March 31, 2020 • 56 mins
What is déjà vu and how does it relate to dreams and anxiety? Robert and Joe discuss what is known about this curious anomaly of memory on Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with another closet edition. Uh So this week
we got kind of hijacked off on the side trail
(00:24):
that we didn't quite expect at the beginning of this
week because of a personal experience you had, right, Robert, Yeah,
this this would have happened Wednesday, and it's got me
researching some other topics and looking into it, and I
mentioned it to you and the next thing we know,
we were putting notes together for a couple of episodes.
But it's great because this is also a topic. It
gets into some topics that have been requested by listeners
(00:46):
as well. So Lenny said, a little background for for
what I'm about to describe. So give us your origin story. Yeah,
my origin story, such as it as it is. When
I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old,
which is which is uh the age of my own
son today, I had a very vivid and unsettling mental experience.
(01:06):
It wasn't really a nightmare, but much like a nightmare,
there was this ineffable quality to it. You know, like
even as I try to explain it, uh, my words
can't really relate how it made me feel and how
it still makes me feel. Like when I when I
remember it, when I think back on it, I can
still feel a bit of the terror that I felt then. Uh,
(01:27):
even though just a flat description of it sounds kind
of dumb. Yeah, that's often how nightmares are. It's like
the thing that was really scary in your dream wouldn't
necessarily make a good horror movie because it's hard to
communicate why it was scary. Yeah, exactly, Like I once
had a nightmare about a polar bear that was peeking
into a house with a periscope, and somehow that was
terrifying in the dream, but outside of the dream, it's
(01:48):
just ridiculous and comical. So uh, but this particular situation,
it was, it was not a nightmare. Um, I was
in my bed and I have always slept with white noise,
so even then I had this like oversized box fan
in my my childhood room. And I should also explain
that I watched a lot of TV in those days,
(02:09):
and the you know, my family would watch TV together
and there were various shows on TBS that we would
regularly check out, and one of them was the sitcom
Sanford and Son. You remember Sanford and Son, right, Oh yeah,
totally yeah, Red Fox uh uh so uh. You know,
I don't want to use the verb here or heard here,
because it's it's not like I actually heard sound. It's
(02:30):
not like I experienced an auditory hallucination. It's more that
I suddenly remembered it as I lay there in bed.
It was like a jagged memory that was suddenly embedded
in my my psyche. And it was the sound of
the Sanford and Son character Fred Sanford speaking in slow
motion through the back of a box fan, addressing the
(02:50):
character Grady in this drawn out, oscillating voice. So that's
great because that that has that perfect quality of something
that would be terrifying in like a dream like memory,
but you just can't see it from the outside. It's
like I had a horrifying dream about Bob Sagett from
Full House. Yeah, it's I mean, it's just so ridiculously dumb,
(03:13):
Like if I were to to fictionalize it even a
little bit, I feel like I'd want to change it completely,
you know. Um, but but but the thing is like,
it definitely filled me with terror, and I can I
can remember that terror, and I can. I can really
compare it only to the stark sort of terror that
one feels in a nightmare, you know, especially with the
nonsensical elements to it. And uh and indeed it also
(03:37):
it did not feel like I was remembering something specifically
from watching TV. And it didn't feel like I was dreaming.
I it was, I guess, in some ways, like I
was remembering a dream that I had never had. But
in the sensation passed, the anxiety of it passed, although
I I've always been able to feel like a tinge
of it when I think back on the experience. So
(03:58):
I've never I was never really sure what it was exactly.
I kind of always just sort of thought, well, okay,
it was, you know, something like a dream or a nightmare.
I don't know. Um. And and looking back, I think
there perhaps times in my life where I had like
similar experiences in the years after that, but but pretty
you know, far flung from each other, far less intense.
(04:19):
And because of these factors, I've never really connected those
experiences with this childhood experience. You know, when I think
about experiences like that, especially involving lying in bed as
a child. I think one thing that's often going on
there is that in our memories we are having a
hard time sorting the demarcation line between wakefulness and sleep. Um.
(04:39):
And this is definitely characteristic of memories I have as
a child, Like there are things that I feel like
I remember as happening while I was lying in bed
awake as a kid, But in fact I think they
probably were some sort of like you know, edge of
sleep hallucination, hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucination, uh, dreams bleeding over
(05:01):
into wakefulness. But that it's it's hard to sort out
what's what at that age. Yeah, And I would say,
prior to this week, if you really put me to
task on on what that experience was I had as
a kid, I would have probably leaned on on the
you know, hypnogogic explanation of for what was happening. You know,
like I was somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, and therefore
(05:22):
my mind was susceptible to this kind of semi paranormal experience.
And these kind of experiences are super common, by the way.
That's nothing especially like pathological about them, right, Yeah, So
you know, I also don't want to make it sound
like this like shaped me as an experience, you know.
S Yeah, like I continue to watch Sanford the Sun
(05:44):
after it. Clearly it didn't. It didn't affect me in
that capacity. No night terror can make Red Fox unfunny.
Uh So so that was that was, you know, my
life up until this week, uh, Wednesday, March. I then
experienced what we're basically four of these in a single day.
(06:04):
So I can I can kind of explain two of them,
I guess. Um. So I've been I've been obsessed with
Peter Lori this week, you know, the famed actor. Um.
And I've been feeding that obsession, you know, to try
and get my mind off of more stressful matters. And
I was in the in the process of actually responding
to an email to you, Joe about we had a
(06:25):
slight sort back and forth about the ninety six movie
Mad Love, which I have not seen, but I've been
meaning to see for years because it has one of
the best trailers of all time, Like the the two
minute long trailer for this movie is more entertaining than
most entire movies. It's got Peter Lorie sitting on the
couch at his house and he's got this giant dog
(06:47):
next to him, this bigger than he is. And then
he gets a phone call from beautiful actress to like
tell him what a wonderful actor he is. And then
he starts explaining the new movie he's in, and it's
Mad Love the movie that this is a trailer or
fo yeah, and it's it's a wild movie. Um, I
feel like it doesn't. It doesn't. It's not remembered as
well as it should be. It has so many bizarre
(07:08):
elements in it. There's there's knife throwing, there's their hand transplants,
there's tragic mad scientists love stories. We gotta come back
and do this as a as a full movie episode sometime.
It's got the line in the trailer, a poor peasant
have conquered science. Why can't I conquer love? Yes, it's
such a great moment. But but in our email, you
(07:30):
specifically mentioned a face that Peter Lare makes when uh,
when when a previous film is mentioned to him, And
and it was weird. When I was about to respond
to that, I was like gonna type, and then suddenly
I had like this kind of like mash up in
my head, like a memory of his face in that trailer,
(07:50):
and then kind of this this the fact that Laura
is deceased, I don't know, just kind of like as
if they were kind of floating in my head. And
I suddenly had this just this czar deja vou like
experience that was like really overwhelming, and I had to
I had to get up, and I had to go
go lay down. And then uh, there was a just
(08:10):
a little later in the day, I I had another
experience like that. Again. I was at a computer. I
was looking over some of the telescool activities that my
son had done in Google classroom, and I was making
sure that everything was checked off, and it was like
checked off in two different places, and you know, this
juggling act of like eight different learning apps. And then
suddenly I have this jagged chunk of deja vu like
(08:32):
mental energy that, um, though quite vague this time, felt
like a fragment from some old TV show, maybe Carol
Burnett or something. If I had to guess, but I
but I really that would be just guessing and like
reshaping the memory. But again it hit me so hard
that I had to get up. I had to go
into another room. I like, I could feel my um,
(08:53):
it felt like a like an anxiety attack, and I
had to I had to, I had to lay down
for a little bit. And then in both of those
cases when I when I laid down, there was kind
of an echo of the initial experience where I had
like kind of another one and um and and then
I was fine. But it was really weird to to
to experience that, especially having not really experienced anything like
(09:15):
that since I was a kid. All right, So I'm
trying to sort out the elements of what it is
you're describing here. So you're saying that there was there
was an element of like sudden onset overwhelming anxiety, but
also uh, sort of some mental imagery and a feeling
of deja vu, like familiarity with whatever thoughts were currently
(09:35):
entering your mind. Is that it right? Yeah? And And
while the first one, the one with Peter LORI did
have I guess there was some sort of contemplation of
death in there, I guess, And and so that one
was a little loaded, but but the other one had
no like nightmare imagery. It was just kind of like
a bit of TV shrapnel. And actually I had I
had one more last night where I was just making
(09:57):
I was making a drink. I was like, like making
us some sort of tiki cocktail, uh, standing in the
same place they normally do, and then there was just
some sort of nondescript image, uh that that that gave
me a similar sensation, and that passed. So you've had
So these are like multiple instances of deja vu like
experience in the course of a couple of days. How
(10:19):
common is that for you? Normally? Would you say that
you have a feeling of deja vu? Maybe once a
year more or less. It's an interesting question because it's
a question that definitely comes up in some of the
studies that we're gonna look at where they ask people
how how many deja experiences do you have? Is it,
you know, once a week, a couple of times a month.
I'd be really hard pressed to say, because normally when
(10:42):
I have deja vu, it is so mild and uninteresting.
It's just kind of like, huh, that's a bit of
deja vu, and then I move on, you know, like
it's never like this. So I would if I would
to to to take just a wild guess, I'd say
maybe maybe, like once every couple of months. That that
(11:03):
sounds about right for me. Maybe a little bit less
frequently now for me. I one thing I've noticed, and
this is going to line up absolutely with some of
the research we look at later. I definitely feel like
I got deja vu like experiences much more often when
I was a young child. UM, when I was younger.
I I think I may have actually mentioned this on
(11:24):
the show before. I have one very specific instance of
deja vu like feelings that stand out in my memory, UM,
and it was when I was a kid. I don't
remember what age, but you know, I was young enough
to be playing out in the front yard with friends.
I think we were like running around, chasing each other
with sticks and stuff. And there was a low hanging
branch that was coming off of a tree hanging over
(11:46):
our front yard, and I guess I was distracted. I
was looking back at a friend of mine or something,
and I turned around and I ran into this low
hanging branch and hit my face. I think I ended
up getting a black eye from running into the branch.
And right then I had this powerful sensation like this
is all happened before. He was standing right there where
(12:08):
he was and I was here and I ran into
the branch, and it was this time of day, this
time of year. And I never knew how to make
sense of that when I was a kid, because like,
I think I pretty quickly understood that, like, no, this
has not actually happened before. I even as a child,
I don't think I attached any kind of magical significance
to it, Like I didn't think that I was clairvoyant
(12:29):
or something. It was just very odd. I was like,
why do I feel like this exact thing happened before
when I know it didn't. Yeah, the the stat about
it occurring more when you're younger definitely comes up, which,
of course it doesn't really help me out explaining this
because I'm what forty one now, and it seems like
I should have had the bulk of this earlier on um.
(12:51):
But but I mean that's just on average. I mean,
everybody's different. Some people have it much more frequently than
other people do. I'd say it's pretty rare for me now.
I think I probably it at least a few times
a year. Well after after I had these experiences, I
I you know, I initially asked, well, what's a different right,
That's what you you can always uh, you know, use
trying to deduct right things that are that are different
(13:15):
this week. Yeah, yeah, I mean, first of all, it's
I thought, well, maybe there's this panicky aspect to it.
