Speaker 1: I'm Dessa, the disembodied lady voice of deeply human Why
Speaker 1: we do the things we do? We're about to set
Speaker 1: off on an episode of deja vu? Why do we
Speaker 1: get it? And how could it help you better understand
Speaker 1: the workings of your own mind. I I don't remember
Speaker 1: the first time, but I remember when they started happening
Speaker 1: really frequently. I would be in math class or something
Speaker 1: and suddenly everything would feel kind of off, like I
Speaker 1: don't know, if you know, this feeling in your gut
Speaker 1: that something's just wrong. I think I was probably fourteen,
Speaker 1: and I started getting them on maybe a daily basis
Speaker 1: by the time I was sixteen, a daily basis. Mm hm,
Speaker 1: can you describe, like, if I met you at fourteen,
Speaker 1: what's your vibe? You know? Do you have like pink hair?
Speaker 1: Do you have like thick glasses? What's the vibe? Um?
Speaker 1: Just picture Avril Levine. It's a little bit cringe e
Speaker 1: but a bit of a skater girl, you know. So
Speaker 1: that means like dark eyeliner. Did your mama you wear eyeliner?
Speaker 1: She did? Yeah, straightened hair, dark eyeliner, band, T shirt.
Speaker 1: I start to feel kind of fearful and have the
Speaker 1: sense of dread, and I start to feel really sick
Speaker 1: to my stomach, and it starts building like there's there's
Speaker 1: something that's going to take hold of me, and um,
Speaker 1: I really don't want it to, so I try to
Speaker 1: focus on what's going on around me, but it starts
Speaker 1: invading my head more and more, and then it I
Speaker 1: get to this point where it feels like everything that's
Speaker 1: currently happening has already happened. And then it sort of
Speaker 1: feels as though I can remember the history of the universe.
Speaker 1: Of course I couldn't give any details of what that
Speaker 1: even meant, but at the time, I like it, fully
Speaker 1: convinced that that's what I'm feeling. I can remember everything
Speaker 1: that's ever happened and everything that will ever happen, and
Speaker 1: it's all tied together, and there's this like extreme sense
Speaker 1: of oneness with the universe, which is also quite sickening.
Speaker 1: And then it's gone. And if I had been, you know,
Speaker 1: sitting beside you in math class and I looked over
Speaker 1: at you during one of these experiences, what would I see, Like,
Speaker 1: what was your body doing, what was your face doing?
Speaker 1: I mostly wouldn't show it. Sometimes I would like put
Speaker 1: my head in my hands, and they're like, oh I
Speaker 1: feel sick. I'd say to my friends all the time, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I have deja vu. It's just the worst. And I
Speaker 1: thought like maybe I was just really poorly adjusted to
Speaker 1: it and everyone else could handle this much better. Okay,
Speaker 1: So for years Anna is suffering from these debilitating episodes
Speaker 1: of deja vu, and she assumes that's normal, Like, that's
Speaker 1: just what being a person feels like. Deja vu is
Speaker 1: French were already seen and most of us know. It
Speaker 1: is the eerie feeling that you've lived this very moment already,
Speaker 1: but usually it isn't so intense that it jettisons you
Speaker 1: to the edge of I'm in space. If you're like me,
Speaker 1: the standard response to deja vu is to start tugging
Speaker 1: on your friend's sleeve to announce I have davu. Hey,
Speaker 1: I need everyone here to acknowledge that I am deja
Speaker 1: vuing right now. But it's a solitary experience. You can't
Speaker 1: share it. You can't even articulate the moment without sounding
Speaker 1: like a palm reader in a panic attack. I knew
Speaker 1: you were going to say that deja vu doesn't happen
Speaker 1: too often, which I think is why I sort of
Speaker 1: like it. It's an exotic condition of mind, like getting
Speaker 1: an egg with two yolks or something. It's also one
Speaker 1: of the few occasions where you're acutely aware of your
Speaker 1: own perception at work. It's like getting to taste your
Speaker 1: own tongue, or that bit that David Foster Wallace does
Speaker 1: about the fishes where the old fish asks the young
Speaker 1: fish how's the water, and the young fish says, what
Speaker 1: the hell is water? Are there any dumb jokes that
Speaker 1: you have to endure? Like as soon as you tell
Speaker 1: someone you're a day's researchers? Ever, like, however that before
Speaker 1: all the time? That's and clearly she's a professor of
Speaker 1: cognitive psychology or cogsi if you are both a snowboarder
Speaker 1: and a PhD student. Years ago, and and her colleagues
Speaker 1: designed a series of ambitious experiments. We were attempting to
Speaker 1: induce stay Chevoo through virtual reality. How do you even
Speaker 1: start to do that? I would spend hours and hours
Speaker 1: playing the SIMS basically at my house on a laptop
Speaker 1: in the lab. I'd close my eyes to go to sleep,
Speaker 1: and I'd be dreaming about moving objects around within the
Speaker 1: SIMS to create environments, because so Anne is building an
Speaker 1: experimental laboratory inside the game, the sims when you create
Speaker 1: the characters and design the surrounding the possibility got it,
Speaker 1: That sims that weirdly successful video game, where you pretend
Speaker 1: to be a person in a universe that's just like ours,
Speaker 1: you can actually create entire neighborhoods. She builds an aquarium,
Speaker 1: she builds a museum, She builds courtyards and residential structures.
