Not long ago, while watching TV with a few friends, Akira O’Connor was overcome by a bizarre sensation. “For a split second, I noticed that the geometry being formed by the individuals on-screen seemed extremely familiar,” he says. “Instantaneously, this feeling became not just about what I was looking at but about everything I was experiencing: The company I was in, the position in which I sat, the exact distances between myself and everything around me. It all seemed a carbon copy of a moment that I felt I must have experienced before.” In those few fleeting moments, he had a distinct feeling of déjà vu, a sensation that psychologists once considered too unpredictable and ephemeral to be studied in any systematic way.
O’Connor, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Leeds in England, is one of a small group of researchers who are giving déjà vu a second look. For the past two years, he’s been trying to induce it in the laboratory. In his study, he places subjects in a soundproof cubicle and puts them under hypnosis. Once their eyes have drifted shut, he has a computer read a list of 20 words aloud. Some are common, like penny. Others, like synod, are supposed to be unfamiliar. After several minutes, O’Connor brings his subjects out of their trance and asks them to gauge the familiarity of a new list of words—including some they’ve just heard under hypnosis. At this point something remarkable often happens: Around 40 percent of the subjects report feeling a sense of déjà vu.