Maybe I had two innch of coffee, but no, it's
a usual amount of coffee for the day. I thought, maybe,
you know, had something to do with steering at screens
too much because I was working, you know, at my
own laptop and then having to go in and help
my son with his laptop. But I dismissed that pretty
(13:37):
quickly as well, because it seems like the connection to
some sort of anxiety was unavoidable. Because, you know, while
while my family and I are objectively you know, lucky
and fortunate compared to plenty of other people going through
COVID nineteen, social distancing, shelter and place mandates or actual
you know illness, there there are a lot of things
to be anxious about right now. I mean, there's the
pandemic itself, local individual, national response is to it, household
(14:01):
protocols to stay safe, my son's tell us schooling, my
own attempts to make my work function remotely, trying to
follow the World Health Organization recommendations to only check the
news once or twice a day, that sort of thing. Yeah,
how's that going? I think I'm I'm still exceeding the
recommended dosage of news per day, but it is helping
(14:21):
me cut down a bit. Uh. And and like some
of the times when I'll reach for my phone to
look at the news, I will put it down instead.
So I think that's it's some advice to take to heart. Yeah,
I feel like looking up that stats, it's like looking
up you know, like how many alcoholic drinks are you
supposed to have a day. It's like yeah, uh, it's
like maybe if you find yourself googling that, it's it's
(14:43):
worth considering that you should consume less. Yeah, exactly. Um.
Another another bit of of infoll throw out on the anxiety.
Uh part of it is that I know on Wednesday
I did go on a walk, but otherwise I didn't
really leave my front porch or my house, and I
ended up not doing yoga or any other kind of
(15:04):
mindfulness exercise that day. Um, so that could have also
been a factor. It's like, well, I did less to
sort of get out of the default mode network and
to escape panic that day. Uh. So maybe I was
more susceptible to it. Yesterday I did do yoga um
and only had one of these episodes. So uh, you know, again,
(15:25):
I think that supports the idea that, well, there's something
going on here with anxiety, right, And and to be sure,
I can be an anxious person in the best of circumstances,
and I've gone through, you know, some stressful times in
my life without having any episodes like this before. But
I thought, well, maybe this is kind of the accumulation
of things, right, death by a thousand cuts. Right, There's
just all these little things and some extra things to
(15:47):
be anxious about, and it kind of builds up. Yeah,
that kind of doesn't make sense for having anomalous I
don't know types of mental phenomena. But then again, one
thing that strikes me is interesting about this is that
I don't formally associate deja vu like sensations with anxiety. Yeah.
I had not really either, because again I didn't I
(16:08):
had never really thought of of that experience for my
childhood as being really connected to deja vu. But but
after these, uh, these experiences on Wednesday, I started doing
a few searches looking around, and indeed a quick glance
around the internet for deja vu panic attacks indeed turned
up some hits like there was someone on an epilepsy
website with a post titled deja Vu slash panic attacks
(16:31):
very tired of being undiagnosed. Another health board nightmarish deja
vu and anxiety attacks. What's going on? Um? And in
both of these posts people responding with like, yeah, I
get this too. Uh, I hate it when this happens,
that sort of thing. And granted, we're talking about message
boards where people are, you know, engaging in varying degrees
of self self diagnosis, et cetera. But it was enough
(16:52):
to make me think, well, maybe there is more to this.
And and uh, you know, I I've never really researched
deja vu itself all that much, so I should look
a little deeper. So in these episodes, that's what we
thought we'd do. We take a little time to explore
deja vu and to explore the connection between deja vu
and anxiety and deja vu and dreams. All right, well,
(17:14):
then maybe we should take a quick break and then
when we come back, we can dive into the memory fog.
Thank thank alright, we're back deja vu. Uh, a term
that I guess most people are familiar with, but you
might not. You might not necessarily be able to define
it off the top of your head. Um, you should
(17:34):
probably just talk about what it means, right, So deja
vu comes from the French. It literally means already seen. Uh. Now,
there are actually a number of different terms for similar,
overlapping experiences that often kind of get blended together and
blurred together. For example, there's another term that's sometimes used.
It's deja vit coup, which means already lived. And so
(17:58):
there's like a lot of things that we call old
deja vu meaning already seen or probably you know, probably
could be categorized as deja viku, meaning like I've already
been through this situation or I've already lived at this moment. Yeah,
they're they're about like twenty different variations of this and
uh and I'll get to some more of them in
the second episode of this series. Yes, But basically, whatever
(18:20):
it is, deja vu, deja viku, uh, it means that
you are having some kind of experience of a stimulus.
You're looking at something, you're hearing something, you're feeling something,
you're going through a situation, and you suddenly get the
feeling that this has already happened. I've already seen that,
or I've already been here, this has happened sometime in
(18:40):
my past, despite evidence to the contrary that like, you're
not seeing something you've already seen, you're not living through
a moment that has already happened. I feel very confident that,
you know, in my in my experience as a child,
that I had not already been playing with those same
friends and run into a branch and gotten a black
eye and all that. For some reason I felt like
(19:01):
I had. Yeah. Likewise, my childhood experience was it was
again not that the feeling that there was an actual
voice in the room with me. It wasn't It wasn't
like that. It was just this feeling that, you know,
the terror was associated with the fact that I didn't
understand like what the sensation came from, not that it
(19:21):
was real. I guess with your original sensation as a child.
There's another level of complexity though, and that'll get into
stuff we'll talk about more in the second episode, with
ideas like de jaureev which do you like that? How
I said that French word? Oh yeah, you hit the
fresh nicely on that, which means already dreamed. So like
(19:42):
there are some cases where you're not even experiencing real
external stimuli. You know, it would be like I already
had this experience as a dream. But then maybe the
current experience isn't is just an imaginative moment. So it
can get very complicated in meta um. But I mean,
especially since just the the vast differences that are possible
(20:03):
from from brain to brain, from mind to mind. Um,
That's kind of the sense I get from a lot
of this research is that when you're dealing with the
basic broad deja vu experience, uh, you know, one size
is not gonna fit all. Like, it seems like it's
going to be a slightly different experience, slightly different frequency,
depending on the individual and the current state of the individual. Right,
(20:24):
I would maybe categorize all of this stuff under an
umbrella that we could just call anomalous familiarity, a sense
of familiarity with something that you have no reason to
be familiar with. So credit for the term deja vu
is usually given to a French philosopher, writer, and parapsychologist
named Amil warrock Uh. He used the term in a
(20:46):
letter to the editor of an academic journal in eighteen
seventy six. Though I do not think Barak made a
distinction from what I can tell, between deja vu is
like a normal psychological phenomenon versus the supposed psychic power
of clairvoyants. And this is something that comes up a
bit throughout the history of research on deja vu. Um.
(21:06):
I think it's more recently that deja vu has been
has gotten a lot of attention as a like just
serious subjective phenomenon, as opposed to people looking at it
trying to find evidence that it's like literal precognition. It's weird,
isn't that. This this kind of idea about deja vu
(21:26):
is really reflected in the Matrix movies, remember where uh,
if you see a black cat twice or whatever, it's
just a glitch in the matrix and it's not really treated.
It's not really a major plot point. It's just kind
of like, huh, isn't that interesting? Uh? Nothing, you should
waste your time with neo just to keep keep on course. Well,
you could look at that two different ways. You could
(21:47):
look at that as like, oh, it's just a little thing,
or you could also look at it as at least
in the Matrix movies, it is giving you real information
about the external world. And oh, and one thing that
we will come back too is there are some theories
of deja vu in which the experience of deja vu
is giving you some real information about the external world.
(22:08):
But it's not clairvoyant or precognitive. You're not having the
sensation because you actually saw the future from the past.
It's more likely having to do with the brains straining
to connect memories that that may not be exactly how
they feel. Yeah, but one thing that I found was
interesting is that before it was fully described and named
in the clinical or scientific context, deja vu was observed
(22:30):
by a number of authors and poets throughout history. Yeah.
I was reading a little bit about this from the
deja vu researcher Art Funk. Howser will come back to
some of his some of some work that he was
involved with the paper that he was a co author on. Yeah,
a little bit later. Uh, but but he pointed out
a few different early examples. Uh. One of the earliest,
(22:50):
I think the earliest that he identified, Well, he's pointing
to the writings of St. Augustine, but to understand what
Augustine's critiquing. You have to go back to the Roman
poem uh Avid, who lived forty three b C. Through
seventeen C. So Avid had written about the human soul
is a thing quote deathless and ever quote when they
(23:12):
have left their former seat, do they live in new
abodes and dwell in the bodies that have received them?
So all of it is getting into ideas of precognition
and more specifically the survival of the human soul. So a.
It is not talking about deja vu here, but what
he's talking about like basically the idea of reincarnation, about
(23:32):
the soul passing from one life to the next. Uh So,
three hundred years later, St. Augustine is critiquing of its
words and he writes the following quote for we must
not acquiesce in their story. Who assert that as Samian
Pythagoras recollected some things which he experienced when he was
(23:53):
previously here in another body, and others that they experienced
something of the same sort in their minds. But it
may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as
we commonly experience in sleep when we fancy we remember,
as though we had done it or seen it what
we never did or saw at all, And that the
(24:14):
minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in
this way at the suggestion of malignant and deep deceitful
spirits whose care it is to confirm or to sow
some false belief concerning the changes of souls in order
to deceive men. And that is from Augustine's on the Trinity.
Uh so, so basically he's he's saying, okay, of it is, uh,
(24:39):
you know, don't listen of it because he might just
be talking about this thing that we have all have
some experience with. And funk howser saying that that Augustine
is is probably talking about deja vu. Here. Yeah, I
found another great example by the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson,
who wrote a poem around eighteen thirty three or eighteen
thirty four called The Two Voices. Uh. This poem was
(25:02):
written during a period of just deep misery and despair
for Tennyson. The basic form it takes is of an
internal argument between two parts of himself about whether or
not to commit suicide, which he describes saying, quote, pain
rises up old pleasures Paul, there is one remedy for
it all. It's actually very similar in many ways to
(25:25):
the famous to be or Not to be soliloquy from
hamlet Um. It's certainly one of Tennyson's darkest works, but
there's a lot of strange beauty and insight in this
passage where he discusses the sensation of false memory, which
did not yet have the name deja vu h. So
Tennyson writes much more, if first I floated free as
(25:46):
naked essence, must I be incompetent of memory for memory
dealing but with time and he with matter? Could she
climb beyond her own material prime? Moreover, something is or
seems that touches me with mystic gleams, like glimpses of
forgotten dreams, of something felt like something here, of something
(26:08):
done I know not where such has no language. May
declare that's nice. I also I am. I don't know
if I'm alone here, but I feel like you could
probably drop a beat behind Tennyson and it would have
some serious flow to it. There's another one from British
poetry that I found. It's kind of on a happier occasion,
though it's by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he manages to
(26:29):
take the happy occasion of a poem and and go
in very dark places with it. But anyway, this is
from a sonnet by Cole Ridge called composed on a
journey homeward, the author having received intelligence of the birth
of a son. He begins by about it exactly, I
love it, But he writes, um off to or my
(26:51):
brain does that strange fancy roll which makes the present
while the flash doth last seem a mere semblance of
some unknown past. And then one more. Charles Dickens writes
about it in pretty straightforwardly in in his novel David Copperfield,
he writes, we have all some experience of a feeling
which comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying
(27:13):
and doing having been said or done before in a
remote time, of our having been surrounded dim ages ago
by the same faces, objects and circumstances, of our knowing
perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly
remembered it. I like the part about dim ages ago
because I think that is also a very consistent and
(27:35):
interesting feature of deja vu experiences, at least in my life,
and as I've often read about them is so you
have the incorrect sensation of remembering present events or present
stimuli from the past, but you can't place it. So
you don't think like I had an experience like this
four months ago, or you know, I had an experience
(27:57):
like this two years ago. It's more like it had
been in this inaccessible, kind of vague other time, which
I think maybe the reason that a lot of people
chalk this up to memory of past lives. Yeah, you
can definitely see where if you wanted to believe in
past lives, this is the sort of the sort of
stuff you could turn to and sort of you know,
(28:18):
warp into evidence. Um now, Yeah, And indeed, most examples
that that I mean I've experienced. I think all the
examples I've experienced have that vagueness to them, and you
do see that in most of the reporting. However, when
we eventually turned to the link between deja vu and dreams,
there are some specific cases where people have a strong
(28:38):
connection between like the deja vu experience they're having now
in a specific dream that they remember. Um. So, I
guess just a reminder that, yeah, with with deja vu experiences,
with this broad category of DejaVu experiences. There's there's a
lot of variety and so there even though that the
trend seems to be towards just you know, the things,
(29:02):
the damn ages, there are occasions where it doesn't seem
so dim to the person experiencing it, which is very interesting.
