“I wondered if there was an explanation in some sort of cognitive illusion.” “If this is an illusion – just a feeling – why do people so strongly believe they actually predicted what unfolded next?” said Cleary, a professor in the CSU Department of Psychology. That predictive feeling, however intense, was just that – a feeling. But in the lab, people who were having déjà vu were not able to actually predict what was going to happen next. Prior experiments had uncovered a strong predictive bias in people having déjà vu – that they feel like they know what’s going to happen next. A dogged scientist who uses laboratory experiments to induce déjà vu in human subjects, Cleary has a new theory on why déjà vu is accompanied not only by feelings of prediction, but also an “I knew that was going to happen” feeling a minute later.Ĭleary’s most recent déjà vu experiments, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, document evidence of such a “postdictive” bias in déjà vu experiencers in the lab, and offers a plausible explanation for why it happens. Not so fast, says Anne Cleary, a memory researcher at Colorado State University who is one of the world’s experts on déjà vu.
For many, déjà vu is just a fleeting, eerie sensation that “I’ve been here before.” For others, it gets even eerier: In that moment of unsettling familiarity, they also feel certain they know what’s going to happen next – like, a girl in a white shirt is going to pass me on the left.Īnd when the girl in the white shirt really does pass by, well, what can explain it? Cue theories of past lives, clairvoyance, and the supernatural.
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