Speaker 1: She's on a construction spree, and although these spaces look different,
Speaker 1: some of them are built on identical floor plans, with
Speaker 1: major features in exactly the same places, Like a desk
Speaker 1: is in exactly the same position is a bed is
Speaker 1: in another scene. Let's say An sends a bunch of
Speaker 1: people into this virtual neighborhood. She hands them a pair
Speaker 1: of goggles, revs up the stems, and now her research
Speaker 1: subjects can look all around the universe she's built, just
Speaker 1: by turning their heads. She hypothesized that visiting places that
Speaker 1: looked really different but had identical floor plans might induce
Speaker 1: deja vu by triggering what's called a memory retrieval failure.
Speaker 1: A memory retrieval failure is exactly what it sounds like
Speaker 1: you've got a bit of info and storage, but you
Speaker 1: can't fish it out for reference. It's like the search
Speaker 1: function in my email. Sometimes it just can't find minutes
Speaker 1: from Tuesday's meeting, even though they're in an email tie
Speaker 1: minutes from Tuesday's meeting. So let's say you're all goggled
Speaker 1: up in Anne's virtual world. If you visit the Bowling Alley,
Speaker 1: you might get the sense, oh, this feels familiar, but
Speaker 1: your recall might not pull up the fact that, uh,
Speaker 1: this Bowling Alley is laid out just like the museum.
Speaker 1: So you've got this inexplicable sense of having been here
Speaker 1: before and bang deja vu and calls this digital universe,
Speaker 1: wait for it, deja ville. This stuff about memory retrieval
Speaker 1: failure is bigger than just deja vu. Sometimes it happens
Speaker 1: in a really common phenomenon called the it's the um.
Speaker 1: It's a feeling of being right on the verge of
Speaker 1: accessing a word from memory. You feel pretty confident that
Speaker 1: it's there, and it's it's right about to come to mind,
Speaker 1: but it's not quite there yet. The tip of the
Speaker 1: tongue thing, thank you, Anne, thank you. This is crazy
Speaker 1: when you think about it like there's a memory I
Speaker 1: can't access, but I know exactly where it is. It's
Speaker 1: always almost here. Ant's work is based on this fallibility
Speaker 1: of recall, the fact that our memories don't always come
Speaker 1: when called. But there are other ways to understand deja vu.
Speaker 1: And for all the time that an spends trying to
Speaker 1: induce it, some people are desperately looking for help to
Speaker 1: get out of it. I started my deja research while
Speaker 1: I was in the memory clinic, and this man came
Speaker 1: in to have his memory tested, and he had a
Speaker 1: very unusual complaint because he said that he had already
Speaker 1: been tested before, which was pretty strange because most people,
Speaker 1: if they've been to a memory clinic before, they've tended
Speaker 1: to forget about it. But he was complaining that he
Speaker 1: had already done it before. That's Chris Moulin. He's a
Speaker 1: researcher and a cognitive neuropsychologist, which means he studies the
Speaker 1: structures of the brain to better understand how we think.
Speaker 1: He's talking here about one of his seminal patients, a KP.
Speaker 1: Taking a walk in the street. He would see the
Speaker 1: same bird singing the same song in the same tree
Speaker 1: every day, and he stopped watching the television because he
Speaker 1: said he had seen it before. He stopped reading the
Speaker 1: newspaper because he had already read it all. And his
Speaker 1: wife was saying that, Yeah, this is typical of him.