It makes you wonder what's different about those cases. And
we'll get into some of that probably in the second episode. Well,
are you ready to jump into some basic facts and
findings about deja vu from scientific research? Yeah, let's do it.
Let's let's just start talking about what we know and
(29:23):
what some of the theories are regarding the true nature
of deja vu. All right, let us jump on this
ghost train. Uh So, first thing is, occasional cases of
deja vu are very common for neurologically typical people. Deja
vu as I think we alluded to this earlier, but
it does not typically a sign of any kind of
known pathology. It's just pretty common for people to experience it.
(29:47):
Approximately sixty percent of people report having experience to deja
vu at some point. Yeah, we're we're of course going
to hear a lot from listeners about their particular experience
with deja vu. And I just want to mind you
if you have not if you were one of these, uh,
these people that have not experienced deja vu at some
point in your life, I want to know about that.
(30:07):
I want to hear what that's like, and then how
and how you process other people's reportings of of deja Yeah,
that's interesting. I wonder if I guess it's fairly straightforward
to explain, so you could know what it was, but
you might not be able to understand how it feels
if you've never felt it, even though you could. I mean,
somebody can explain to you, like what the frequency of
(30:32):
light of the color red is, but you might not
really be able to understand it if you've never been
able to see red. Yeah, because uh, deja vu in particular,
My take on it is that it it feels at
least casually weird. You know, every time it happens, it
is at least notable for a second where like huh,
well that's that's odd, and then then you move on. Well, No,
(30:54):
I do think that's interesting because to me, deja vu
feels inherently weird. It's just weird because you realize that
it couldn't be correct, Like, it's not just weird because
you logically recognize the misperception. For me, deja vu feels
weird the moment you experience it, before you even realize
(31:15):
anything's wrong. It is accompanied by a strange sensation. See
that that's interesting because it makes me think of But
between the two of us, like your, your typical deja
vu experience might be maybe more intense or at least, uh,
you end up contemplating it more I don't know than
than I do. Uh. And then of course the episodes
(31:38):
like I've had this week are certainly more pronounced than
than either of these cases. So I don't know. But
when when I experience like just typical deja vu, it is,
it is generally just so casual that I might mention
it if I am, you know, if i'm you know,
around somebody that I'm close to, But otherwise it's just
it's like seeing a bird flyover that's fun, like, oh, well,
(32:00):
there's another bird. I'm not going to point it out
because it's not a special bird, it's just another bird. Well,
maybe this is another thing for listeners to tell us about.
Oh yeah, I would love to hear from them, so
we know it happens every now and then at least
pretty frequently to even typical otherwise healthy people. But is
there any psychological or neurological condition consistently associated with deja vu?
(32:22):
I would say the answer to this is um. The
actual evidence for the link might be a little more
tenuous than has sometimes been suggested, But in the history
of research on deja vu, there appears to be one
major answer here, and that is temporal lobe epilepsy or
t l E. So, temporal lobe epilepsy is characterized by
(32:43):
focal seizures that begin in the temporal lobe of the brain.
And the temporal lobe is very important. It's a crucial
part of the brain that's been associated with major brain
functions like emotional association, visual and short term memory. Does
a lot of stuff with memory, like understanding and processing language.
(33:03):
There's a lot that goes on there. So where does
the deja Vu come in? Are people with temporal lobe
epilepsy just more likely to have deja vu experiences? The
answer there is no. Instead, there is a specific case
where people with temporal lobe epilepsy tend to report deja vu,
and that is in what's known as the aura before
(33:25):
the onset of a seizure, so people with recurrent seizures
often get this weird combination of feelings right before seizure happens.
It's it's sometimes described as a kind of like series
of warning signs. So these might include sudden, unexpected emotions
like you have elation or fear with no cause. Another
(33:45):
one might be numbness in parts of the body, weird
smells or tastes from out of nowhere, like I smell oranges.
Another one is known as epigastric phenomena. This refers to
a weird feeling in the abdomen. I've read it some
times described as a rising feeling, like when you're plummeting
on a roller coaster. Um epigastric specifically, I think, refers
(34:07):
to higher up on the abdomen, so very often it's
like right below the chest, above the stomach, you know,
right sort of where your solo plexus is. But then finally,
another recognized symptom of of the aura for temporal lobe
epilepsy is deja vu, which is interesting, right, yeah, because
this this makes us look to causes in the brain,
(34:30):
like like more specifically, it's it's it seems like there
must be some sort of uh in neurophysical origin for
what is occurring. Yes, But on the other hand, I
think we should also acknowledge that deja vu is, as
we've said, pretty common in people with no otherwise identified
medical or neurological conditions. Um. And I want to quote
(34:52):
now from somebody I'm going to be referring to a
lot throughout this couple of episodes. This is Alan S. Brown,
who published a big review of of deja vous research
in two thousand three in the journal Psychological Bulletin. And
this is an older paper and we will have to
refer to some more recent ones to supplement it, but
up to that point, it's a really fantastic review of
(35:14):
all the research leading up to the early two thousands. Uh.
And So Brown writes about the association between temporal lobe
epilepsy and deja vu that despite the fact that it
is a recognized symptom of a t L a seizure
on set, deja vu doesn't appear to be more common
in general in people with epilepsy. Quote. The weight of
(35:37):
evidence argues against deja vu being more common in people
with epilepsy or being diagnostic of seizure pathology. So there's
a couple of things to weigh. They're on one hand,
it is a recognized feature that a lot of people
report when they're about to have a temporal lobe epileptic seizure.
But on the other hand, it doesn't appear that people
(35:57):
with temporal lobe epilepsy have deja vu more often than
people in general. And uh yeah, And for for that
to make sense, I have to do is just think
back to some of these other symptoms uh we were listing,
uh that are part of the TLA. Like, none of
these other symptoms are things that are exclusive to people
that are experiencing uh, epileptic seizures or anything. Uh So
(36:21):
it's just deja vu is thrown in the mix, but
it's not exclusive to people with this condition, right uh now,
deja vu appears to be that this is one that
that does look pretty solid in in the research. It
is associated with stress and fatigue. You are more likely
to have an episode of deja vu when you are
(36:41):
tired and when you are agitated and you've got your
stress hormones you're pumping your no adrenaline and cortisol. And
this is interesting because I wonder how I mean it's
not exactly the same thing as Robert. You're talking about
your experience with UH sudden anxiety producing episodes of deja vu.
But it makes me wonder if there's some kind of
(37:02):
connection here. Yeah, I mean, when I ran across the
same information, I I lined it up with what I
had experienced, and Okay, you know, obviously there's the stress level,
which I've already touched on, but also, um, all the
experiences I had were in the afternoon or the early evening.
They were not in the morning. You know, I did
not experience them like when I in the first few
(37:24):
hours after waking up or anything like that. So it's
possible that, yeah, I'm throughout the day, I'm getting getting
more tired, I'm having you know, I have less energy
to handle sort of the ambient stress that is around
me and UH, and that could potentially have some connection
to the deja vu H like experiences that I had. Yeah, totally. Now,
(37:44):
the next thing that I thought was interesting is that
Brown reports that some studies have found that people who
travel experience deja vu more than people who don't. For example,
I was looking at the paper by Richardson and Winnaker
from nineteen sixty seven. It was summarizing an earlier study
(38:04):
by Chapman and Mench from nineteen fifty two. But this
study had defined travel as going more than fifty miles
away from home, and it reported findings that quote, non
travelers experienced deja vu in only eleven per cent of
their number, and in those who traveled twenty five percent
of their number. There was no relationship with the frequency
(38:28):
of travel. And so that part about no relationship with
the frequency of travel makes me wonder, like, why would
it be that people who like if this effect is real,
why would it be that people who travel some have
more deja vu than people who don't travel at all.
But if you travel a lot, you don't appear to
have it much more than people who travel a little. Well, well,
(38:50):
the I guess the main potential answer that comes to
my mind is that if we're thinking about deja vu
as this experience by the novel seems familiar, if something
new seems like something old, then perhaps there would be
more potential to experience it if you live the sort
(39:12):
of life in general, uh, either via travel or you know,
via other acts that line up with this personality type. Uh.
You know, the more novelty in your life, the more
potential there is to then have that turn around and
be made a seemingly mundane through deja vu. Oh yeah,
well no, I've actually seen that hypothesized by a researcher
(39:33):
who who I think we're going to talk about more
later and Cleary who's done work on on deja vu.
But I think I also saw her mention at some
point that there's some research indicating that people who watch
more movies are also more likely to experience higher deja
vu frequency. Interesting now, now one I have to catch
(39:54):
myself though at the same time, because when I think
back about deja vu experiences I've had in the past,
a lot of them have not They have not occurred
while I'm traveling. They occurred like if I'm if they're
occurring during novel experiences, they're only mildly novel, you know, like, oh,
like I've never maybe I've never stood in my backyard
with a coffee mug, you know, at this particular spot before.
(40:17):
But that's hardly on par with say, traveling you know,
around the world to to Bangkok or something. I was
sailing to Byzantium. Yeah, um it was. So there's an
interesting thing that Alan Brown notes in his review, combining
the last couple of facts, the idea that deja vu
appears to be strongly associated with stress and fatigue and
the association with with travel um He he notes that
(40:41):
there it was at least one clinician in the nineteen
fifties who observed that reports of deja vu were especially
common among soldiers heading into battle. Weird, but it would
combine those things, right, Heading into battle tends to combine stress, fatigue,
and travel into new locations. Yeah, yeah, you're really piling
(41:02):
those up. Yeah. Now there's another one, which is that
frequency of deja vu experience also shows a positive relationship
with socioeconomic status and level of education. On average, people
who are wealthier and people who have attained higher levels
of education experience more frequency of deja vu, or at
least report more frequency of deja vu on average, And
(41:26):
that does complicate some other findings by the way, Like
for I think Brown actually mentions, I wonder if like
this is acting on the travel variable, right, that, like,
people who have more money or probably more likely to
travel more frequently, So something could be going on there. Yeah,
And of course it also makes me wonder about the
(41:46):
populations that are polled for these kind of studies. You know, um,
I know that there's going to be at least one
study later on that that the researchers point out that, well,
we we looked at like four people, but they were
mostly psychology students, you know, so common with psychology research.
