But people had the experience long before it had a name. Carl Jung thought the experience was related to the collective unconscious. In essence, his groundwork set the stage for the research community to take a closer look at the phenomenon in the years to come. Still, researchers have come up with novel ways to study it in the wild.
Anne Cleary, professor of cognitive psychology and memory researcher at Colorado State University, had a more high-tech idea. Cleary and her team took subjects through a series of scenes in the Sims video game, carefully designed so that the spatial layout of one scene was similar to another, even though the actual images were quite different.
This would be a situation where you experienced something, but cannot consciously recall it. Imagine you were walking down the street and passed a new coffee shop. By: Lee Ann Obringer. Or maybe you're deep in conversation with a friend and you suddenly get the feeling that you've had the exact conversation before, even though you know that you haven't. Sixty to 70 percent of us admit to getting this feeling at least once in our lives.
The sight, sound , taste or even smell of something makes us think that we've experienced it before, although we know that we couldn't have. In this article, we'll explore a few of those theories to shed some light on this little understood phenomenon. French scientist Emile Boirac, one of the first to study this strange phenomenon, gave the subject its name in Precognitive experiences -- if they are real -- show things that will happen in the future, not things that you've already experienced.
In , Dr. They refused to watch the news because they felt like they already knew what was going to be said even though they really didn't.
Or, they wouldn't go to the doctor because they felt like they had already been and didn't see the point. Researchers have suggested that these individuals have experienced a failure in the temporal lobe. The circuits that are activated when you remember something have gotten stuck in the "on" position, so to speak.
This has essentially created memories that don't actually exist [ ref ]. From philosophers, to psychologists, to paranormal experts, they've all had their theories. Sigmund Freud theorized that these experiences resulted from repressed desires or memories related to a stressful event that people could no longer access as regular memory.
Recently, researchers have set aside some of those associations and have begun putting brain imaging technology to work. They have since determined that the medial temporal lobe is involved in our conscious memory. Within the medial temporal lobe are the parahippocampal gyrus , the rhinal cortex and the amygdala.
John D. Gabrieli at Stanford University found in that the hippocampus enables us to consciously recall events. He also found that the parahippocampal gyrus enables us to determine what's familiar and what isn't and without actually retrieving a specific memory to do it.
There have also been higher reported occurrences among those with higher incomes, those who tend to travel more and those with higher education levels. Other researchers, however, have seen just the opposite.
Need a quick summary? They showed photographs of various locations to a group of students, with the plan to ask them which locations were familiar. Prior to showing them some of the photographs, however, they flashed the photos onto the screen at subliminal speeds -- around 10 to 20 milliseconds -- which is long enough for the brain to register the photo but not long enough for the student to be consciously aware of it. That information comes through as the unsettling feeling that we've been there before, but we can't pin down when or why," Cleary said.
You have familiarity in a situation when you feel you shouldn't have it, and that's why it's so jarring, so striking. Now, building on previous experiments, Cleary has put people to the test. The team built environments in the computer game The Sims - layouts that were spatially the same, but thematically different: for example, a garden and a junkyard.
Cleary et al.
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