief flurry of interest. The
phenomenon seems at once too rare and too ephemeral to capture in a
laboratory. And even if it were as common as sneezing, déjà vu would
still be difficult to study because it produces no measurable
external behaviors. Researchers must trust their subjects' personal
descriptions of what is going on inside their minds, and few people
are as eloquent as Hawthorne. Psychology has generally filed déjà vu
away in a drawer marked "Interesting but Insoluble."

During the past two decades, however, a few hardy souls have reopened
the scientific study of déjà vu. They hope to nail down a persuasive
explanation of the phenomenon, as well as shed light on some
fundamental elements of memory and cognition. In the new book The
Déjà Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology (Psychology
Press), Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychology at Southern
Methodist University, surveys the fledgling subfield. "What we can
try to do is zero in on it from a variety of different angles," he
says. "It won't be something like, 'Boom! The explanation is there.'
But we can get gradual clarity through some hard work."

Fatigue and Freud

In their brief late-19th-century flirtation with déjà vu, academic
psychologists developed remarkably sophisticated hypotheses, some of
which survive today. An article in a German psychology journal in
1878 suggested that déjà vu happens when the processes of "sensation"
and "perception," which normally occur simultaneously, somehow move
out of sync. Fatigue, it said, may be a cause.

Eleven years later, William H. Burnham, a psychologist at Clark
University, in Worcester, Mass., offered the opposite suggestion:
that déjà vu occurs when the nervous system is unusually well
rested. "When we see a strange object," he wrote, "its unfamiliar
aspect is largely due to the difficulty we find in apperceiving its
characteristics. ... [But] when the brain centers are over-rested,
the apperception of a strange scene may be so easy that the aspect of
the scene will be familiar."

That idea may sound peculiar: Could our minds really be thrown out of
kilter by unusually speedy and well-greased visual signals? But a
large body of modern research strongly suggests that brains do use
speed as a tool to assess whether an image or situation is familiar
or not. If we can process an image fluently and quickly, our brains
unconsciously interpret that as a cue that we have seen it before.
Both the "fatigue" and the "well rested" theories of déjà vu remain
on the table today.

In 1896 Arthur Allin, a professor of psychology at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, wrote a long essay that covered many potential
explanations. Among other possibilities, he suggested that déjà vu
situations feel familiar because they remind us of elements of
forgotten dreams; that our emotional reactions to a new image can
conjure a false feeling of familiarity; and that déjà vu is generated
when our attention is very briefly interrupted during our
introduction to a new image.

Such inquiries nearly ground to a halt in the early-20th century, in
part because of the shadow of Freud. A new generation of scholars
arose for whom déjà vu was unmistakable evidence of the ego's
struggle to defend itself against id and superego. In 1945 the
British psychologist Oliver L. Zangwill wrote a 15-page essay
explaining that Hawthorne's episode at Stanton Harcourt stemmed from
an unresolved erotic yearning for his mother. (This despite
Hawthorne's own plausible conclusion that his déjà vu was sparked by
a dimly remembered Alexander Pope poem about the building.) As late
as 1975 the prominent psychologist Bernard L. Pacella proposed that
déjà vu occurs when the ego goes into a regressive panic, "scanning
the phases of life in a descent historically to the composite primal-
preobject-early libidinal object-representations of mother."

4 Modern Approaches

Most of today's déjà vu scholars have chucked primal-preobject-
libidinal representations in favor of brain scans and neuroimaging.
Taking advantage of a recent explosion of experimental research on
memory errors, Mr. Brown and a few like-minded colleagues have dusted
off the theories of déjà vu proposed during the late Victorian era.
At last, he hopes, such hypotheses can be subject to rigorous
experimental tests. He warns, however, not to expect quick
results: "A lot of science is geared at, How can I get tenure? How
can I crank out a study in a year? The luxury of being able to attack
difficult problems is often more risky. There's a little more
investment of your personal resources, a little bit of gambling."

In Mr. Brown's account, scientific theories of déjà vu fall into four
broad families. The first are theories of "dual processing." The late
neuropsychiatrist Pierre Gloor conducted experiments in the 1990s
strongly suggesting that memory involves distinct systems
of "retrieval" and "familiarity." In a 1997 paper, he speculated that
déjà vu occurs at rare moments when our familiarity system is
activated but our retrieval system is not. Other scholars argue that
the retrieval system is not shut off entirely but simply fires out of
sync, evoking the fatigue theory of a century earlier.

In the second category are more purely neurological explanations. One
such theory holds that déjà vu experiences are caused by small, brief
seizures, akin to those caused by epilepsy. That idea is buttressed
by the fact that people with epilepsy often report having déjà vu
just before going into full-blown seizures. Researchers have also
found that déjà vu can be elicited by electrically stimulating
certain regions of the brain. In a 2002 paper, the Austrian physician
Josef Spatt, who works with epilepsy patients, argued that déjà vu is
caused by brief, inappropriate firing in the parahippocampal cortex,
which is known to be associated with the ability to detect
familiarity.

Mr. Brown's third category consists of memory theories. These propose
that déjà vu is triggered by something we have actually seen or
imagined before, either in waking life, in literature or film, or in
a dream. Some of these theories hold that a single element, perhaps
familiar from some other context, is enough to spark a déjà vu
experience. (Suppose, for example, that the chairs in Stanton
Harcourt's kitchen were identical in color and shape to Hawthorne's
decorously neat grandmother's, but that he didn't recognize them in
this new context.) At the other end of the scale are gestalt
theories, which suggest that we sometimes falsely recognize a general
visual or audio pattern. (Suppose that the Stanton Harcourt kitchen
looked similar, in broad visual outline, to a long-forgotten church
that Hawthorne had once attended.)