Speaker 1: He does this all the time. Chris's work with a
Speaker 1: KP led him to other patients with similar symptoms. We
Speaker 1: presented in the scientific literature a young man who had
Speaker 1: a history of anxiety, some substance use, and he was
Speaker 1: stuck in what he described as like a Donnie Darko
Speaker 1: time loop. He was acutely aware, and he said he
Speaker 1: had to really spend a long time reasoning with himself
Speaker 1: that life wasn't repeating and that he wasn't going mad.
Speaker 1: I remember driving four hours to meet with a patient
Speaker 1: just had two emails with her daughter we've not met before,
Speaker 1: and I turn up and she opens the door and
Speaker 1: she greets me like she she knows me. Chris understands
Speaker 1: deja vu to be caused by a glitch in the
Speaker 1: memory system, where the feeling of recalling a memory becomes
Speaker 1: disassociated from the act of actually doing it. According to Chris,
Speaker 1: we can have the strong sensation of remembering something even
Speaker 1: when there's no memory there like pushing a needle through
Speaker 1: fabric feels like sewing, even if I've gotten no thread.
Speaker 1: The glitch account of deja vu is very different from
Speaker 1: the idea behind Anne's Deja Ville, where we've got a
Speaker 1: memory we just can't retrieve. But I'm gonna tell you
Speaker 1: right now, this is not a show where we picked
Speaker 1: to deja vu scientists against each other to fight to
Speaker 1: the death like post dot gladiators in the colosseum of
Speaker 1: my podcast Let's keep It, Let's keep it classy for
Speaker 1: the record, and thinks that some deja vu might be
Speaker 1: caused by glitches too. Okay, a lot of the memory
Speaker 1: patients that chris se'es are older, some suffering from the NHA.
Speaker 1: Brain scans have revealed some subtle atrophy in particular regions
Speaker 1: of their brains in the frontal lobes and the temporal
Speaker 1: lobes at the side of the skull. So just to
Speaker 1: get like the the anatomy right, you know, So if
Speaker 1: I'm sitting right now with my my index finger against
Speaker 1: the spot on my skull that's right above my right ear,
Speaker 1: how deep would I sink that finger until I hit
Speaker 1: the region that we're talking about, Like first knuckle, second knuckle, Okay,
Speaker 1: so it would be your second knuckle. The memory center
Speaker 1: is tucked into the very middle, so you're almost going
Speaker 1: right into the center of the space between your ears.
Speaker 1: But it's not like there's a discreete little memory cottage
Speaker 1: in your brain. Apart from all the rest, there's a
Speaker 1: complex set of interlocking parts, and understanding healthy memory function
Speaker 1: could allow Chris and his colleagues to better serve people
Speaker 1: who come looking for help who are really suffering. Chris
Speaker 1: thinks deja vu might provide real insight into just how
Speaker 1: this system works in normal circumstances during like regular vo
Speaker 1: deja vu is just another one of the kind of
Speaker 1: quirks of memory that helps us understand what the memory
Speaker 1: system is. Not only is there kind of memory performance,
Speaker 1: memory function, but there is also the relationship we have
Speaker 1: with that memory. The beliefs about memory, the feelings about memory.
Speaker 1: They're relatively automatic and they don't usually go wrong, but
Speaker 1: when they go wrong, they are They are strange, striking experiences,
Speaker 1: and the people who contact me are often in great distress.
Speaker 1: My second year in college was the first time I
Speaker 1: fully lost consciousness, and it happened like maybe two or
Speaker 1: three times during college. Um, and I mean one time
Speaker 1: was really scary because I had twisted my ankle while
Speaker 1: walking down one step and the next thing I know, like,
Speaker 1: I wake up on the ground. One of my friends
Speaker 1: is standing over me, completely panicked. She said that my
Speaker 1: eyes rolled into the back of my head and I
Speaker 1: was shaking. It actually took until grad school for me
Speaker 1: to realize truly that these things weren't just how some
Speaker 1: people experienced deja voo. And I just remember talking to
Speaker 1: my boyfriend about it because I had just lost consciousness
Speaker 1: during class and it was very embarrassing, and I was saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get that feeling, you know with deja vu, where
Speaker 1: you feel this kind of oneness and it's really sickening
Speaker 1: and scary. And he was like, what he's got to
Speaker 1: be like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So maybe a couple of hours later, I pull out
Speaker 1: my phone and I'm like, there's no way and the
Speaker 1: only one who experiences this, you know, what did you Google?
Speaker 1: I put in I think like nausea, deja vu and fainting,
Speaker 1: clicked search and it was like epilepsy, epilepsy, brain tumors, epilepsy,
Speaker 1: neurological disorders, and it's like, oh my god, I needed
Speaker 1: to get an m r I in case I had
Speaker 1: a brain tumor and needed to get an e G.
