In this chapter, the authors begin with a brief history of the interpretations that have been given – from the middle of the 19th Century to the present day, to the phenomenon of déjà‐vu that psychological disorder leads us to believe that they have already experienced in an undetermined past the situation they are experiencing. In 1904 and 1906, psychologist Gérard Heymans wrote the reports of two investigations linking the déjà‐vu phenomenon to another psychic experience, also fleeting: “depersonalization”, (...) a sudden state that disappears just as suddenly, and in which everything we perceive seems foreign to us, including ourselves – we then have the feeling of not speaking or acting, but perceiving our actions and words as inactive spectators. If this necessary condition is met, we can speak of a successful inscription of the representation‐occurrence in its memory, whose representation in our model is then that of the specious present of the individual actor concerned. (shrink)

El déjà vu es problemático en el fin de siglo (XIX), no por la ensoñación poética que trae consigo, sino por la perturbación que le causa a la vida. De allí la preocupación de los “savants” por entenderlo, controlarlo y “curarlo”. El déjà vu irrumpe en la vida cotidiana del sujeto, lo perturba, lo desconcierta. De allí que Bodei lo relacione con el eterno retorno de Nietzsche. Más que un caso aislado o “patológico” ligado a individuos “pa(de)cientes” como (...) los epilépticos, o una “válvula de escape de la realidad”, el déjà vu sería para Bodei, la irrupción (la erupción) de una ilusión frente a la realidad “operante”. El déjà vu pone en crisis la supuesta identidad “absoluta” del sujeto, su dimensión del tiempo y su “confianza” en la continuidad de la personalidad. Para hablar de él es necesario, como sugiere Bodei, referirse al tema del “doble” en la literatura del siglo XIX. (Dostoievski más que Stevenson). (shrink)

In déjà vu, a novel experience feels strangely familiar. Here we propose that this phenomenology is best seen as consisting in an illusory feeling of identification of the gist of the current scene or event, rather than in the intensity of the fluency-based, metacognitive feeling of familiarity.

Referring to a past that never was, dij vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of dij vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichid celebrations of cultural memory and forces (...) us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time. Disturbances of cultural memory-screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions-disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, dij vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp's analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner M]ller, this exploration of the effects of dij vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol's work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet. Peter Krapp, lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, coedited "Medium Cool," a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on contemporary media theory. He has published in the fields of German studies, media studies, and literary theoryand, since 1995, has acted as editor of the Hydra Web site for theories of literature and media. (shrink)

The continuum between involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu, as proposed by Barzykowski and Moulin, can be better defined by considering research on autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Although autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease can generally be associated with a sense of familiarity, involuntary retrieval can trigger an autonoetic experience of retrieval in these patients.

Rather than a natural product, a computational analysis leads us to characterize déjà vu as a failure of memory retrieval, linked to the activation in neocortex of familiar items from a compositional memory in the absence of hippocampal input, and to a misappropriation by the self of what is of others.

ArgumentCultivated by a number of writers and studied by psychologists, the phenomenon of déjà vu is an invention of the nineteenth century and is part of a broader exploration of how the mind experiences memory and time. Thus this typically benign mental aberration provides an entry-point into the mechanisms that preside over the regulation of the flow of consciousness. The theories of the mind developed recently by neuroscientists help us understand, meanwhile, why investigations into this mental “event” necessarily invoke (...) concepts of representation and narrative. In fact, our increasingly sophisticated models for processes of memory and perception depend on literary representations. This article relies on the paramnesiac writings of Gérard de Nerval, seen through the lens of Proust's analysis, to argue that a consideration of the aesthetic and representational features of déjà-vu can bring us closer to solving the epistemological challenges we face in studying this phenomenon.For Gregory T. Polletta. (shrink)

This paper tackles the issue of the diversity of déjà experiences. According to the standard view in the neuropsychological literature, they should all be defined by means of a psychological criterion, by which they are experiences triggered by a perceived item and consist of a conscious clash between a first-order feeling of familiarity about the item and a second-order evaluation that assesses the first-order feeling as erroneous. This paper dismisses the standard view and contends there are two types of (...) déjà experiences, labeled déjà vu and déjà vécu respectively. But it also takes issue with the rare proponents of a distinct déjà vécu type. Contrary to their achievement view, it argues that recollection is not involved in déjà vécu experiences as an actual mental state or a component thereof. In our ability view, déjà vécu involves the feeling that one could recollect past occurrences of a currently lived episode of experience. (shrink)

Ian Hacking, Hacking and Latour on science studies and metaphysics: The Social Construction of What?Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-81200-X Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science StudiesHarvard University Press, ISBN0-67-465336-X.

