Speaking of Psychology - What déjà vu can teach us about memory, with Chris Moulin, PhD

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

The eerie sensation of “déjà vu” -- feeling a strong sense of familiarity in a new place or situation -- is one of memory’s strangest tricks. Researcher Chris Moulin, PhD, of Grenoble Alpes Un...iversity, talks about why déjà vu happens; why both déjà vu and its lesser-known opposite, jamais vu, may actually be signs of a healthy memory at work; why young people are more prone to déjà vu; how he and others study déjà vu and jamais vu in the lab; and what these experiences can teach us about memory more broadly. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:24 Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. It's one of memory's strangest tricks. You're visiting a new city, one you've never been to before, when you turn a corner, and suddenly you get the overwhelming sense you've been there before. You can't shake the feeling even though your rational mind knows that it can't be true. That fleeting, eerie sensation, deja vu, has puzzled psychologists for more than a century. Now researchers are learning more about the causes of deja vu, as well as its lesser-known opposite, Ja'A-Mé-Vu,
Starting point is 00:01:00 when a previously known thing seems suddenly strange and unfamiliar. So why do Deja-Vu and Ja-Mé-Vu happen? Why does our brain play these tricks on us? Are some people more prone to Deja-Vo and Ja-Mé-Vu than others? How do you study these sensations in the lab? And what can studying them teach us about memory more broadly? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.
Starting point is 00:01:33 I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Chris Moulin, a professor in the Laboratory of Psychology and Neurocognition at Grenoble Alps University in France. He is a cognitive neuropsychologist known for his work on memory, especially Deja Vu and Ja Mevo. He's the author of hundreds of scientific studies, as well as the book, The Cognitive Geelong, Neuropsychology of DejaVu. And finally, his work on Jaumevue won a 2023 Ig Nobel Prize, an annual award given for scientific research that makes people laugh and then makes them think. Dr. Moulin, thank you for joining me today. Thank you very much for having me. We're going to talk about both DejaVu and JaMévue and some related phenomena, but let's start with
Starting point is 00:02:19 DejaVu, which I would imagine most of us have heard of. I mentioned a classic example of DejaVu in the introduction when a place you've never been before seems familiar and you have the sense that you've been there. Are there other types of deja vu or other examples of when this happens? So that is the classic example to find yourself in a place where you've never been before and feel like you've been there before. So we know that there's a kind of sense of place involved in in deja vu, but it's not the only kind. The people who fill in my questionnaires tell me that it often arrives in conversations, a conversation you might be having at a party
Starting point is 00:02:59 or something like that, and you'll have the sensation that you've had the same conversation before. So we think it happens for pretty much most of the things that you can be conscious of and you can think about, but certainly right up there is places. We seem to have it more for places than for other things. Interestingly, one of the straight
Starting point is 00:03:23 The strange data sets that we have to explain is the reason why people in our questionnaires also seem to have more deja vu, the more they travel, which is a very interesting idea, especially if you think it's to do with the places you visit. It seems the more likely you are to go to novel places, the more likely you are to experience deja vu, which is a very interesting idea. So it sounds like that's one of the triggers, travel. Are there other things that may trigger deja vu? So for deja vu, one of the things we have to think about is who's having the deja vu.
Starting point is 00:04:00 So let's just talk now about healthy deja vu. And we do know that there are some triggers for healthy deja vu. That's for people like you and I who may have this rarely, and there's no kind of neurological reason why we're having deja vu. And we might have it more when we're tired. it seems that we might have it more when we're stressed. Travel is a big idea. You have it more when you're young than when you're older.