(42:08):
So yeah, not to because I don't know the particulars
of the data that they're referring to here. You know,
perhaps the polling data is uh is the survey data
is more robust than I'm giving it credit to. But
I mean, obviously that's always a potential problem when you're
when you're considering information like this. Absolutely another thing I
thought this was interesting. Men and women seem to experience
(42:29):
deja vu at about the same rate. There have been
a few studies here and there that found gender differences,
but they were not directionally consistent, and combining all the
results together did not find any differences for gender. Now,
we've talked about overlap with neurological conditions, but here's one
that should be very interesting. What about drugs. Do do
any drugs cause increased uh chances of deja vou? Well,
(42:52):
there are some isolated reports of certain drugs yes and
causing very frequent episodes of dejav For example, I was
looking at a paper from the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience
in two thousand one where authors A. Tarot timon In
and Satu K. Jones Yaskalainen. I think UH report the
(43:16):
case of quote a thirty nine year old Caucasian, healthy
male physician who developed intense recurrent deja vu experiences within
twenty four hours of initiating concommitant UH. And this is
a couple of drugs. I'll try the names here, amantadine
and UH phenal propanelamine UH. Those are treatments against influenza.
(43:38):
So the day he was started taking these two drugs
at the same time, amantadine and phenal propanelamine and UH,
and then the deja vu experiences stopped as soon as
he stopped taking the medication. Now, amantadine is a drug
that has multiple effects. It's used to promote dopamine in
patients with some neurological conditions I think, like Parkinson's disease,
(44:01):
but it's also used as an anti viral against influenza
type A. Meanwhile, phenal propanelamine is a decongestion that is
sometimes used as a cough and cold medicine. Um and
I should note I also found at least one other
case report from the nineties of psychosis in an otherwise
healthy patient brought on by this exact same drug combination.
(44:21):
So this appears to be related to the ability of
these drugs to mess around with your dopamine levels. But
we don't know for sure. And I must say that
that would be such a strange symptom to report to
your doctor. You know, they say take two and call
me in the morning, and you call her back and say, Doc,
I am I am experiencing deja vu every five minutes. Yeah,
(44:42):
I mean, that would that would be something. But again,
I mean there are other medications that have, you know,
weird side effects like this. There's a there's a particular
malaria treatment. I remember. I remember being on vacation and
chatting with another couple that was on vacation, but I
believe this was in Costa Rica years and years ago,
and the older couple we were talking to they were
(45:03):
both on this, uh, this anti malarial medication. Uh, you know,
it's just just in case. But they were talking about
the vivid dreams they would have every night because of it. Yeah,
it was. It was quite interesting. It makes me want
to come back and do an episode on malaria drugs
because there are some there's some interesting stories about UH
side effects and complications that have occurred with some of them. Well,
(45:25):
maybe we should take another quick break and the when
we come back, we can discuss maybe the single most
consistent finding in the literature on deja vu. Thank alright,
we're back all right now. I think Brown actually notes
this in his review that that probably the single most
consistent finding in the literature on deja vu is that
(45:46):
frequency of deja vu decreases with age. Isn't that strange?
Like there there's a graph that's included in UH in
Brown's paper here that shows UH like it takes average
yearly experiences like the san of number number of yearly
experiences people report. And I imagine that there must be
a lot of guessing because if you're like us, we
(46:07):
don't exactly remember, but you know people people are estimating,
and you know, you look at it and people in there,
like early twenties, there's this spike and that they're reporting
somewhere between like two and a half and three UH
experiences on average every year of deja vu. But it's
it's sharply curves down. You're down to like one or
(46:28):
a half by the time you're in your late thirties,
and then people in their like sixties are reporting extremely
little with the internet. You know, it's a good thing
we did the episode. If we if we kept going,
you and I are just going to get older and
older and we'll have fewer fresh memories of deja vu
to talk about. Oh, we just got to keep our
stress and fatigue up and then we can buck the trend.
You know. Now here's another big trend about deja vu
(46:51):
experiences that we see reflected in you know all a
lot of these different variations of it, including it's what
is often held up is its opposite Jimmy's oh yeah,
and that means uh, something like never seen. It's the
inverse it would be, uh, you know, deja vu is
you see something new and you think I've seen this before.
Jama vu is you see something you should be familiar
(47:13):
with and you think it's brand new, You've never seen
it before. Well, well, one of the an attribute that
one tends to encounter in all of these experiences is
that people with intact reality testing do not have a
problem identifying the deja vu as inherently unreal. And this
comes back to something we were talking about with our
own experiences, you know, like even these really pronounced experiences
(47:36):
I had yesterday, even the experience I had as a
as a kid, like my my brain kind of fact
checked them and said, is this real? Is there really?
Is Fred Stanford really in my bedroom speaking through a fan?
Uh No, he's not. This is something else, you know, yes,
and that it's not. That's not a function of you
being like a hyper skeptical person or something that that's like,
(47:57):
that's normal for human brains. Yeah. So I was looking
at reading around a little bit about reality testing, and
according to the University of Adelaide philosophy professor Philip Grands,
it's basically the system by which the brain monitors the
brain's own storytelling system, the very narrative of our lives.
(48:18):
So it ends up testing and rejecting ideas about reality. Now,
I was running across uh, um, this is actually a
two thousand and fourteen press release and or an interview
that was published on Eureka Alerts and uh. In this,
Grands used the example of wondering if a common headache
(48:39):
is a brain tumor. Like you get a headache and
you're like, oh boy, I've got a headache right now.
I wonder if this is a brain tumor. Well, in
a typical mind, this sort of thought is probably quickly rejected.
You're like, no, this is just a normal headache. I
had one of these last week and it wasn't you know,
when't a brain tumor, then it's not a brain tumor. Today.
It's nothing to get upset about. Okay. But but if
one's reality testing is faulty, the notion that this might
(49:03):
be a brain tumor, it might persist, It might even
become more dominant, It might you know, become the thought
itself becomes a malignancy. Uh So this, you know, faulty
reality testing plays into various delusions, especially delusions that are
tied to the way our brains process the familiar and
(49:23):
the novel. And one of the examples that Grand's points
to is cop cross delusion, which we've discussed in the
show before. Yeah, Cap craws, where you believe that um
that people you know have been replaced by doubles. So
like you might see you know, it often results from
a particular brain injury or neurodegenerative disease or something that
(49:44):
um causes a dysfunction of the part of the brain
that accused the feeling of familiarity when you recognize familiar faces.
So you might see members of your family and you
recognize them, you say, that looks just like dad. What
you don't feel familiar and thus you think that's not
him though, so you think that he's been replaced by
(50:06):
a doppelganger or look alike. Yeah. So, so we can
see that as kind of an extreme example of an
illusion that's tied to malfunctioning reality testing. Uh and uh
and deja vou is also an example of a mental
experience that is subjected to reality testing in a typical brain,
and indeed, it will generally fail a reality test even
(50:27):
if it's distracting. Part of the distraction for us is
generally realizing that it's not real. Like just this week,
those experiences I had, like one of the super distracting
things was that I realized that this wasn't you know,
that this something was weird here that you know, it
made me question the software, the hardware involved a little
bit but it didn't make me think you know that,
(50:49):
you know, mind flavors are sending thought beams into my
brain or anything. Yeah, I mean this is generally an
interesting question. How how the brain tells what's real? I mean,
I feel like we we could do episode after episode
on this subject. Actually, but like, like this came up
not too long ago when we were talking about visual imagination.
I think this was an episode from last summer. Um
(51:11):
how there is evidence indicating that the brain uses some
of the same infrastructure for imagining visual images that it
uses for seeing with the eyes. And so if it
does that, if there's stuff going on in the visual
processing centers of the brain, just like when you actually
look at a basketball, uh as when you imagine a basketball,
(51:32):
how does your brain know that when you are imagining
a basketball, you're not really seeing one. Clearly, there can
be cases where that that reality testing fails. And this
would be like you imagine seeing something and then you
think it's really there. This is you know, I think
what's generally accepted to happen in psychosis is like your
your reality testing fails in the line between what is
(51:55):
imagined and what is perceived as reality breaks and this
of course, applies yet to dreams as well. Grant's pointed
out that during dreams are reality testing is effectively switched off,
so we simply have experiences. We don't have beliefs about experiences,
which was interesting. I I don't think i'd ever you know,
(52:17):
certainly we've covered dreams in the nature of dreams and
thoughts about dreams in the show before, but I don't
think I've ever heard it put so succinctly before. Yeah. Well,
I think we have talked about the idea that in dreams,
clearly critical thinking is reduced. Yes, yes, definitely that that
seems to be an extremely common feature of dream cognition,
and not just the kind of deliberate, effortful critical thinking
(52:39):
that you do when you're like, okay, and I'm trying
to understand is there a problem with this scientific claim
or something. I mean, the normal automatic critical thinking that
we do that forms the basis of our intuitive reality testing,
even that is sort of turned off sometimes in dreams,
or at least greatly diminished. Yeah, it's the kind of
statement that makes me feel better about being such a
(53:00):
horrible lucid dreamer. Not that I put in a lot
of work on it. But I have frequently noticed that
at times, the rare times where I feel like I
could have lucid dreamed, I clearly didn't have it in me.
Like I just fell right back into into just experiencing
and certainly not having any beliefs or thoughts about the experience.
This is so embarrassing. I'm such a dream loser. I've
(53:22):
probably told you this before, but a very common experience
I have in dreams is stopping in the middle of
a dream and thinking, hold on a second, I'm dreaming
right now, right is this a dream? And then in
the dream I try to pursue that question and interrogate it,
and then I, invariably every single time, end up concluding no,
(53:45):
this is definitely real. Uh See, I've had I've probably
shared this before too. I'll have experiences where I'm dreaming,
I realized I'm dreaming, and then I just click it
right back off again, and then I just fall right
back into the dream. I had that moment where I
was like raising my my head above the waters, and
I could concede like that seems the time to take
(54:07):
the reins of of the dream and and then engage
in lucid dreaming. But I don't. I just fall right
back underwater. This is funny. So we've got similar things
going on, actually, except I just like I address it
more head on and still fail. By the way, Grande
is the author of the Measure of Madness, Philosophy and
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, which was published by m T Press if
(54:29):
anybody wants to to look up more of their work.
But uh, in general, though, just about the connection between
deja vu and dreams, I guess it's gonna be the
next episode of Stuff to Blow your mind where we'll
definitely touch on on some studies related to that, but
then we'll also get into really some of the core
theories regarding that the true nature of deja vu itself. Yeah,
(54:52):
next time we're gonna explore scientific theories that have tried
to explain why the brain creates the feeling of deja vu,
what comes from, and we'll look into dreams, we'll look
into anxiety and more. I think it's gonna be very fun. Yeah,
and certainly feel free to reach out to us in
the meantime, knowing, of course that there's about to be
another episode where we'll we'll probably answer some of your
(55:14):
questions but hey, maybe not. Uh So it's always good
to hear from you either way. In the meantime, if
you want to check out other episodes to Stuff to
Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you find
your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just support the
show by rating, reviewing, and subscribing, uh though. That's the
trinity of actions that help our show out. And if
you just go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
(55:36):
that will shoot you to the I heart listing for
our show where you can basically do all three of
those things as well. Hughes. Thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, who, again I just
want to emphasize, has been doing really heroic work while
Robert and I and all of us are trying to
work from home and do social distancing. Uh. Seth has
(55:56):
helped us figure out all manner of gear stuff, closet stuff,
and then today I couldn't even understand why my microphone
wasn't working for the first half hour we tried this,
So thank you, Seth. Thank you Seth. Uh. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest something for
the future, or just to say Hi, let's know how
(56:16):
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(56:37):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with another closet edition. Uh So this week
we got kind of hijacked off on the side trail
(00:24):
that we didn't quite expect at the beginning of this
week because of a personal experience you had, right, Robert, Yeah,
this this would have happened Wednesday, and it's got me
researching some other topics and looking into it, and I
mentioned it to you and the next thing we know,
we were putting notes together for a couple of episodes.
