Getting a sense of déjà vu - SMU psychologist trying to trigger that old
familiar feeling By
BILL MARVEL / The Dallas Morning News

Few of us will ever see a ghost. Most will not have an out-of-body experience,
or
communicate telepathically, or foretell the future.

Dr. Alan Brown of Southern Methodist University says an approximation of déjà vu
may be
the best he can hope for in a clinical setting.

But the majority of Americans at one time or another will experience the eerie,
almost
otherworldly sense of dislocation known as déjà vu.

Literally the phrase means "already seen." It's that uncanny feeling that you've
been in a
place before, or dreamed that you've been in a place, even though you know for a
fact
you've never been there, that you're seeing it for the first time in your life.

You're walking into a room or down a city street and suddenly an overwhelming
sensation
of familiarity washes over you – and, as suddenly, vanishes: This is not the
sort of thing
scientists can drag into the lab and put under the microscope. But Dr. Alan J.
Brown, a
Southern Methodist University psychologist, is trying to capture that elusive
experience
through a series of experiments – to catch the mind in the act, so to speak.

Dr. Brown is author of The Déjà vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology
(Psychology
Press, $56.50), the first book-length scientific study of the phenomenon since
the 1980s.
(The opposite sensation, jamais vu, is interesting, too, he says. It's the
feeling we
sometimes get when a familiar place suddenly feels utterly strange, like we've
never seen
it before.)

"Déjà vu hasn't received much attention," he says. "There's been a lot of
speculation but
not much empirical work. It gets all mixed up with parapsychology," the study of
extrasensory perception and other psychic phenomena. But you don't have to be
psychic
to experience déjà vu. It's a fairly ordinary, though rare, occurrence, Dr.
Brown says, "and
we don't know how to trigger it."

If you can't trigger the occurrence itself, perhaps you can try to trigger
something like it.
And so during the summer, students from Dr. Brown's introduction to psychology
classes
and from a class at Duke University volunteered a few hours at a time to an
experiment in
memory and perception.

Dr. Brown, a 31-year member of the SMU faculty, likes to study fleeting and
elusive mental
phenomena, "areas on the fringe of perception and cognition," he says. "I like
to pull in the
areas we're not studying, on the fringe of science.

"I also like to stay with these experiences people can relate to, rather than
something that
can be understood only by a few colleagues."

For example, he is also studying retrieval inhibition, the mental mechanism that
allows us
to repress or forget old, unneeded information. He has done research on why
words
sometimes dangle on the tip of the tongue, tantalizingly out of reach, and why
computer
passwords are so hard to remember. He also has studied inadvertent plagiarism,
that
dreaded experience in which a writer thinks he is putting his own words on paper
but is
really writing something he's read somewhere.

Déjà vu seemed a little like these phenomena, both familiar and strange. So in
the 1990s
Dr. Brown set out to learn as much about the experience as possible. "I did a
questionnaire
asking how many people have had it. What were the circumstances? Did it involve
other
people?" He also ransacked the scientific literature on the subject.

He learned that about two-thirds of individuals have experienced déjà vu at
least once.
People who travel frequently or are better educated are more likely to
experience déjà vu.
So are political liberals, people who readily recall their dreams, and those
with certain
types of epilepsy. As people age they seem to have the experience less often.

Why liberals? Are they yearning for elections past? "Maybe because they're open
to
different types of experience," Dr. Brown surmises, "experiences outside the
mainstream."

Déjà vu commonly involves a place or a scene that seems familiar. "Setting seems
to be a
key element to all déjà vu experiences," he says. "There are a couple of
explanations for
this that could be tested with the right equipment and circumstances."

To test the role of memory in producing déjà vu experiences, Dr. Brown worked
for six
months with Dr. Elizabeth J. Marsh, a Duke University psychologist who studies
memory
and who became interested in déjà vu after reviewing his book manuscript. The
two are
running the experiment on their respective campuses and will get together
afterward to
review results and perhaps tweak the process for another round.

"It's turned into a nice collaboration," says Dr. Marsh. "We've done a couple
different
rounds of the experiment now." Preliminary results have been interesting, she
says, but
they need to be replicated before scientists can put much confidence in them.