Speaker 1: So it went from like zero to sixty on how
Speaker 1: severe doctors perceived this as being for my e G.
Speaker 1: I had to stay up all night. I guess your
Speaker 1: brain is more prone to seizures or whatever disorders are
Speaker 1: lurking there when you're low on sleep. I stayed up
Speaker 1: all night watching The Fresh Prince of bel Air because
Speaker 1: I love that show. Now, this is a story all
Speaker 1: about how my life got swip turns upside down, and
Speaker 1: I'd like to take so I did one of those,
Speaker 1: and they saw some weird stuff going on in my
Speaker 1: temporal lobe. Um. So, when I finally went to see
Speaker 1: an actual neurologist and talked with her about it and
Speaker 1: she was like, yeah, this is definitely temporal lobe epilepsy,
Speaker 1: it it was like, that's good. That's good to just know.
Speaker 1: In temporal lobe epilepsy, deja vu can actually be part
Speaker 1: of the seizure, sometimes called an aura. For some people,
Speaker 1: deja vu can serve as a storm warning that things
Speaker 1: are about to get much much worse. Of course, deja
Speaker 1: vu isn't always linked to epilepsy, but for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, it is linked to feelings of precognition, the
Speaker 1: ability to predict the future. We had hypothesized that maybe
Speaker 1: people can, and maybe there's a scientific explanation for why.
Speaker 1: And seriously, what are you talking about. If you've been
Speaker 1: through a situation that's very much like the current situation,
Speaker 1: maybe you do know exactly how it's going to unfold
Speaker 1: because you've been through it before and you're just forgetting
Speaker 1: or you've been through something very similar. And so we
Speaker 1: had hypothesized that if we could somehow put people in
Speaker 1: the middle of a memory, so to speak. So here
Speaker 1: and changes her protocol this time when you put on
Speaker 1: the goggles instead of turning your head and looking around
Speaker 1: deja Ville. She's cued up several little videos, like virtual
Speaker 1: tours that maneuver through the places she's built. Let's say
Speaker 1: you enter the bowling Alley and then you go left,
Speaker 1: and then you go right, when you hit the first
Speaker 1: wall and you go left, and you go right one
Speaker 1: more time, and subjects watch a bunch of these virtual
Speaker 1: tours through all sorts of different places, and some tours
Speaker 1: go through spaces with identical layouts following exactly the same route,
Speaker 1: a fact that Anne hopes her subjects won't consciously realize,
Speaker 1: but that might trigger deja vu. This bowling alley is
Speaker 1: laid out just like the museum. And now here's the
Speaker 1: moment of truth because Anne pauses one of these videos
Speaker 1: in the middle of the route, right before it's about
Speaker 1: to take a turn, and she asks her subjects if
Speaker 1: they're feeling deja vu at the moment, and if so,
Speaker 1: do they have that I can predict the future feeling?
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you know the direction of the
Speaker 1: next turn? And some people said, yes, I do have
Speaker 1: deja vu? Yes, I do feel like I know what's
Speaker 1: going to happen next. This tour is going left, man left,
Speaker 1: let's unpause the thing and let's go left already. So
Speaker 1: when an unpaused it, were they correct? We were really bombed. Actually,
Speaker 1: the first time we ran the experiment, we found no
Speaker 1: predictive ability at all. This poses a new question. If
Speaker 1: people aren't actually able to foresee the future during deja vu,
Speaker 1: why do they have such a strong impression that they
Speaker 1: can well during a deja vu episode in regular life?