Starting point is 00:04:33 There's some research, but I think we need to do some more work on those kinds of things, which suggests that you have deja vu, not necessarily whilst you're intoxicated, but having been intoxicated with drink and drugs, for instance. So there's some. interesting data about those kinds of things. But essentially, I'm telling you about general patterns from questionnaire research, I think it's best to characterize DejaVu as being unpredictable. So we know you get it more in places than for other things, but you can get it in conversations. And I think the main thing about Dejabu is that it's unpredictable and
Starting point is 00:05:09 you don't know when it's going to strike. Is there any reasons or any research behind why younger people may have it more often than older folks? So, um, The first reason that could explain this pattern of data would be that older people have deja vu the same amount, but they just forget that they've had it because it's pretty infrequent and pretty rare. So maybe they do have it as much, but they've forgotten about it. We've tried to control that by asking people about the last time they had it and asking people to remember a specific instance of it. So we think it's not that. what we think is, is this is the first piece of evidence in our idea that deja vu is a healthy thing and a good thing. So we like to describe it as a fact-checking mechanism. As you get older,
Starting point is 00:05:58 there's very subtle but real changes in your memory, which mean you're not quite so able to verify the certainty that something has not yet happened to you. So in my daily life, as I get older, I have far fewer experiences of deja vu, but what I have instead is a bit more that horrible hesitation. Have I already made this joke? I feel like I'm repeating myself. I feel like I probably am repeating myself. So I think as you get older, that that relationship with your memory changes, and we call that metacognition, so that you're less aware of what's going on in your memory system. And as you get older, you just lack that kind of certainty that it's impossible that you've already had this conversation or it's impossible that feeling you've
Starting point is 00:06:51 already been here. More likely as you get older, you might say, well, I probably read about this place in a book or it's very similar to some other place that I've been. So your interpretation of the same feeling possibly changes as you get older. And that's probably our best case explanation for that. But already, again, a very interesting piece of data for us, because if you think that memory gets worse as you get older, you'd expect to have more deja vu if you're saying that memory is a, is behind deja vu. It's like a deja vu is a memory error. But in fact, you get the opposite. So that's really why we come to this idea of it's not quite about memory. It's about your relationship with your memory.
Starting point is 00:07:35 You've worked with patients with epilepsy and dementia who have chronic deja vu. That is, they have a constant sense that everything that's happening to them is familiar. Can you talk about that? Why does that happen? And what's life like for those patients? Yeah. So my whole entry point into researching deja vu was through looking at somebody working closely with somebody who had a permanent sense of deja vu, at least his family,
Starting point is 00:08:05 and his doctors all described it as a permanent set of deja vu. And I was a young neuropsychologist just out of my PhD at that time. And I looked up in a book, Deja Vu, and I thought, well, there'll be an explanation of why this person's got deja vu. And in fact, there was nothing similar. And his case was very extreme. Subsequently, we've identified other people that's the same. But for instance, when he came to the memory technique, he said there was no point doing my memory tests because he'd already done them all before. he said that every conversation was repeating, that he'd already met me when I turned up at his house to do some research with him.
Starting point is 00:08:44 He refused to watch television, saying that everything was repeating on the television. He was an engineer and he took, still, he had subscriptions to scientific journals. And I like this one the most. He stopped reading his scientific journals saying that he'd read everything in them already before. and sometimes an experience that us scientists have anyway in general. So his life was very, very difficult. Certainly for his wife, she was very patient and was very interested in the research and saw the kind of philosophical side of things.
Starting point is 00:09:22 But it was constant torment. From the moment he woke up, he was saying that he'd already had that conversation, that he'd already done all the things and the chores that he needed to be doing at the house. So it really was more like being stuck in the present moment, more like anything like deja vu. So we did some research with him and identified memory mechanisms and brain mechanisms that were involved. And that was really interesting work and that launched my interest in deja vu.
Starting point is 00:09:54 But of course, it took me a bit of time to realize, but that's not actually what deja vu is when we have deja vu. When we have deja vu, we are aware that we're having a deja vu. So he was not aware that he had this kind of problem. So one of the things his wife used to ask him, it's like, okay, if you've watched this TV program before, can you tell me what's going to happen next? And his response was very can he. He used to reply, well, how should I know what happens next?
