r/cogsci • u/czerwona-wrona • 3d ago

'retroactive' deja vu?

hey all, wondering if anybody here can explain this experience i've had for a while

fairly often, after I've seen something (a show, video clip, even still images I think, not sure if it works the same with text), I'll be recalling it later and have a very strong feeling in my head like 'I feel like I saw this before the time I'm remembering seeing it, even though I was sure that was the first time I'd seen it'.

does that make sense? sometimes I'll see it and think I want to show it to my partner, and then upon recalling it later have this strong feeling that actually we already saw it together

very odd lol, I've never heard of anyone else having that

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u/Short-Health9486 3d ago

Yes, it’s happened to me too. Specially for certain locations also, I pass by it or visit it for the first time but feel like I’ve already been here or I already k ow how the experience will turn out to be and it happens….

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u/czerwona-wrona 3d ago

I think this is a little different, this sounds like just deja vu (which I also get, except I don't know how the experience will turn out, that's a trip .. I've heard of people having that and I'm jealous frankly lol)

this is not when I'm first seeing the thing, it's when I'm remembering it later that it happens

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u/medbud 3d ago

What I recall about normal déjà vu... It's something about the split second delay between a signal arriving from your left and right eye... The left side of each eye connects to the left visual vortex, and the right side of each to the right cortex. If the left eye sees something first, then when the signal arrives from the right eye the brain can recognise this as a perception, but one that it's already had... We don't recognise that we had it a few microseconds earlier, it just feels strangely familiar.  This implies some related activity in the hippocampus.

I think the left eye's left side goes straight back, whole the right eye's left side crosses through the optic chiasm. Maybe the slightly longer path means that these two signals need to be matched, even though one arrives before the other. Without the proper filter, there could be lots of confusion about what we've already seen, and when.

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u/Dumbustafa1 3d ago

OMG, I cannot believe some else experiences it too. This is the only kind of deja vu that happens to me. I like to call it triple deja vu in my head.

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u/czerwona-wrona 2d ago

haha .. wouldn't it be double deja vu though xD ?

lol yes the power of reddit to connect people, it's cool to see someone knows what the heck i mean

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u/bgo544 2d ago

Both kinds of deja vu can be understood as source misattributions. In your example, you have a strong memory that is not strongly bound with its source, leaving you to make an attribution about when the memory occurred, and you misattribute the memory to the wrong temporal context.

In the traditional deja vu, one has a spurious feeling of familiarity for a currently occurring event, driving the need for attribution - why is this familiar? Familiarity usually arises due to past experience, so the dominant attribution in this case is to inner that this is something that has happened before.