The SMU-Duke experiment draws on two groups of volunteers, one at each campus.
The
lab setting is bare bones: a small room with a computer screen, a table and a
chair. Dr.
Brown's research assistant, Sandy Zoccoli, a doctoral candidate in the
psychology
department, monitors the tests.

The volunteers seem as curious about the outcome as the experimenters, Ms.
Zoccoli says.

"They ask a lot of questions. They come in wanting to know what we're going to
do, why
we're going to do it and what we're trying to find out."

She can't tell them, of course. If she did that, it wouldn't be an experiment.

Still, one young recent test subject was persistent. "If I come back afterward,"
she bubbled,
"will you tell me?"

The setup is deceptively simple. Each volunteer sits at the table and views a
series of
photographs flashed on the screen. Some show scenes of the SMU campus, some show
scenes at Duke, and the rest depict views of city streets and pleasant scenery.
The location
of the picture isn't important at this stage, Dr. Brown says. The volunteer is
simply asked
to find a small cross superimposed over each picture and to press a key to
designate its
location.

The second part of the experiment comes a week later. The volunteer returns to
view
another series of pictures on the computer screen. Some are the same pictures
used in the
first test, others are not. This time the volunteer is asked, "Have you been in
this place?"
and given four choices to rate the likelihood, from certainty to doubt.

The idea, says Dr. Brown, is that the subject may see a picture presented in the
first go
around, not recognize it, but feel "an inordinate feeling of familiarity." The
subject may
even think he or she has been there without being able to pinpoint when or under
what
circumstances.

"We've found we can elicit a strong sense of familiarity," he says. But so far,
no full-blown
déjà vu. "That's probably as close as we can get in the lab," he says. "As in
any real-world
situation, the sensation is different.

"We're peeling away the layers, like an onion."

One surprise, which needs further testing, says Dr. Marsh: "The more
unique-looking
places produce the stronger results. That's the opposite of what we expected."

Dr. Brown and his Duke colleague will meet soon to peel away some more layers,
discuss
how things went and possibly make some changes or adjustments. "We may wait
three
weeks instead of one between the two parts of the experiment," he says.

Other experiments will be designed to follow up the results – or non-results –
of this test.
"We're wondering what strengthening exposure to a scene might do," he says.

The publication of his book has generated a lot of chatter over the Internet
among
professionals and nonprofessionals alike. Dr. Brown says he's getting e-mail,
much of it
from nonscientists warning him that he's poking around in mystical territory and
that he'll
never catch his quarry.

Why study a subject as elusive as déjà vu?

"The practical part of this is, it's a phenomenon people experience," he says.
"How can it
be applied? I really don't know. Why does déjà vu decline with age? You'd expect
just the
opposite. What does that say about aging and memory?
"The gold nugget if we can figure that out."


WHO EXPERIENCES DÉJÀ VU?

About two-thirds of individuals have experienced déjà vu at least once. Here's a
quick list
of those more likely to experience it.

• People who travel frequently
• People who are better educated
• Political liberals
• People who readily recall their dreams
• People with certain types of epilepsy

SCIENTISTS WEIGH IN

There has been little research on the phenomenon known as déjà vu. But there's
been
plenty of speculation, by scientists and nonscientists alike. Among the
nonscientific
explanations for déjà vu are memories of events in a past life, in a dream or a
voyage to
some other reality.

Here are some explanations that scientists have offered:

• The mind may work something like a tape recorder, with one mechanism recording
our
perceptions and another playing them back to us as memories. Normally the two
mechanisms are not working at the same time, but in déjà vu, the mind
simultaneously
records and plays back, leading to a strange sense of familiarity.

• Ordinarily the mind is focused on perceiving the situation at hand. But in
déjà vu, some
momentary distraction might lead the mind to stray. Memory instantly steps into
this gap,
causing us to confuse what we are perceiving with what we remember perceiving.

• Something about a setting seems familiar, but the source of the familiarity –
a photo
seen somewhere, a previous experience – has been forgotten.

• Some passing neurological problem – for example, a brief seizure or a change
in the
speed our neurons transfer information – may cause a brief disruption in the
brain's
processing of information.

Bill Marvel

<http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/texasliving/stories/
110804dnlivdejavu.16b3f.html>