Starting point is 00:10:23 I've got a memory problem. So he was kind of aware that he had difficulties with his memory, but he was not aware that he had this constant feeling of repetition, that his life was repeating. So again, that helps us converge on what deja vu is, because for us, deja vu is this conflict, this sense that it feels like it's familiar, but I know it's not.
Starting point is 00:10:46 And we think with him and the other patients who are similar, all of whom have had this kind of dementia pattern and have been older adults, and it is very, very rare. They've all had this kind of permanent sense of familiarity. And instead of being able to reject the sense of familiarity as something false and erroneous, these patients actually accept it and then kind of work with it and embellish it and have details to it and so on and so forth. So there's a very interesting cases and that launched my interest in deja vu. But I think the most important thing to to underline there is it's not deja vu.
Starting point is 00:11:25 And I actually regret ever using the word deja vu. but that's how everybody describes it. The carers and the doctors involved, they all say, this guy's got permanent deja vu. And then you asked about epilepsy. Epilepsy, my interest in epilepsy came a bit afterwards. The only kind of scientific studies of deja vu
Starting point is 00:11:48 for maybe 100 years were within the domain of the study of epilepsy. So it's long been known that certain people, not everybody, certain people with epilepsy reports Dejave, which is associated with seizure activity. So before or maybe just during seizure activity. And as a result, if we wanted to research DejaVue, they seem like a very helpful group of people to help us better understand what's going on. Certainly for some people with epilepsy, Deja vu is clinically relevant because it can signal that they're about to have a seizure, which is something they need to know about. But also, for us wanting to better understand Deja vu, with those people, at least,
Starting point is 00:12:47 Deja Vu appears to be more frequent and more predictable, so that helps us get a handle on what's going on in Dejaou. And unlike the patients with dementia, we do believe, that there's no difference between the deja vu experience by people with and without epilepsy. It's a very similar kind of thing, except you might imagine that in epilepsy, it's due to neuronal communication and electrical activity, which is in some way disrupted. But that's not the same case for us necessarily, although that's a story where we need more research. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG.
Starting point is 00:13:34 Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge-serving craft ice, mini-craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for DT. Now, there is sort of the opposite of deja vu, right, which is called Jaumevo.
Starting point is 00:14:02 That's something that you've never experienced. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is? The term, I believe, is not that widely known, but people recognize the sensation. Yeah, so exactly. When we do questionnaires on Jaievoo, we have to help people understand what it is we're trying to talk about. and happily people do understand and identify this experience. So Jamivu happens in daily life most frequently for things like spelling and using words.
Starting point is 00:14:37 So you may have had this experience. I definitely have had it where you're using a word and all of a sudden, even though you know the word is spelled right and you've produced it correctly, there's something wrong. It feels it feels like it's not right. So once I had it for the word this, I was using the word this. And all of a sudden it was like, well, this isn't how it's spelled. This can't be right.
Starting point is 00:15:04 It seems pretty common for words. At least that seems to be the most common version. But when I talk to people about it, and again, I'll talk about my own experience and hope that I'm not the only person to have had such things, I once had it quite profoundly looking at my father's face. And it was like, wow, this is, it was like I knew it was my father. There was no way in which I didn't recognize him. But I was looking at him thinking, well, that's, that's really, there's something strange about this.
Starting point is 00:15:30 It's a strange kind of idea that that is my, that is my father. And it's almost like you see your father's face with fresh eyes. You come to something fresh. And you have this kind of sense of novelty, like you're seeing something for the first time, even though you know it's your father. And there's no, there's no question that you wouldn't recognize him. It's more like the recognition seems strange in some way. So in JamiVu, just like with Dejavu, they are opposites,
Starting point is 00:16:02 but the key experience is this experience of strangeness and a conflict between two evaluations. So the conflict in Dejaou is that you know it's new. It's something you've never talked about before or a place you've never been before, but somehow it's. feels like it's familiar. And then you have the opposite with the opposite being that you know very well that this is a word that you've used and you can write it perfectly well. But somehow it looks strange or it looks wrong or you have to double check what you're doing.