Barzykowski and Moulin's model proposes that déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories are the result of a continuously active memory system that tracks the novelty of situations. Déjà vu would only have episodic content and concern interpretation of prior experiences. We argue that these aspects of the model would gain to be clarified and explored further and we suggest possible directions.

It has been known for long time that intuition plays significant role in many professions and human life, including in entrepreneurship, government, and also in detective or law enforcement activities. Even women are known to possess better intuitive feelings or “hunch” compared to men. Despite these examples, such a precognitive interdiction is hardly accepted in established science. In this paper, we discuss briefly the advanced solutions of Maxwell equations, and then make connection between syntropy and precognition from classical perspective. It (...) is our hope that the new proposed method can be verified with experimental data. But we admit that our model is still in its infancy, more researches are needed to fill all the missing details. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu are phenomena that occur spontaneously in daily life. IAMs are recollections of the personal past, whereas déjà vu is defined as an experience in which the person feels familiarity at the same time as knowing that the familiarity is false. We present and discuss the idea that both IAMs and déjà vu can be explained as natural phenomena resulting from memory processing and, importantly, are both based on the same memory (...) retrieval processes. Briefly, we hypothesise that both can be described as “involuntary” or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and déjà vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval. We map out the similarities and differences between the two, making a theoretical and neuroscientific account for their integration into models of memory retrieval and how the autobiographical memory literature can explain these quirks of daily life and unusual but meaningful phenomena. We explain the emergence of the déjà vu phenomenon by relating it to well-known mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval, concluding that IAMs and déjà vu lie on a continuum. (shrink)

This article examines the transference of the European Union's equal opportunity directives to the new post-socialist accessor states, most especially to Bulgaria and Romania. Drawing upon 13 interviews in Bulgaria and 12 in Romania with local institutional stakeholders — e.g. trade union deputies, ministry officials — the article shows how politico-ideological differences have bred very different gender sensibilities across Europe, East and West. It further reveals how these disparities have been downplayed, if not wholly ignored in the EU's extension eastward. (...) The study concludes that continued disregard of the historical and cultural specificities of power relations between men and women in the formerly socialist, new EU member states threatens the efficacy of the EU's `gender equality agenda' and more generally, the integrity of the EU as a self-purported democratic body. (shrink)

The target article claims that involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu are based on the same retrieval processes, although they result in different phenomenological states. Here we argue that the differential engagement of attention at various stages of memory may be one of the determinants of when common retrieval processes give rise to such different experiences.

The proposed framework can benefit from integrating predictive processing into the explanation of déjà vu which corresponds to interrupted prediction. Déjà vu is also accompanied by familiarity. However, considerable ambiguity is inherent in familiarity, which necessitates elaboration of this construct. Research findings on involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu show discrepancies, and clustering these constructs can be counterproductive for research.

The imagery debate re-enacts controversies persisting since Descartes. The controversy remains important less for what we can learn about visual imagery than about cognitive science itself. In the tradition of Arnauld, Reid, Bartlett, Austin and Ryle, Pylyshyn’s critique exposes notorious mistakes being unwittingly rehearsed not only regarding imagery but also in several independent domains of research in modern cognitive science.

This commentary on Edwin Carels’ essay “Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative anamnesis and autonomous vision in Ken Jacobs’ appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son” broadens up the media-archaeological framework in which Carels places his text. Notions such as Huhtamo’s topos and Zielinski’s “deep time” are brought into the discussion in order to point out the difficulty to see what there is to see and to question the position of the viewer in front of experimental films like Tom Tom the Piper’s (...) Son and its remakes. (shrink)

Ian Hacking, Hacking and Latour on science studies and metaphysics: The Social Construction of What?Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-81200-X Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science StudiesHarvard University Press, ISBN0-67-465336-X.

Déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are differentiated by a number of factors including metacognition. In contrast to IAMs, déjà vu activates regions associated with self-awareness including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Barzykowski and Moulin argue that déjà vu is a natural product of autobiographical memory retrieval. Their proposal fails to account for three salient properties of déjà vu experiences: Their strangeness, their infrequency, and their characteristically sudden onset. Accounting for these properties is necessary for proper integration of déjà vu into autobiographical memory research.