But it's great because this is also a topic. It
gets into some topics that have been requested by listeners
(00:46):
as well. So Lenny said, a little background for for
what I'm about to describe. So give us your origin story. Yeah,
my origin story, such as it as it is. When
I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old,
which is which is uh the age of my own
son today, I had a very vivid and unsettling mental experience.
(01:06):
It wasn't really a nightmare, but much like a nightmare,
there was this ineffable quality to it. You know, like
even as I try to explain it, uh, my words
can't really relate how it made me feel and how
it still makes me feel. Like when I when I
remember it, when I think back on it, I can
still feel a bit of the terror that I felt then. Uh,
(01:27):
even though just a flat description of it sounds kind
of dumb. Yeah, that's often how nightmares are. It's like
the thing that was really scary in your dream wouldn't
necessarily make a good horror movie because it's hard to
communicate why it was scary. Yeah, exactly, Like I once
had a nightmare about a polar bear that was peeking
into a house with a periscope, and somehow that was
terrifying in the dream, but outside of the dream, it's
(01:48):
just ridiculous and comical. So uh, but this particular situation,
it was, it was not a nightmare. Um, I was
in my bed and I have always slept with white noise,
so even then I had this like oversized box fan
in my my childhood room. And I should also explain
that I watched a lot of TV in those days,
(02:09):
and the you know, my family would watch TV together
and there were various shows on TBS that we would
regularly check out, and one of them was the sitcom
Sanford and Son. You remember Sanford and Son, right, Oh yeah,
totally yeah, Red Fox uh uh so uh. You know,
I don't want to use the verb here or heard here,
because it's it's not like I actually heard sound. It's
(02:30):
not like I experienced an auditory hallucination. It's more that
I suddenly remembered it as I lay there in bed.
It was like a jagged memory that was suddenly embedded
in my my psyche. And it was the sound of
the Sanford and Son character Fred Sanford speaking in slow
motion through the back of a box fan, addressing the
(02:50):
character Grady in this drawn out, oscillating voice. So that's
great because that that has that perfect quality of something
that would be terrifying in like a dream like memory,
but you just can't see it from the outside. It's
like I had a horrifying dream about Bob Sagett from
Full House. Yeah, it's I mean, it's just so ridiculously dumb,
(03:13):
Like if I were to to fictionalize it even a
little bit, I feel like I'd want to change it completely,
you know. Um, but but but the thing is like,
it definitely filled me with terror, and I can I
can remember that terror, and I can. I can really
compare it only to the stark sort of terror that
one feels in a nightmare, you know, especially with the
nonsensical elements to it. And uh and indeed it also
(03:37):
it did not feel like I was remembering something specifically
from watching TV. And it didn't feel like I was dreaming.
I it was, I guess, in some ways, like I
was remembering a dream that I had never had. But
in the sensation passed, the anxiety of it passed, although
I I've always been able to feel like a tinge
of it when I think back on the experience. So
(03:58):
I've never I was never really sure what it was exactly.
I kind of always just sort of thought, well, okay,
it was, you know, something like a dream or a nightmare.
I don't know. Um. And and looking back, I think
there perhaps times in my life where I had like
similar experiences in the years after that, but but pretty
you know, far flung from each other, far less intense.
(04:19):
And because of these factors, I've never really connected those
experiences with this childhood experience. You know, when I think
about experiences like that, especially involving lying in bed as
a child. I think one thing that's often going on
there is that in our memories we are having a
hard time sorting the demarcation line between wakefulness and sleep. Um.
(04:39):
And this is definitely characteristic of memories I have as
a child, Like there are things that I feel like
I remember as happening while I was lying in bed
awake as a kid, But in fact I think they
probably were some sort of like you know, edge of
sleep hallucination, hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucination, uh, dreams bleeding over
(05:01):
into wakefulness. But that it's it's hard to sort out
what's what at that age. Yeah, And I would say,
prior to this week, if you really put me to
task on on what that experience was I had as
a kid, I would have probably leaned on on the
you know, hypnogogic explanation of for what was happening. You know,
like I was somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, and therefore
(05:22):
my mind was susceptible to this kind of semi paranormal experience.
And these kind of experiences are super common, by the way.
That's nothing especially like pathological about them, right, Yeah, So
you know, I also don't want to make it sound
like this like shaped me as an experience, you know.
S Yeah, like I continue to watch Sanford the Sun
(05:44):
after it. Clearly it didn't. It didn't affect me in
that capacity. No night terror can make Red Fox unfunny.
Uh So so that was that was, you know, my
life up until this week, uh, Wednesday, March. I then
experienced what we're basically four of these in a single day.
(06:04):
So I can I can kind of explain two of them,
I guess. Um. So I've been I've been obsessed with
Peter Lori this week, you know, the famed actor. Um.
And I've been feeding that obsession, you know, to try
and get my mind off of more stressful matters. And
I was in the in the process of actually responding
to an email to you, Joe about we had a
(06:25):
slight sort back and forth about the ninety six movie
Mad Love, which I have not seen, but I've been
meaning to see for years because it has one of
the best trailers of all time, Like the the two
minute long trailer for this movie is more entertaining than
most entire movies. It's got Peter Lorie sitting on the
couch at his house and he's got this giant dog
(06:47):
next to him, this bigger than he is. And then
he gets a phone call from beautiful actress to like
tell him what a wonderful actor he is. And then
he starts explaining the new movie he's in, and it's
Mad Love the movie that this is a trailer or
fo yeah, and it's it's a wild movie. Um, I
feel like it doesn't. It doesn't. It's not remembered as
well as it should be. It has so many bizarre
(07:08):
elements in it. There's there's knife throwing, there's their hand transplants,
there's tragic mad scientists love stories. We gotta come back
and do this as a as a full movie episode sometime.
It's got the line in the trailer, a poor peasant
have conquered science. Why can't I conquer love? Yes, it's
such a great moment. But but in our email, you
(07:30):
specifically mentioned a face that Peter Lare makes when uh,
when when a previous film is mentioned to him, And
and it was weird. When I was about to respond
to that, I was like gonna type, and then suddenly
I had like this kind of like mash up in
my head, like a memory of his face in that trailer,
(07:50):
and then kind of this this the fact that Laura
is deceased, I don't know, just kind of like as
if they were kind of floating in my head. And
I suddenly had this just this czar deja vou like
experience that was like really overwhelming, and I had to
I had to get up, and I had to go
go lay down. And then uh, there was a just
(08:10):
a little later in the day, I I had another
experience like that. Again. I was at a computer. I
was looking over some of the telescool activities that my
son had done in Google classroom, and I was making
sure that everything was checked off, and it was like
checked off in two different places, and you know, this
juggling act of like eight different learning apps. And then
suddenly I have this jagged chunk of deja vu like
(08:32):
mental energy that, um, though quite vague this time, felt
like a fragment from some old TV show, maybe Carol
Burnett or something. If I had to guess, but I
but I really that would be just guessing and like
reshaping the memory. But again it hit me so hard
that I had to get up. I had to go
into another room. I like, I could feel my um,
(08:53):
it felt like a like an anxiety attack, and I
had to I had to, I had to lay down
for a little bit. And then in both of those
cases when I when I laid down, there was kind
of an echo of the initial experience where I had
like kind of another one and um and and then
I was fine. But it was really weird to to
to experience that, especially having not really experienced anything like
(09:15):
that since I was a kid. All right, So I'm
trying to sort out the elements of what it is
you're describing here. So you're saying that there was there
was an element of like sudden onset overwhelming anxiety, but
also uh, sort of some mental imagery and a feeling
of deja vu, like familiarity with whatever thoughts were currently
(09:35):
entering your mind. Is that it right? Yeah? And And
while the first one, the one with Peter LORI did
have I guess there was some sort of contemplation of
death in there, I guess, And and so that one
was a little loaded, but but the other one had
no like nightmare imagery. It was just kind of like
a bit of TV shrapnel. And actually I had I
had one more last night where I was just making
(09:57):
I was making a drink. I was like, like making
us some sort of tiki cocktail, uh, standing in the
same place they normally do, and then there was just
some sort of nondescript image, uh that that that gave
me a similar sensation, and that passed. So you've had
So these are like multiple instances of deja vu like
experience in the course of a couple of days. How
(10:19):
common is that for you? Normally? Would you say that
you have a feeling of deja vu? Maybe once a
year more or less. It's an interesting question because it's
a question that definitely comes up in some of the
studies that we're gonna look at where they ask people
how how many deja experiences do you have? Is it,
you know, once a week, a couple of times a month.
I'd be really hard pressed to say, because normally when
(10:42):
I have deja vu, it is so mild and uninteresting.
It's just kind of like, huh, that's a bit of
deja vu, and then I move on, you know, like
it's never like this. So I would if I would
to to to take just a wild guess, I'd say
maybe maybe, like once every couple of months. That that
(11:03):
sounds about right for me. Maybe a little bit less
frequently now for me. I one thing I've noticed, and
this is going to line up absolutely with some of
the research we look at later. I definitely feel like
I got deja vu like experiences much more often when
I was a young child. UM, when I was younger.
I I think I may have actually mentioned this on
(11:24):
the show before. I have one very specific instance of
deja vu like feelings that stand out in my memory, UM,
and it was when I was a kid. I don't
remember what age, but you know, I was young enough
to be playing out in the front yard with friends.
I think we were like running around, chasing each other
with sticks and stuff. And there was a low hanging
branch that was coming off of a tree hanging over
(11:46):
our front yard, and I guess I was distracted. I
was looking back at a friend of mine or something,
and I turned around and I ran into this low
hanging branch and hit my face. I think I ended
up getting a black eye from running into the branch.
And right then I had this powerful sensation like this
is all happened before. He was standing right there where
(12:08):
he was and I was here and I ran into
the branch, and it was this time of day, this
time of year. And I never knew how to make
sense of that when I was a kid, because like,
I think I pretty quickly understood that, like, no, this
has not actually happened before. I even as a child,
I don't think I attached any kind of magical significance
to it, Like I didn't think that I was clairvoyant
(12:29):
or something. It was just very odd. I was like,
why do I feel like this exact thing happened before
when I know it didn't. Yeah, the the stat about
it occurring more when you're younger definitely comes up, which,
of course it doesn't really help me out explaining this
because I'm what forty one now, and it seems like
I should have had the bulk of this earlier on um.
(12:51):
But but I mean that's just on average. I mean,
everybody's different. Some people have it much more frequently than
other people do. I'd say it's pretty rare for me now.
I think I probably it at least a few times
a year. Well after after I had these experiences, I
I you know, I initially asked, well, what's a different right,
That's what you you can always uh, you know, use
trying to deduct right things that are that are different
(13:15):
this week. Yeah, yeah, I mean, first of all, it's
I thought, well, maybe there's this panicky aspect to it.
