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