Shors & Matzel's conclusion that LTP is not related to learning is similar to one we reached several years ago. We discuss some methodological advances that have relevance to the issue and applaud the authors for challenging existing dogma.

Déjà vu is the striking sense that the present situation feels familiar, alongside the realization that it has to be new. According to the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis, déjà vu results when the configuration of elements within a scene maps onto a configuration previously seen, but the previous scene fails to come to mind. We examined this using virtual reality technology. When a new immersive VR scene resembled a previously-viewed scene in its configuration but people failed to recall the (...) previously-viewed scene, familiarity ratings and reports of déjà vu were indeed higher than for completely novel scenes. People also exhibited the contrasting sense of newness and of familiarity that is characteristic of déjà vu. Familiarity ratings and déjà vu reports among scenes recognized as new increased with increasing feature-match of a scene to one stored in memory, suggesting that feature-matching can produce familiarity and déjà vu when recall fails. (shrink)

External cues and internal configuration states are the likely instigators of involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu experience. Indeed, Barzykowski and Moulin discuss relevant neuroscientific evidence in this direction. A complementary line of enquiry and evidence is the study of inhibition and its role in memory retrieval, and particularly how its (dys)function may contribute to IAMs and déjà vu.

This paper analyses the déjà-vu experience in order to deepen the understanding of the complex nature of time-consciousness from a phenomenological point of view. The paper is divided into two sections: the first section focuses on Bergson’s research on déjà vu in order to assess the validity of his position; the second section describes a specific form of déjà-vu experience from a phenomenological perspective. This investigation will question the widespread assumption according to which déjà vu should (...) be conceived as a disturbance of the memory of the past. On the contrary, the author shows that the disturbance primarily pertains to the dimension of the future. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to focus on the coherent deformation of the immediate expectation of the imminent future. (shrink)

Barzykowski and Moulin link déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories to the process of retrieval. They make no reference to Tulving's SPI-model. In this, it is proposed that information is acquired serially (S), stored in parallel (P), and retrieved independently (I). This model offers an alternative, elegant, view of involuntary autobiographical memory retrieval, as well as of déjà vus.

This commentary supports Barzykowski and Moulin's model, but departs from it on the question of functionality, where IAMs and déjà vu fractionate. The authors seem to say that IAMs are functional, while déjà vu is not. As there is no hard evidence supporting the idea that IAMs are functional, I argue that both phenomena should be viewed as cognitive failures.

We propose that IAM and déjà vu may not share a placement on the same gradient, per se, but the mechanism of cue familiarity detection, and a major differentiating factor between the two metacognitive experiences is whether the resulting inward directed search of memory yields retrieved content or not. Déjà vu may manifest when contentless familiarity detection is inexplicable by the experiencer.

Barzykowski and Moulin suggest that déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories recruit similar retrieval processes. Here, we invite the authors to clarify three issues: (1) What mechanism prevents déjà vu to happen more frequently? (2) What is the role of semantic cues in involuntary autobiographical retrieval? and (3) How déjà vu relates to non-believed memories?

I argue the relationship between déjà vu and autobiographical memory is not continuous, but more akin to a path diagram. The starting points might be overlapping, but eventually the paths diverge dependent on whether there is memory content to be retrieved. I am worried that considering déjà vu as part of autobiographical memory solves more problems than it creates.

The proposed memory architecture by Barzykowski and Moulin is compelling, and could be improved by incorporating a rational analysis of the functional roles of involuntary autobiographical memory and déjà vu. Additionally, modeling these phenomena computationally would remove ambiguities from the proposal. We provide examples of past work that illustrate how the phenomena may be described more precisely.

This article interrogates the persistence of critical frameworks informed by depth-models of hermeneutics, and the repercussions the equation of “depth” with meaningfulness has for the appreciation of the “shallow” aesthetics of post-classical action cinema. Oppositions such as depth/surface, body/mind, and proximity/distance associated with a hermeneutics of depth are not neutral, but rather exist in a “violent hierarchy”. This ensures that works or styles that foreground surface are automatically deemed to be meaningless. One influential example of this logic is Fredric Jameson's (...) dismissal of postmodern superficiality in favour of modernist depth. In contrast, this article will explore alternative models of postmodern superficiality. Taking up Catherine Constable's reading of Linda Hutcheon, I will endeavour to demonstrate the benefits of adopting a postmodern critical perspective when engaging with texts that resist or problematise depth-models. Through a close reading of a key se... (shrink)