ABSTRACT
The most striking aspect of the déjà vu experience is the strong sense of familiarity in the absence of objective evidence to justify this impression. This chapter considers the possibility that there really exists some form of memory representation for some aspect or dimension of the present experience, but that this information is momentarily (or permanently) inaccessible by the individual. The first set of memory explanations under “episodic forgetting” assume that the present experience, in its entirety, has actually been experienced before but that the individual has lost access to this information. A more likely set of interpretations of déjà vu are based on the assumption that some circumscribed aspect of the present setting is stored in long-term memory, and that the individual’s sense of familiarity is implicitly tied to this fragmentary information. The connection is opaque to the individual in the moment, and this ambiguous sense of familiarity is mistakenly ascribed to the entire experience.