Maybe I had two innch of coffee, but no, it's
a usual amount of coffee for the day. I thought, maybe,
you know, had something to do with steering at screens
too much because I was working, you know, at my
own laptop and then having to go in and help
my son with his laptop. But I dismissed that pretty
(13:37):
quickly as well, because it seems like the connection to
some sort of anxiety was unavoidable. Because, you know, while
while my family and I are objectively you know, lucky
and fortunate compared to plenty of other people going through
COVID nineteen, social distancing, shelter and place mandates or actual
you know illness, there there are a lot of things
to be anxious about right now. I mean, there's the
pandemic itself, local individual, national response is to it, household
(14:01):
protocols to stay safe, my son's tell us schooling, my
own attempts to make my work function remotely, trying to
follow the World Health Organization recommendations to only check the
news once or twice a day, that sort of thing. Yeah,
how's that going? I think I'm I'm still exceeding the
recommended dosage of news per day, but it is helping
(14:21):
me cut down a bit. Uh. And and like some
of the times when I'll reach for my phone to
look at the news, I will put it down instead.
So I think that's it's some advice to take to heart. Yeah,
I feel like looking up that stats, it's like looking
up you know, like how many alcoholic drinks are you
supposed to have a day. It's like yeah, uh, it's
like maybe if you find yourself googling that, it's it's
(14:43):
worth considering that you should consume less. Yeah, exactly. Um.
Another another bit of of infoll throw out on the anxiety.
Uh part of it is that I know on Wednesday
I did go on a walk, but otherwise I didn't
really leave my front porch or my house, and I
ended up not doing yoga or any other kind of
(15:04):
mindfulness exercise that day. Um, so that could have also
been a factor. It's like, well, I did less to
sort of get out of the default mode network and
to escape panic that day. Uh. So maybe I was
more susceptible to it. Yesterday I did do yoga um
and only had one of these episodes. So uh, you know, again,
(15:25):
I think that supports the idea that, well, there's something
going on here with anxiety, right, And and to be sure,
I can be an anxious person in the best of circumstances,
and I've gone through, you know, some stressful times in
my life without having any episodes like this before. But
I thought, well, maybe this is kind of the accumulation
of things, right, death by a thousand cuts. Right, There's
just all these little things and some extra things to
(15:47):
be anxious about, and it kind of builds up. Yeah,
that kind of doesn't make sense for having anomalous I
don't know types of mental phenomena. But then again, one
thing that strikes me is interesting about this is that
I don't formally associate deja vu like sensations with anxiety. Yeah.
I had not really either, because again I didn't I
(16:08):
had never really thought of of that experience for my
childhood as being really connected to deja vu. But but
after these, uh, these experiences on Wednesday, I started doing
a few searches looking around, and indeed a quick glance
around the internet for deja vu panic attacks indeed turned
up some hits like there was someone on an epilepsy
website with a post titled deja Vu slash panic attacks
(16:31):
very tired of being undiagnosed. Another health board nightmarish deja
vu and anxiety attacks. What's going on? Um? And in
both of these posts people responding with like, yeah, I
get this too. Uh, I hate it when this happens,
that sort of thing. And granted, we're talking about message
boards where people are, you know, engaging in varying degrees
of self self diagnosis, et cetera. But it was enough
(16:52):
to make me think, well, maybe there is more to this.
And and uh, you know, I I've never really researched
deja vu itself all that much, so I should look
a little deeper. So in these episodes, that's what we
thought we'd do. We take a little time to explore
deja vu and to explore the connection between deja vu
and anxiety and deja vu and dreams. All right, well,
(17:14):
then maybe we should take a quick break and then
when we come back, we can dive into the memory fog.
Thank thank alright, we're back deja vu. Uh, a term
that I guess most people are familiar with, but you
might not. You might not necessarily be able to define
it off the top of your head. Um, you should
(17:34):
probably just talk about what it means, right, So deja
vu comes from the French. It literally means already seen. Uh. Now,
there are actually a number of different terms for similar,
overlapping experiences that often kind of get blended together and
blurred together. For example, there's another term that's sometimes used.
It's deja vit coup, which means already lived. And so
(17:58):
there's like a lot of things that we call old
deja vu meaning already seen or probably you know, probably
could be categorized as deja viku, meaning like I've already
been through this situation or I've already lived at this moment. Yeah,
they're they're about like twenty different variations of this and
uh and I'll get to some more of them in
the second episode of this series. Yes, But basically, whatever
(18:20):
it is, deja vu, deja viku, uh, it means that
you are having some kind of experience of a stimulus.
You're looking at something, you're hearing something, you're feeling something,
you're going through a situation, and you suddenly get the
feeling that this has already happened. I've already seen that,
or I've already been here, this has happened sometime in
(18:40):
my past, despite evidence to the contrary that like, you're
not seeing something you've already seen, you're not living through
a moment that has already happened. I feel very confident that,
you know, in my in my experience as a child,
that I had not already been playing with those same
friends and run into a branch and gotten a black
eye and all that. For some reason I felt like
(19:01):
I had. Yeah. Likewise, my childhood experience was it was
again not that the feeling that there was an actual
voice in the room with me. It wasn't It wasn't
like that. It was just this feeling that, you know,
the terror was associated with the fact that I didn't
understand like what the sensation came from, not that it
(19:21):
was real. I guess with your original sensation as a child.
There's another level of complexity though, and that'll get into
stuff we'll talk about more in the second episode, with
ideas like de jaureev which do you like that? How
I said that French word? Oh yeah, you hit the
fresh nicely on that, which means already dreamed. So like
(19:42):
there are some cases where you're not even experiencing real
external stimuli. You know, it would be like I already
had this experience as a dream. But then maybe the
current experience isn't is just an imaginative moment. So it
can get very complicated in meta um. But I mean,
especially since just the the vast differences that are possible
(20:03):
from from brain to brain, from mind to mind. Um,
That's kind of the sense I get from a lot
of this research is that when you're dealing with the
basic broad deja vu experience, uh, you know, one size
is not gonna fit all. Like, it seems like it's
going to be a slightly different experience, slightly different frequency,
depending on the individual and the current state of the individual. Right,
(20:24):
I would maybe categorize all of this stuff under an
umbrella that we could just call anomalous familiarity, a sense
of familiarity with something that you have no reason to
be familiar with. So credit for the term deja vu
is usually given to a French philosopher, writer, and parapsychologist
named Amil warrock Uh. He used the term in a
(20:46):
letter to the editor of an academic journal in eighteen
seventy six. Though I do not think Barak made a
distinction from what I can tell, between deja vu is
like a normal psychological phenomenon versus the supposed psychic power
of clairvoyants. And this is something that comes up a
bit throughout the history of research on deja vu. Um.
(21:06):
I think it's more recently that deja vu has been
has gotten a lot of attention as a like just
serious subjective phenomenon, as opposed to people looking at it
trying to find evidence that it's like literal precognition. It's weird,
isn't that. This this kind of idea about deja vu
(21:26):
is really reflected in the Matrix movies, remember where uh,
if you see a black cat twice or whatever, it's
just a glitch in the matrix and it's not really treated.
It's not really a major plot point. It's just kind
of like, huh, isn't that interesting? Uh? Nothing, you should
waste your time with neo just to keep keep on course. Well,
you could look at that two different ways. You could
(21:47):
look at that as like, oh, it's just a little thing,
or you could also look at it as at least
in the Matrix movies, it is giving you real information
about the external world. And oh, and one thing that
we will come back too is there are some theories
of deja vu in which the experience of deja vu
is giving you some real information about the external world.
(22:08):
But it's not clairvoyant or precognitive. You're not having the
sensation because you actually saw the future from the past.
It's more likely having to do with the brains straining
to connect memories that that may not be exactly how
they feel. Yeah, but one thing that I found was
interesting is that before it was fully described and named
in the clinical or scientific context, deja vu was observed
(22:30):
by a number of authors and poets throughout history. Yeah.
I was reading a little bit about this from the
deja vu researcher Art Funk. Howser will come back to
some of his some of some work that he was
involved with the paper that he was a co author on. Yeah,
a little bit later. Uh, but but he pointed out
a few different early examples. Uh. One of the earliest,
(22:50):
I think the earliest that he identified, Well, he's pointing
to the writings of St. Augustine, but to understand what
Augustine's critiquing. You have to go back to the Roman
poem uh Avid, who lived forty three b C. Through
seventeen C. So Avid had written about the human soul
is a thing quote deathless and ever quote when they
(23:12):
have left their former seat, do they live in new
abodes and dwell in the bodies that have received them?
So all of it is getting into ideas of precognition
and more specifically the survival of the human soul. So a.
It is not talking about deja vu here, but what
he's talking about like basically the idea of reincarnation, about
(23:32):
the soul passing from one life to the next. Uh So,
three hundred years later, St. Augustine is critiquing of its
words and he writes the following quote for we must
not acquiesce in their story. Who assert that as Samian
Pythagoras recollected some things which he experienced when he was
(23:53):
previously here in another body, and others that they experienced
something of the same sort in their minds. But it
may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as
we commonly experience in sleep when we fancy we remember,
as though we had done it or seen it what
we never did or saw at all, And that the
(24:14):
minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in
this way at the suggestion of malignant and deep deceitful
spirits whose care it is to confirm or to sow
some false belief concerning the changes of souls in order
to deceive men. And that is from Augustine's on the Trinity.
Uh so, so basically he's he's saying, okay, of it is, uh,
(24:39):
you know, don't listen of it because he might just
be talking about this thing that we have all have
some experience with. And funk howser saying that that Augustine
is is probably talking about deja vu. Here. Yeah, I
found another great example by the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson,
who wrote a poem around eighteen thirty three or eighteen
thirty four called The Two Voices. Uh. This poem was
(25:02):
written during a period of just deep misery and despair
for Tennyson. The basic form it takes is of an
internal argument between two parts of himself about whether or
not to commit suicide, which he describes saying, quote, pain
rises up old pleasures Paul, there is one remedy for
it all. It's actually very similar in many ways to
(25:25):
the famous to be or Not to be soliloquy from
hamlet Um. It's certainly one of Tennyson's darkest works, but
there's a lot of strange beauty and insight in this
passage where he discusses the sensation of false memory, which
did not yet have the name deja vu h. So
Tennyson writes much more, if first I floated free as
(25:46):
naked essence, must I be incompetent of memory for memory
dealing but with time and he with matter? Could she
climb beyond her own material prime? Moreover, something is or
seems that touches me with mystic gleams, like glimpses of
forgotten dreams, of something felt like something here, of something
(26:08):
done I know not where such has no language. May
declare that's nice. I also I am. I don't know
if I'm alone here, but I feel like you could
probably drop a beat behind Tennyson and it would have
some serious flow to it. There's another one from British
poetry that I found. It's kind of on a happier occasion,
though it's by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he manages to
(26:29):
take the happy occasion of a poem and and go
in very dark places with it. But anyway, this is
from a sonnet by Cole Ridge called composed on a
journey homeward, the author having received intelligence of the birth
of a son. He begins by about it exactly, I
love it, But he writes, um off to or my
(26:51):
brain does that strange fancy roll which makes the present
while the flash doth last seem a mere semblance of
some unknown past. And then one more. Charles Dickens writes
about it in pretty straightforwardly in in his novel David Copperfield,
he writes, we have all some experience of a feeling
which comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying
(27:13):
and doing having been said or done before in a
remote time, of our having been surrounded dim ages ago
by the same faces, objects and circumstances, of our knowing
perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly
remembered it. I like the part about dim ages ago
because I think that is also a very consistent and
(27:35):
interesting feature of deja vu experiences, at least in my life,
and as I've often read about them is so you
have the incorrect sensation of remembering present events or present
stimuli from the past, but you can't place it. So
you don't think like I had an experience like this
four months ago, or you know, I had an experience
(27:57):
like this two years ago. It's more like it had
been in this inaccessible, kind of vague other time, which
I think maybe the reason that a lot of people
chalk this up to memory of past lives. Yeah, you
can definitely see where if you wanted to believe in
past lives, this is the sort of the sort of
stuff you could turn to and sort of you know,
(28:18):
warp into evidence. Um now, Yeah, And indeed, most examples
that that I mean I've experienced. I think all the
examples I've experienced have that vagueness to them, and you
do see that in most of the reporting. However, when
we eventually turned to the link between deja vu and dreams,
there are some specific cases where people have a strong
(28:38):
connection between like the deja vu experience they're having now
in a specific dream that they remember. Um. So, I
guess just a reminder that, yeah, with with deja vu experiences,
with this broad category of DejaVu experiences. There's there's a
lot of variety and so there even though that the
trend seems to be towards just you know, the things,
(29:02):
the damn ages, there are occasions where it doesn't seem
so dim to the person experiencing it, which is very interesting.