Starting point is 00:16:39 And exactly the same with people's faces. And it goes on, Akira O'Connor, who's my main partner in crime with this research work that we do together. He says he's had a Jemé Mvue for driving to the extent that he, you know, was really unsure of what he was doing and what pedal was doing what in the car. Wow. It's a little scary. It is a little scary. Well, he pulled over. He's a sensible chap.
Starting point is 00:17:10 But when those things happen, they're very, very rare. But again, that's another kind of piece of evidence as to what's happening in Jamevue. because driving is a very fluent automatic behavior. And we find in the lab the easiest way to generate Jemavu is by another very fluent automatic behavior, which is writing. And we ask people to repeatedly write the same word until they feel pretty strange about the word.
Starting point is 00:17:41 And that's the work for which we won the Ig Nobel Prize because it's a pretty strange thing to do. And in fact, it's basically, when we designed the experiment, it was based on my experience of punishment at school where I had to write lines and write the same sentence over and over again. I will not talk in French class. I think it was, but I can't remember. And I realized that writing this sentence over and over again, I must have been about 12, really made me feel strange. And it wasn't an unpleasant sensation, but it was very strange. So, yeah, I guess nearly 20 years later I came to the idea, oh, that could be a cool way of, of invoking these strange sensations, these conflicts between familiarity and lack of familiarity. So you can instigate one, Ja me, but can you in a lab instigate Dejaveu?
Starting point is 00:18:35 I mean, how do you study it since it's such a fleeting, subjective thing? Yeah, that's a good question. So the first thing is that Deja vu took a little bit of time to get going, as an experimental concern. And I think there's two reasons for that. The first reason is that subjective experiences kind of fell out of grace in psychology, but since the 1980s, we've been able to tackle
Starting point is 00:19:08 subjective experiences head on. But that's kind of a historical note. The second issue is we were kind of waiting for a theoretical entity that might be useful to better understand. deja vu because it didn't seem easy to classify what deja vu was. In the title, it's deja vu. It's about vision. So we tend to think it's about what we see and perception. But in fact, the best theoretical entity is familiarity. So familiarity is supposed to be like a memory
Starting point is 00:19:40 process, which we know quite a lot about. So you can have familiarity for concepts which may just feel like you know about them without really being able to retrieve too much about them. So the examples I like are things like when you're a child, you were very familiar with a concept, let's say, like a home computer. You had a home computer for five years and it was called an an acorn electron. And then 20, 30 years later in your life, you might encounter something like that acorn electron in a different concept. It's now the name of a rock group or something like that. And what you may find is familiarity. You may have this, wow, that rings some bells. That means something to me that concept. And so familiarity is kind of one of the cornerstones of how
Starting point is 00:20:32 memory works in daily life. And we think it operates like when you hear this acorn electron kind of idea, you're like, oh, okay, well, that's, that feels familiar to me. Well, what? and then you can coordinate your memory processes to try and research for things in memory. So given that you know that this entity familiarity exists, that's really what we can pin our DejaVue research on. And here, to cut a long story short, I think there's some really elegant experiments
Starting point is 00:21:06 which are done which kind of provoke DejaVu in the lab, and I can really praise these experiments and say how elegant and wonderful I think they are because in fact, I'm not responsible for any of them, but Anne Cleary, who's done a lot of research on deja vu, she's used, I think my favorite experiment of hers uses virtual reality. And what she does is she provokes this sense of familiarity by using similarity.
Starting point is 00:21:36 And since the 19th century, one of the ideas about what causes deja vu is a similarity between something you've encountered previously in your life and something which you encounter now where you can't identify that source of familiarity. So in the daily life, you might go into your friend's flat for the first time, your friend's apartment for the first time. And the layout of the apartment is such that there's the window in front of you and the fireplace, the left of you and the sofa and the TV. And in fact, that configuration matches exactly something that you've already seen before in your life. You can't remember what it is.