Speaker 1: Like the action doesn't stop to allow us to test
Speaker 1: our predictions. The tape just keeps running, so we're never
Speaker 1: confronted by any evidence to disprove that overwhelm feeling of
Speaker 1: I knew that would happen and thinks deja voo doesn't
Speaker 1: allow us to make predictions. It's actually something called postdiction,
Speaker 1: and it gives an illusion of having predicted after the
Speaker 1: fact is there was some tension. You know, when you're
Speaker 1: talking to somebody, there has to be who's like, yo,
Speaker 1: I am clairvoyant and I have predicted the future, and
Speaker 1: I bet they're not going to drop that easily. When
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, actually, it just feels like you can
Speaker 1: predict a few like that is not a satisfying response. No,
Speaker 1: people people hate it. Um. I commonly hear from members
Speaker 1: of the public that I'm wrong, that deja vu is
Speaker 1: not a memory phenomenon. And when I started publishing work
Speaker 1: on dejavoo being associated with illusory feelings of prediction, of course,
Speaker 1: people started to push back at that to say, no,
Speaker 1: when I feel like I can predict, I actually do predict,
Speaker 1: and it's not just a feeling still and says it
Speaker 1: is just a feeling. She sure because she tested for
Speaker 1: exactly that. But anyone who's had it knows how real
Speaker 1: DejaVu can feel. It descends like like a little private
Speaker 1: tornado to lift you out of your everyday perceived continuum
Speaker 1: of time and space. Do you ever get like the
Speaker 1: pedestrian run of the mill version of dejava? I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd recognize it, Like, I think I would just
Speaker 1: dismiss it as so ordinary that I wouldn't even think
Speaker 1: twice about, oh, this is real deja vu? Do you
Speaker 1: think that you know this history of having profound and
Speaker 1: unpleasant dejavue experiences shaped your personality in any way a
Speaker 1: little bit? Um. I got really into philosophy when I
Speaker 1: was a teenager, and I think that was pretty much
Speaker 1: mostly due to these seizures that I had. I remember
Speaker 1: reading different philosophers who talked about everyone experiences the world
Speaker 1: very differently, and that rang true to me because I
Speaker 1: was like, I think the way that other people experience
Speaker 1: like deja vu is very different from me. The idea
Speaker 1: that people experience consciousness differently, I think that fascinates a
Speaker 1: lot of us. Like if I could test drive someone
Speaker 1: else's mind trade consciousness is for a day, would it
Speaker 1: feel disorienting like driving on the left, or would it
Speaker 1: feel like trying to drive a baked potato or trying
Speaker 1: to drive yellow? Could I even recognize it as a
Speaker 1: mind and find all the pedals to make it go? Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Can I ask, like, what do you what do you
Speaker 1: do for a living now? Oh? I'm a PhD student
Speaker 1: of astrophysics. Okay, dang dude. Do you think that your
Speaker 1: experiences of deja vu might feel like the experiences of
Speaker 1: astronauts when they look at the world through the window
Speaker 1: and it's just conceptualizes how how small a place in
Speaker 1: the universe that they occupy. Yeah, that's a really great
Speaker 1: way of thinking of it. I mean with astrophysics, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like we are looking at the universe without us.
Speaker 1: It's like seeing something outside of of how you normally
Speaker 1: experience it, very far away. If you could rewrite your life,
Speaker 1: would you write these deja vu experiences out of it? No?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. These episodes felt like they cut
Speaker 1: to the heart of existence. A lot of how I
Speaker 1: understand the world comes from, like the way that I
Speaker 1: sort of experienced time. In these seizures, you're you're seeing
Speaker 1: the passage of time. We don't get to experience time directly,
Speaker 1: don't have a dedicated sense organ for it, and I
Speaker 1: think that's why even the occasional deja vu is sort
Speaker 1: of thrilling, because it brings our sensation of time to
Speaker 1: the four. We get a moment where we can really
Speaker 1: feel it moving around us. Usually time is just the
Speaker 1: invisible substrate that we maneuver through. We're like the fish
Speaker 1: asking what's water, But of course I can see what's
Speaker 1: in the bowl that holds the goldfish. Maybe on I
Speaker 1: can see the bowl full of time that's holding me,
Speaker 1: And that's deeply human on deja vu a sensation we
Speaker 1: can experience in grade school, but takes a doctorate degree
Speaker 1: to begin to explain. Our next stop on deeply Human
Speaker 1: is a terminal. The topic is death and why it's
Speaker 1: time to talk about yours. There's been lots of conversations
Speaker 1: around this idea of a good death. I've never been
Speaker 1: big on that terminology because then it suggests there's a
Speaker 1: bad death. Once you start to create expectations around dying,
Speaker 1: people can start to feel like they're doing it wrong.
Speaker 1: And that's always been one of my big concerns with
Speaker 1: a lot of the discussions around death and dying in
Speaker 1: all different kinds of facets society, which has been going
Speaker 1: on for like the last twenty years. It's never not
Speaker 1: been a hot topic as it were. But I think
Speaker 1: that what happens is families, and usually families more than
Speaker 1: the dying, but sometimes the dying they can feel like
Speaker 1: they're doing it wrong. Deeply Human is a co production
Speaker 1: of the BBC World Service and American Public Media with
Speaker 1: I Heart Media and it's spoken into a microphone by Medessa.
Speaker 1: See you next question.