It makes you wonder what's different about those cases. And
we'll get into some of that probably in the second episode. Well,
are you ready to jump into some basic facts and
findings about deja vu from scientific research? Yeah, let's do it.
Let's let's just start talking about what we know and
(29:23):
what some of the theories are regarding the true nature
of deja vu. All right, let us jump on this
ghost train. Uh So, first thing is, occasional cases of
deja vu are very common for neurologically typical people. Deja
vu as I think we alluded to this earlier, but
it does not typically a sign of any kind of
known pathology. It's just pretty common for people to experience it.
(29:47):
Approximately sixty percent of people report having experience to deja
vu at some point. Yeah, we're we're of course going
to hear a lot from listeners about their particular experience
with deja vu. And I just want to mind you
if you have not if you were one of these, uh,
these people that have not experienced deja vu at some
point in your life, I want to know about that.
(30:07):
I want to hear what that's like, and then how
and how you process other people's reportings of of deja Yeah,
that's interesting. I wonder if I guess it's fairly straightforward
to explain, so you could know what it was, but
you might not be able to understand how it feels
if you've never felt it, even though you could. I mean,
somebody can explain to you, like what the frequency of
(30:32):
light of the color red is, but you might not
really be able to understand it if you've never been
able to see red. Yeah, because uh, deja vu in particular,
My take on it is that it it feels at
least casually weird. You know, every time it happens, it
is at least notable for a second where like huh,
well that's that's odd, and then then you move on. Well, No,
(30:54):
I do think that's interesting because to me, deja vu
feels inherently weird. It's just weird because you realize that
it couldn't be correct, Like, it's not just weird because
you logically recognize the misperception. For me, deja vu feels
weird the moment you experience it, before you even realize
(31:15):
anything's wrong. It is accompanied by a strange sensation. See
that that's interesting because it makes me think of But
between the two of us, like your, your typical deja
vu experience might be maybe more intense or at least, uh,
you end up contemplating it more I don't know than
than I do. Uh. And then of course the episodes
(31:38):
like I've had this week are certainly more pronounced than
than either of these cases. So I don't know. But
when when I experience like just typical deja vu, it is,
it is generally just so casual that I might mention
it if I am, you know, if i'm you know,
around somebody that I'm close to, But otherwise it's just
it's like seeing a bird flyover that's fun, like, oh, well,
(32:00):
there's another bird. I'm not going to point it out
because it's not a special bird, it's just another bird. Well,
maybe this is another thing for listeners to tell us about.
Oh yeah, I would love to hear from them, so
we know it happens every now and then at least
pretty frequently to even typical otherwise healthy people. But is
there any psychological or neurological condition consistently associated with deja vu?
(32:22):
I would say the answer to this is um. The
actual evidence for the link might be a little more
tenuous than has sometimes been suggested, But in the history
of research on deja vu, there appears to be one
major answer here, and that is temporal lobe epilepsy or
t l E. So, temporal lobe epilepsy is characterized by
(32:43):
focal seizures that begin in the temporal lobe of the brain.
And the temporal lobe is very important. It's a crucial
part of the brain that's been associated with major brain
functions like emotional association, visual and short term memory. Does
a lot of stuff with memory, like understanding and processing language.
(33:03):
There's a lot that goes on there. So where does
the deja Vu come in? Are people with temporal lobe
epilepsy just more likely to have deja vu experiences? The
answer there is no. Instead, there is a specific case
where people with temporal lobe epilepsy tend to report deja vu,
and that is in what's known as the aura before
(33:25):
the onset of a seizure, so people with recurrent seizures
often get this weird combination of feelings right before seizure happens.
It's it's sometimes described as a kind of like series
of warning signs. So these might include sudden, unexpected emotions
like you have elation or fear with no cause. Another
(33:45):
one might be numbness in parts of the body, weird
smells or tastes from out of nowhere, like I smell oranges.
Another one is known as epigastric phenomena. This refers to
a weird feeling in the abdomen. I've read it some
times described as a rising feeling, like when you're plummeting
on a roller coaster. Um epigastric specifically, I think, refers
(34:07):
to higher up on the abdomen, so very often it's
like right below the chest, above the stomach, you know,
right sort of where your solo plexus is. But then finally,
another recognized symptom of of the aura for temporal lobe
epilepsy is deja vu, which is interesting, right, yeah, because
this this makes us look to causes in the brain,
(34:30):
like like more specifically, it's it's it seems like there
must be some sort of uh in neurophysical origin for
what is occurring. Yes, But on the other hand, I
think we should also acknowledge that deja vu is, as
we've said, pretty common in people with no otherwise identified
medical or neurological conditions. Um. And I want to quote
(34:52):
now from somebody I'm going to be referring to a
lot throughout this couple of episodes. This is Alan S. Brown,
who published a big review of of deja vous research
in two thousand three in the journal Psychological Bulletin. And
this is an older paper and we will have to
refer to some more recent ones to supplement it, but
up to that point, it's a really fantastic review of
(35:14):
all the research leading up to the early two thousands. Uh.
And So Brown writes about the association between temporal lobe
epilepsy and deja vu that despite the fact that it
is a recognized symptom of a t L a seizure
on set, deja vu doesn't appear to be more common
in general in people with epilepsy. Quote. The weight of
(35:37):
evidence argues against deja vu being more common in people
with epilepsy or being diagnostic of seizure pathology. So there's
a couple of things to weigh. They're on one hand,
it is a recognized feature that a lot of people
report when they're about to have a temporal lobe epileptic seizure.
But on the other hand, it doesn't appear that people
(35:57):
with temporal lobe epilepsy have deja vu more often than
people in general. And uh yeah, And for for that
to make sense, I have to do is just think
back to some of these other symptoms uh we were listing,
uh that are part of the TLA. Like, none of
these other symptoms are things that are exclusive to people
that are experiencing uh, epileptic seizures or anything. Uh So
(36:21):
it's just deja vu is thrown in the mix, but
it's not exclusive to people with this condition, right uh now,
deja vu appears to be that this is one that
that does look pretty solid in in the research. It
is associated with stress and fatigue. You are more likely
to have an episode of deja vu when you are
(36:41):
tired and when you are agitated and you've got your
stress hormones you're pumping your no adrenaline and cortisol. And
this is interesting because I wonder how I mean it's
not exactly the same thing as Robert. You're talking about
your experience with UH sudden anxiety producing episodes of deja vu.
But it makes me wonder if there's some kind of
(37:02):
connection here. Yeah, I mean, when I ran across the
same information, I I lined it up with what I
had experienced, and Okay, you know, obviously there's the stress level,
which I've already touched on, but also, um, all the
experiences I had were in the afternoon or the early evening.
They were not in the morning. You know, I did
not experience them like when I in the first few
(37:24):
hours after waking up or anything like that. So it's
possible that, yeah, I'm throughout the day, I'm getting getting
more tired, I'm having you know, I have less energy
to handle sort of the ambient stress that is around
me and UH, and that could potentially have some connection
to the deja vu H like experiences that I had. Yeah, totally. Now,
(37:44):
the next thing that I thought was interesting is that
Brown reports that some studies have found that people who
travel experience deja vu more than people who don't. For example,
I was looking at the paper by Richardson and Winnaker
from nineteen sixty seven. It was summarizing an earlier study
(38:04):
by Chapman and Mench from nineteen fifty two. But this
study had defined travel as going more than fifty miles
away from home, and it reported findings that quote, non
travelers experienced deja vu in only eleven per cent of
their number, and in those who traveled twenty five percent
of their number. There was no relationship with the frequency
(38:28):
of travel. And so that part about no relationship with
the frequency of travel makes me wonder, like, why would
it be that people who like if this effect is real,
why would it be that people who travel some have
more deja vu than people who don't travel at all.
But if you travel a lot, you don't appear to
have it much more than people who travel a little. Well, well,
(38:50):
the I guess the main potential answer that comes to
my mind is that if we're thinking about deja vu
as this experience by the novel seems familiar, if something
new seems like something old, then perhaps there would be
more potential to experience it if you live the sort
(39:12):
of life in general, uh, either via travel or you know,
via other acts that line up with this personality type. Uh.
You know, the more novelty in your life, the more
potential there is to then have that turn around and
be made a seemingly mundane through deja vu. Oh yeah,
well no, I've actually seen that hypothesized by a researcher
(39:33):
who who I think we're going to talk about more
later and Cleary who's done work on on deja vu.
But I think I also saw her mention at some
point that there's some research indicating that people who watch
more movies are also more likely to experience higher deja
vu frequency. Interesting now, now one I have to catch
(39:54):
myself though at the same time, because when I think
back about deja vu experiences I've had in the past,
a lot of them have not They have not occurred
while I'm traveling. They occurred like if I'm if they're
occurring during novel experiences, they're only mildly novel, you know, like, oh,
like I've never maybe I've never stood in my backyard
with a coffee mug, you know, at this particular spot before.
(40:17):
But that's hardly on par with say, traveling you know,
around the world to to Bangkok or something. I was
sailing to Byzantium. Yeah, um it was. So there's an
interesting thing that Alan Brown notes in his review, combining
the last couple of facts, the idea that deja vu
appears to be strongly associated with stress and fatigue and
the association with with travel um He he notes that
(40:41):
there it was at least one clinician in the nineteen
fifties who observed that reports of deja vu were especially
common among soldiers heading into battle. Weird, but it would
combine those things, right, Heading into battle tends to combine stress, fatigue,
and travel into new locations. Yeah, yeah, you're really piling
(41:02):
those up. Yeah. Now there's another one, which is that
frequency of deja vu experience also shows a positive relationship
with socioeconomic status and level of education. On average, people
who are wealthier and people who have attained higher levels
of education experience more frequency of deja vu, or at
least report more frequency of deja vu on average, And
(41:26):
that does complicate some other findings by the way, Like
for I think Brown actually mentions, I wonder if like
this is acting on the travel variable, right, that, like,
people who have more money or probably more likely to
travel more frequently, So something could be going on there. Yeah,
And of course it also makes me wonder about the
(41:46):
populations that are polled for these kind of studies. You know, um,
I know that there's going to be at least one
study later on that that the researchers point out that, well,
we we looked at like four people, but they were
mostly psychology students, you know, so common with psychology research.
