before birth experience and deja vu psychology today

But, like the feelings of prediction, the feelings of having gotten the prediction right were not rooted in reality. The 'I knew that was going to happen' bias was very strong when déjà vu occurred, and especially strong when the scene happened to be rated as very familiar. But the experiment was set up so it would be impossible for them to know, because the turns were made at random. Then participants were asked, did the scene unfold the way you expected? In a later experiment, participants were further asked to rate the familiarity of the scene, both before and after the turn.Īfter crunching their results, the researchers found that when intense feelings of prediction accompanied déjà vu, they were strongly correlated with feelings of 'postdiction' - that the person reported, after the fact, that they knew what particular turn was going to happen. Next, the virtual scene would turn left or right. Subjects were asked if they were experiencing déjà vu. To test that theory in the lab, Cleary and co-authors immersed a bank of test subjects in a video game-like scene created in the Sims virtual world. '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.

And 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.

Before birth experience and deja vu psychology today