Starting point is 00:22:14 But that's enough to provoke this sense of familiarity. So Anne Cleary, she's looked at that in virtual reality because it's quite easy to set up those kinds of things in experimental situations. And like that, she can provoke feelings of deja vu, and people report freely that they've had deja vu or something like it generated in her experiments. So that's really neat. And then she's taken that in lots of other different directions.
Starting point is 00:22:43 And then the other series of experiments, which is similar, are run by Akira O'Connor. And he's used pretty much as similar technique, but with words. And his thing is all about generating the conflict, which is in deja vu. So he does this really neat thing. He asks people to learn lists of words, which is something we do. bread and butter, that's what I'm paid to do mostly. He gets people to learn a list of words, and for each word they have to learn, they have to note down the first letter of the word. So they're doing something at the same time as looking at the word, and he keeps the note of that,
Starting point is 00:23:26 and he uses that with them later when he tests them. So there's this neat effect which we see often in memory experiments, which is if you learn a set of related information, it will give you a false memory and strong familiarity for something that you haven't learned. So if I give you a list of words to learn, which is like doze, rest, blanket, bed, snore, pillow, tired, etc. And then a bit later on I show you the word sleep. You'll think that you've seen the word sleep now. I didn't give you the word sleep. So that's like a kind of false memory paradigm.
Starting point is 00:24:05 but what you have for the word sleep is familiarity. So what Akira did, which is really novel, was he did that kind of experiment, which is fairly standard in the experimental psychology. But the new thing he did was to ask people to look at the numbers of words that started with a certain letter. So at the same time as presenting them with the word sleep, he also presented them with the information
Starting point is 00:24:31 that no words that they actually saw on the list began with an S. So that is exactly like the conflict that's inherent in deja vu. And I think that's a really neat demonstration of really what's going on. It's like that. It's just like that. Well, sleep feels familiar. Yes, yes. I've encountered that before.
Starting point is 00:24:50 But hang on, it's impossible. And so people identify that as being like deja vu. So are there brain imaging studies that help you to understand what's going on in people's brains when they're having these experiences? Yeah. So that's a good question. In healthy subjects, Akira has done that work as well. So we know that when people are having something like a Dejavert experience, it's the prefrontal cortex which is activated.
Starting point is 00:25:22 And the prefrontal cortex is proposed to be involved in this kind of detection of conflict. And it's kind of a higher order system which kind of, watches what's going on beneath it, if you see what I mean. So it's there to control and coordinate what's happening in memory. So that's consistent with this kind of aspect, which is about detecting conflict and your relationship with your memory rather than memory itself. That's one kind of avenue of research. There's not a lot of neuroimaging research done on healthy populations.
Starting point is 00:26:01 What there's more of is kind of, classic neuropsychology. So good old neuropsychology on on volunteers who are very keen to help us on research who have epilepsy, for instance, or even acquire brain injury. And those people with Dejave, we can converge on the fact that there's definitely implication of the temporal lobes and the areas which we know are responsible from memory. And The particular zone is the zone which is described as being para-hypochampal. So the hippocampus is what we teach as students in the first year of their undergraduate degrees that is the area which is responsible for memory.
Starting point is 00:26:52 But just outside that area in the brain, just connected to it is another zone, which is responsible for familiarity. So it's no surprise that this intense. sensation of familiarity is associated to activation in that area. And we've actually known that for quite a long time because of the studies of the pioneering studies in epilepsy, trying to understand different kinds of epileptic focus and the changes that people experience in daily life with those things. So there's kind of two zones that are involved.
