It is estimated that 97% of people have had d?j? vu – the feeling that a new situation has already been experienced – at some time in their life. Now, research conducted at the Leeds Memory Group at the University of Leeds, has turned to Hypnosis to help them understand the phenomenon.
As an article in New Scientist reports, “Two key processes are thought to occur when someone recognises a familiar object or scene. First, the brain searches through memory traces to see if the contents of that scene have been observed before. If they have, a separate part of the brain then identifies the scene or object as being familiar. In d?j? vu this second process may occur by mistake, so that a feeling of familiarity is triggered by a novel object or scene.”
The researchers wanted to validate this theory, so used hypnosis to isolate and trigger the second process, hoping to recreate feelings of d?j? vu. Subjects were shown 24 everyday words, then in hypnosis were given the suggestion that if they later saw a word in a red frame, it would feel familiar, but they would not know when they last saw it, and if they saw a word in a green frame, they would believe the word was one of the original 24 shown.
Of 18 people studied, 10 reported a peculiar feeling when they saw new words in red frames and 5 said the feeling was like d?j? vu. Researchers hope that using hypnosis in such experiments will ultimately help uncover the mechanisms behind d?j? vu as well as the fundamental workings of human memory.