I Think That..I've Seen This Before
Tory Comier
Why I chose this topic?
I chose the topic of deja vu because I seem to experience this a lot more then usual and I am always wondering why do I feel like this is familiar. Learning what deja vu is can help me and also other know the correct definition of the term and why we have these familiarity-based recognition of things that we have yet to experience but think we have.
What is deja vu?
We have all experienced being in a new place and feeling certain that we have been there before. This mysterious feeling is known as deja vu. Deja vu occurs when we feel that a new situation is familiar, even if there is evidence that the situation could not have occurred previously.
The Brain
Scientist have not pinpointed exactly what goes on in the brain when a person experiences deja vu, they can make good guesses based on models of memory. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions the temporal cortex. All theories of memory acknowledge that remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection.
Research & Psychologist
A new report by Colorado State University psychologist Anne M. Cleary, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes recent findings about deja vu, including the many similarities that exist between déjà vu and our understanding of human recognition memory. Cleary conducted experiments testing familiarity-based recognition in which participants were given a list of celebrity names. Later on, they were shown a collection of celebrity photographs; some photographs corresponded to the names on the list, other photographs did not. The volunteers were told to identify the celebrities in the photographs and indicate how likely it was the celebrity’s names were on the list they had seen previously. The findings were surprising. Even when the volunteers were unable to identify a celebrity by photo, they had a sense of which names they had studied earlier and which they had not.
Interesting Stuff
- There are 21 kinds of deja vu.
- The youngest age of deja vu reported is age 5.