Starting point is 00:27:28 It would be the temporal lobes for this kind of familiarity part. and then the prefrontal cortex, which is in some way monitoring what's going on in the temple lobes. So we can imagine those two different zones are involved. It seems that there are a number of these types of experiences that you study that are all related. There's also Deja Rivay, for example, which has to do with dreaming. Yeah. Can you explain what some of these others are and how they're related? Yeah, well, I think, I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's,
Starting point is 00:28:02 There's almost a jokey response to this in which I like to point out that some researchers in déjà vu have tried to discover, in quotation marks, there's many different forms of deja vu that exist as possible. And for me, certainly living in France, it seems like they're just running through their French past participates that they've learned. So you can imagine there's deja vu, déjà vu, déjà vu, déjà vu, deja vu, which is to have already dreamt. and we can go on and on. There's Deja Saint-I which is already felt. And some researchers who are not motivated by the same scientific concerns as me would identify really 20, 30 different types of Dejaue.
Starting point is 00:28:51 Deja Reve is something which is beginning to gather scientific interest and we think it would be distinct from deja vu, and it's this sensation of having already dreamt something or experiencing something which feels to you like you'd already experienced it in a dream. In epileptic patients, it's a bit of a different concern, I think, because it seems that there might be kind of reactivation of material that was indeed experienced as part of a dream.
Starting point is 00:29:28 I think with the people that I work with, when I talk about Deja Revei, I think, and I remember thinking this myself before I studied psychology, deja vu is pretty weird, and when you have it, you're trying to explain to yourself why it is that you find something familiar.
Starting point is 00:29:48 And I think without wanting to kind of trick yourself, you nonetheless think that, well, a pretty good bet, is that I dreamt something like this, and now I'm encountering it again. And it seems to be like a natural interpretation of this sense of familiarity that you are now encountering something
Starting point is 00:30:05 that you already dreamt. And that's an idea that's entered into kind of popular thought because that was Jung's idea of what Deja Vu was. And Freud and Young both thought that there was kind of this aspect of the unconscious and the dream state, which was related to Dejaouille. I think we just need more research, but there's, I mean, there's data that shows that there's
Starting point is 00:30:29 definitely something going on. People who remember their dreams are more likely to have deja vu. And that's the finding that's been replicated for in across different research labs and in different studies. So there seems to be something going on with dreaming. And I'm, I'm not quite prepared to say what that is yet, but it's certainly something very interesting. And then for the other types of deja vu, I try not to proliferate the different types of deja vu. I think my job is to generate plausible accounts of deja vu based on the memory systems. And I think there might be a weaker form which is more about familiarity and a stronger
Starting point is 00:31:12 form which is more about really believing that you can remember something, which might give you the feeling that you're about to predict what's about to happen. next. So not everybody, we think in our question is about 20% of the time. When you have deja vu, you also have the feeling that you can predict what's going to happen next. I think we need to start looking at that aspect of things as well, because that might be a stronger, different form of deja vu than the form where you just have a vague sensation of familiarity. People who regularly listen to this podcast probably know that I have a particular fascination with odd psychological syndromes. And there is another one that is, you know, that is a particular
Starting point is 00:31:51 that is, it sounds like it might be related to Jaumevo, which is Capgras syndrome where people don't recognize their own loved ones. I think that they are strangers. Is this an extreme version of Jaumevo or is it something else totally? I am very pleased you ask that because I think that's, I think that's possible. I think that's one way of looking at it. And I think you and I share the same kind of passions for psychology because I think having worked with all kinds of people with all kinds of psychological and cognitive difficulties, I really believe that there's nothing that unusual that you can experience in terms of like psychological disturbance, like in Capgras, which doesn't have an equivalent in our own daily lives. I think it's more severe and more
Starting point is 00:32:47 problematic and debilitating. But yeah, I mean, I think the Jaemé vu thing, we can give people with faces. You do it with famous faces and you can just saturate the face so people just have to repeatedly look at the same face. And eventually it will begin to feel a bit different. So we know that inducing Ja'Mevue is all about this kind of idea of repetition of things that are very automatic.