(42:08):
So yeah, not to because I don't know the particulars
of the data that they're referring to here. You know,
perhaps the polling data is uh is the survey data
is more robust than I'm giving it credit to. But
I mean, obviously that's always a potential problem when you're
when you're considering information like this. Absolutely another thing I
thought this was interesting. Men and women seem to experience
(42:29):
deja vu at about the same rate. There have been
a few studies here and there that found gender differences,
but they were not directionally consistent, and combining all the
results together did not find any differences for gender. Now,
we've talked about overlap with neurological conditions, but here's one
that should be very interesting. What about drugs. Do do
any drugs cause increased uh chances of deja vou? Well,
(42:52):
there are some isolated reports of certain drugs yes and
causing very frequent episodes of dejav For example, I was
looking at a paper from the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience
in two thousand one where authors A. Tarot timon In
and Satu K. Jones Yaskalainen. I think UH report the
(43:16):
case of quote a thirty nine year old Caucasian, healthy
male physician who developed intense recurrent deja vu experiences within
twenty four hours of initiating concommitant UH. And this is
a couple of drugs. I'll try the names here, amantadine
and UH phenal propanelamine UH. Those are treatments against influenza.
(43:38):
So the day he was started taking these two drugs
at the same time, amantadine and phenal propanelamine and UH,
and then the deja vu experiences stopped as soon as
he stopped taking the medication. Now, amantadine is a drug
that has multiple effects. It's used to promote dopamine in
patients with some neurological conditions I think, like Parkinson's disease,
(44:01):
but it's also used as an anti viral against influenza
type A. Meanwhile, phenal propanelamine is a decongestion that is
sometimes used as a cough and cold medicine. Um and
I should note I also found at least one other
case report from the nineties of psychosis in an otherwise
healthy patient brought on by this exact same drug combination.
(44:21):
So this appears to be related to the ability of
these drugs to mess around with your dopamine levels. But
we don't know for sure. And I must say that
that would be such a strange symptom to report to
your doctor. You know, they say take two and call
me in the morning, and you call her back and say, Doc,
I am I am experiencing deja vu every five minutes. Yeah,
(44:42):
I mean, that would that would be something. But again,
I mean there are other medications that have, you know,
weird side effects like this. There's a there's a particular
malaria treatment. I remember. I remember being on vacation and
chatting with another couple that was on vacation, but I
believe this was in Costa Rica years and years ago,
and the older couple we were talking to they were
(45:03):
both on this, uh, this anti malarial medication. Uh, you know,
it's just just in case. But they were talking about
the vivid dreams they would have every night because of it. Yeah,
it was. It was quite interesting. It makes me want
to come back and do an episode on malaria drugs
because there are some there's some interesting stories about UH
side effects and complications that have occurred with some of them. Well,
(45:25):
maybe we should take another quick break and the when
we come back, we can discuss maybe the single most
consistent finding in the literature on deja vu. Thank alright,
we're back all right now. I think Brown actually notes
this in his review that that probably the single most
consistent finding in the literature on deja vu is that
(45:46):
frequency of deja vu decreases with age. Isn't that strange?
Like there there's a graph that's included in UH in
Brown's paper here that shows UH like it takes average
yearly experiences like the san of number number of yearly
experiences people report. And I imagine that there must be
a lot of guessing because if you're like us, we
(46:07):
don't exactly remember, but you know people people are estimating,
and you know, you look at it and people in there,
like early twenties, there's this spike and that they're reporting
somewhere between like two and a half and three UH
experiences on average every year of deja vu. But it's
it's sharply curves down. You're down to like one or
(46:28):
a half by the time you're in your late thirties,
and then people in their like sixties are reporting extremely
little with the internet. You know, it's a good thing
we did the episode. If we if we kept going,
you and I are just going to get older and
older and we'll have fewer fresh memories of deja vu
to talk about. Oh, we just got to keep our
stress and fatigue up and then we can buck the trend.
You know. Now here's another big trend about deja vu
(46:51):
experiences that we see reflected in you know all a
lot of these different variations of it, including it's what
is often held up is its opposite Jimmy's oh yeah,
and that means uh, something like never seen. It's the
inverse it would be, uh, you know, deja vu is
you see something new and you think I've seen this before.
Jama vu is you see something you should be familiar
(47:13):
with and you think it's brand new, You've never seen
it before. Well, well, one of the an attribute that
one tends to encounter in all of these experiences is
that people with intact reality testing do not have a
problem identifying the deja vu as inherently unreal. And this
comes back to something we were talking about with our
own experiences, you know, like even these really pronounced experiences
(47:36):
I had yesterday, even the experience I had as a
as a kid, like my my brain kind of fact
checked them and said, is this real? Is there really?
Is Fred Stanford really in my bedroom speaking through a fan?
Uh No, he's not. This is something else, you know, yes,
and that it's not. That's not a function of you
being like a hyper skeptical person or something that that's like,
(47:57):
that's normal for human brains. Yeah. So I was looking
at reading around a little bit about reality testing, and
according to the University of Adelaide philosophy professor Philip Grands,
it's basically the system by which the brain monitors the
brain's own storytelling system, the very narrative of our lives.
(48:18):
So it ends up testing and rejecting ideas about reality. Now,
I was running across uh, um, this is actually a
two thousand and fourteen press release and or an interview
that was published on Eureka Alerts and uh. In this,
Grands used the example of wondering if a common headache
(48:39):
is a brain tumor. Like you get a headache and
you're like, oh boy, I've got a headache right now.
I wonder if this is a brain tumor. Well, in
a typical mind, this sort of thought is probably quickly rejected.
You're like, no, this is just a normal headache. I
had one of these last week and it wasn't you know,
when't a brain tumor, then it's not a brain tumor. Today.
It's nothing to get upset about. Okay. But but if
one's reality testing is faulty, the notion that this might
(49:03):
be a brain tumor, it might persist, It might even
become more dominant, It might you know, become the thought
itself becomes a malignancy. Uh So this, you know, faulty
reality testing plays into various delusions, especially delusions that are
tied to the way our brains process the familiar and
(49:23):
the novel. And one of the examples that Grand's points
to is cop cross delusion, which we've discussed in the
show before. Yeah, Cap craws, where you believe that um
that people you know have been replaced by doubles. So
like you might see you know, it often results from
a particular brain injury or neurodegenerative disease or something that
(49:44):
um causes a dysfunction of the part of the brain
that accused the feeling of familiarity when you recognize familiar faces.
So you might see members of your family and you
recognize them, you say, that looks just like dad. What
you don't feel familiar and thus you think that's not
him though, so you think that he's been replaced by
(50:06):
a doppelganger or look alike. Yeah. So, so we can
see that as kind of an extreme example of an
illusion that's tied to malfunctioning reality testing. Uh and uh
and deja vou is also an example of a mental
experience that is subjected to reality testing in a typical brain,
and indeed, it will generally fail a reality test even
(50:27):
if it's distracting. Part of the distraction for us is
generally realizing that it's not real. Like just this week,
those experiences I had, like one of the super distracting
things was that I realized that this wasn't you know,
that this something was weird here that you know, it
made me question the software, the hardware involved a little
bit but it didn't make me think you know that,
(50:49):
you know, mind flavors are sending thought beams into my
brain or anything. Yeah, I mean this is generally an
interesting question. How how the brain tells what's real? I mean,
I feel like we we could do episode after episode
on this subject. Actually, but like, like this came up
not too long ago when we were talking about visual imagination.
I think this was an episode from last summer. Um
(51:11):
how there is evidence indicating that the brain uses some
of the same infrastructure for imagining visual images that it
uses for seeing with the eyes. And so if it
does that, if there's stuff going on in the visual
processing centers of the brain, just like when you actually
look at a basketball, uh as when you imagine a basketball,
(51:32):
how does your brain know that when you are imagining
a basketball, you're not really seeing one. Clearly, there can
be cases where that that reality testing fails. And this
would be like you imagine seeing something and then you
think it's really there. This is you know, I think
what's generally accepted to happen in psychosis is like your
your reality testing fails in the line between what is
(51:55):
imagined and what is perceived as reality breaks and this
of course, applies yet to dreams as well. Grant's pointed
out that during dreams are reality testing is effectively switched off,
so we simply have experiences. We don't have beliefs about experiences,
which was interesting. I I don't think i'd ever you know,
(52:17):
certainly we've covered dreams in the nature of dreams and
thoughts about dreams in the show before, but I don't
think I've ever heard it put so succinctly before. Yeah. Well,
I think we have talked about the idea that in dreams,
clearly critical thinking is reduced. Yes, yes, definitely that that
seems to be an extremely common feature of dream cognition,
and not just the kind of deliberate, effortful critical thinking
(52:39):
that you do when you're like, okay, and I'm trying
to understand is there a problem with this scientific claim
or something. I mean, the normal automatic critical thinking that
we do that forms the basis of our intuitive reality testing,
even that is sort of turned off sometimes in dreams,
or at least greatly diminished. Yeah, it's the kind of
statement that makes me feel better about being such a
(53:00):
horrible lucid dreamer. Not that I put in a lot
of work on it. But I have frequently noticed that
at times, the rare times where I feel like I
could have lucid dreamed, I clearly didn't have it in me.
Like I just fell right back into into just experiencing
and certainly not having any beliefs or thoughts about the experience.
This is so embarrassing. I'm such a dream loser. I've
(53:22):
probably told you this before, but a very common experience
I have in dreams is stopping in the middle of
a dream and thinking, hold on a second, I'm dreaming
right now, right is this a dream? And then in
the dream I try to pursue that question and interrogate it,
and then I, invariably every single time, end up concluding no,
(53:45):
this is definitely real. Uh See, I've had I've probably
shared this before too. I'll have experiences where I'm dreaming,
I realized I'm dreaming, and then I just click it
right back off again, and then I just fall right
back into the dream. I had that moment where I
was like raising my my head above the waters, and
I could concede like that seems the time to take
(54:07):
the reins of of the dream and and then engage
in lucid dreaming. But I don't. I just fall right
back underwater. This is funny. So we've got similar things
going on, actually, except I just like I address it
more head on and still fail. By the way, Grande
is the author of the Measure of Madness, Philosophy and
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, which was published by m T Press if
(54:29):
anybody wants to to look up more of their work.
But uh, in general, though, just about the connection between
deja vu and dreams, I guess it's gonna be the
next episode of Stuff to Blow your mind where we'll
definitely touch on on some studies related to that, but
then we'll also get into really some of the core
theories regarding that the true nature of deja vu itself. Yeah,
(54:52):
next time we're gonna explore scientific theories that have tried
to explain why the brain creates the feeling of deja vu,
what comes from, and we'll look into dreams, we'll look
into anxiety and more. I think it's gonna be very fun. Yeah,
and certainly feel free to reach out to us in
the meantime, knowing, of course that there's about to be
another episode where we'll we'll probably answer some of your
(55:14):
questions but hey, maybe not. Uh So it's always good
to hear from you either way. In the meantime, if
you want to check out other episodes to Stuff to
Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you find
your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just support the
show by rating, reviewing, and subscribing, uh though. That's the
trinity of actions that help our show out. And if
you just go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
(55:36):
that will shoot you to the I heart listing for
our show where you can basically do all three of
those things as well. Hughes. Thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, who, again I just
want to emphasize, has been doing really heroic work while
Robert and I and all of us are trying to
work from home and do social distancing. Uh. Seth has
(55:56):
helped us figure out all manner of gear stuff, closet stuff,
and then today I couldn't even understand why my microphone
wasn't working for the first half hour we tried this,
So thank you, Seth. Thank you Seth. Uh. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest something for
the future, or just to say Hi, let's know how
(56:16):
you found out about the show, what's going on with you,
whatever it is, you can email us at contact at
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
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(56:37):
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