In the final box are "double perception" theories of déjà vu, which
descend from Allin's 1896 suggestion that a brief interruption in our
normal process of perception might make something appear falsely
familiar. In 1989, in one of the first laboratory studies that tried
to induce something like déjà vu, the cognitive psychologists Larry
L. Jacoby and Kevin Whitehouse, of Washington University in St.
Louis, showed their subjects a long list of words on a screen. The
subjects then returned a day or a week later and were shown another
long list of words, half of which had also been on the first list.
They were asked to identify which words they had seen during the
first round.

The experimenters found that if they flashed a word at extremely
quick, subliminal speeds (20 milliseconds) shortly before
its "official" appearance on the screen during the second round,
their subjects were very likely to incorrectly say that it had
appeared on the first list. Those results lent at least indirect
support to the notion that if we attend to something half-consciously
and then give it our full attention, it can appear falsely familiar.

The study is one of many that demonstrate the potential pitfalls of
everyday memory and cognition, says Mr. Jacoby. "At our core, I think
all of us are naïve realists. We believe the world is as it presents
itself," he says. "All of these experiments are a little unsettling
if you're a naïve realist." He hopes that this line of research will
point toward new ways to repair the mental abilities of elderly
people with impaired memories. "If we highlight the distinction
between memory as expressed in performance and memory as we
subjectively experience it," he says, we might be able to train
elderly people to avoid common errors.

Speak, Memory

Having published his survey of the déjà vu world, Southern
Methodist's Mr. Brown is embarking on a research program of his own.
Together with Elizabeth J. Marsh, an assist-ant professor of
psychology at Duke University, he is developing an experiment that
may extend the findings of Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Whitehouse. In the new
studies, subjects are asked to quickly locate a small red cross that
is superimposed on photographs of various campus landscapes. The
researchers' expectation is that the subjects will concentrate on the
crosses and not pay much attention to the backgrounds. A week later,
when the subjects return, they are shown the campus photographs
again -- along with many photographs not used in the first round --
and are asked, "Have you seen this place before?" and "Have you been
to this place before?" (After all the slides have been shown, the
participants are asked about which campuses they have actually
visited.) Mr. Brown and Ms. Marsh wonder if the experiment will
produce incorrect "yes" answers -- or even déjà vu experiences --
when the subjects look at the images they have half-consciously seen
the week before.

Ms. Marsh, who specializes in more-orthodox studies of memory, had no
particular interest in déjà vu before last year, when she was asked
to review Mr. Brown's book manuscript. "I came at this as a student
of basic memory and memory errors," she says. "But I became
fascinated by what Alan had to say about the déjà vu literature. He
described all of these funky little findings -- that people who
travel frequently, for example, are more likely to experience déjà
vu."

Further down the road, Mr. Brown would like to see studies that shed
light on some of those odd findings. Why does déjà vu become less
common as people grow older? Why do political liberals report more
frequent déjà vu experiences than conservatives do? And why do the
majority of déjà vu experiences seem to occur when people are in
mundane settings? (Arthur T. Funkhouser, a Jungian analyst in
Switzerland who is considering writing a book about the phenomenon,
believes that it offers a window into the self -- but concedes that
the raw material of déjà vu experiences are often oddly dull. "Why
does the unconscious pick such banal elements for us to think about?"
he asks.)

Mr. Brown would also like to work with people with epilepsy, and with
people who have the rare condition of suffering déjà vu pretty much
every day. "I'm in contact with someone by e-mail who has almost
constant déjà vu," he says. "Someone like that would be very fruitful
to work with in the lab."

But he does not expect to see any clear conceptual or experimental
breakthroughs anytime soon. It is possible, he says, that what we
call déjà vu is actually five or six phenomena, with separate
causes. "This will be very slow progress toward a very abstract
phenomenon," he says. "It's kind of like space exploration. You're
not sure exactly what you'll find."


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3 MODELS OF DÉJÀ VU

The Victorian-era British psychologist Sir James Crichton-Browne
suggested that deja vu is caused by a "trifling and transitory" brain
disorder, "like cramp in a few fibers of muscle." Here are three
modern attempts to explain the phenomenon:





Spontaneous neural activity in the parahippocampal gyrus

According to this theory, the brain suffers a small seizure in the
parahippocampal system, which is associated with spatial processing
and our sense of familiarity.

Slowdown in the secondary visual pathway

It is well established that we process visual information through two
pathways. One goes directly to the visual cortex, in the occipital
lobe. The secondary pathway, which is infinitesimally slower, is
routed through various other areas of the brain, notably the parietal
cortex, on its way to the occipital lobe. Some researchers believe
that a deja vu experience occurs when signals on the secondary
pathway move too slowly, and the brain interprets this second wave of
data as a separate experience.

Inattentional blindness

Imagine that you drive through an unfamiliar town but pay it little
attention because you are talking on a cellphone. If you then drive
back down the same streets a few moments later, this time focusing on
the landscape, you might be prone to experience deja vu. During your
second pass, the visual information is consciously processed in the
hippocampus but feels falsely "old" because the images from your
earlier drive still linger in your short-term memory.


SOURCE: Chronicle reporting



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