Starting point is 00:33:15 And indeed, our research goal was to try and understand the link between Jaieu and that sensation that okay it looks real but it's not real I mean that sounds exactly like Capua's delusion that you do you know it's you or in fact it's not
Starting point is 00:33:34 so much that you know you accept that person as being as looking like your husband but you you don't want you don't feel that that's your husband so that's it's almost
Starting point is 00:33:50 exactly the same thing. It's the difference between a perception, which is a perception of a face that looks like my husband, and then the internal feeling which LaBelle, it doesn't feel like my husband. It's not right. It's something that's not right. So, yeah, it's definitely something we'd like to work more on. But if I don't get to do work and to elucidate, like, or concretely what the relationship between those two things is, I think it's important for this story. that we are all of us, each of us, living a kind of relationship with our perceptual systems and our cognitive systems. And when DejaVu and Jemivu happened, they're a little reminder of the fact that it doesn't
Starting point is 00:34:35 always run that smoothly. We are sometimes mistaken. And the reason why DejaVu is so interesting is because it's infrequent and it's rare, but it feels really, really weird. And if you imagine being stuck with sensations like that, which you can't reason with that you can't reject or that you can't justify, then I think you have a little window into how it is to be living with something like Capcarus dilution. And I think that's a very important point for psychology. So what are you researching right now? What are the big questions you want to answer?
Starting point is 00:35:13 So right now I've got a really nice. project which we are looking to get funded, which is looking at deja vu in children, because it seems like nobody's done much direct asking of children about their experiences of deja vu. It's more retrospective questionnaires. And it seems like the scientific literature says you don't get deja vu until you're about 10 years old. And that's again a nice bit of data to try and understand what deja vu is. And we're working on the idea that deja vu is metacognitive. And as I say, it's a sign that you're able to kind of reflect upon your memory
Starting point is 00:36:02 and maybe not be overly trusting of your memory. So we'd say it was a good thing. So the research that we've got ongoing is simply to look at when people get deja vu. We've got some interesting preliminary findings which look like deja vu. runs in families, not because it's genetic. I don't think I'm going to get a prize for finding out that deja vu is genetic. I think that's relatively unlikely. I think the simple explanation is there are people that talk about their experiences
Starting point is 00:36:32 and have a label to give to those experiences. And there are people, families that don't so much talk about those things. But certainly it runs in families. The more the parents have it, the more the children have it. That's pretty nice. and what we would ultimately like to do is to do kind of standard tests of metacognitive abilities and thinking skills and see if according to our prediction people who had deja vu or people who had deja vu earlier, children, they would be more metacognitively aware of other kinds of cognitive systems and how their memory works and things like that.
Starting point is 00:37:13 We're kind of really pushing this angle that deja vu is fact-checking, that it's something good and it's something useful. So one project would be to look at that. And then you can imagine it would just be helpful to start talking to children about, not just deja vu and jaie-vous also, but the tip of the tongue experience. These are all kind of metacognitive experiences, which are relationships with your own memory and your own cognitive systems. And I think if teachers and educators are talking about those kinds of things, it's going to help children in general with their learning and education and things like that. And then I think the second big project that we've got going on that we're just going to start is, I don't believe that these things are just quirks.
Starting point is 00:38:03 I don't think they're just random events which are meaningless. I think they are infrequent and they speak to their kind of complexity and sensitive. of the human cognitive system. And I think now we have smartphone technology and things like that, we could be much better at collecting examples and frequency of these experiences. And I think that those might be clinically useful. And my experience of working with deja vu is that people don't much do research on it, partly because nobody much asks people about their experiences of those things.
Starting point is 00:38:43 And I think we could be asking much more about people's subjective experiences in daily life with a hope to better understanding psychological distress, but also just the rich range of human experience. So with neurologists, I'm hoping to have like a very broad spectrum of all these kinds of subjective experiences and see how frequently they occur and what they mean to people. This is all really fascinating. I want to thank you for joining me. It's been real interesting talking to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure for me, too. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.combeckycology.org
Starting point is 00:39:25 or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email, us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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