The fascinating relationship between déjà vu and premonition | Anne Cleary | TEDxLiverpool

Have you ever had déjà vu, then felt like you knew exactly what was going to happen next? If so, you are not alone. In this talk, Dr. Cleary describes her hunt for the cause of the mysterious link between déjà vu and so-called “precognition.”

Follow Anne on @AnneClearyPhD Professor Anne Cleary is fascinated by how we explain scenarios that defy our definition of normal! She is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology and studies these strange cognitive episodes that many assume to be outside the realm of science. She likes to try to explain the seemingly inexplicable in scientific terms. Along these lines, one of the phenomena that she has studied over the years is déjà vu—that mysterious feeling of having done something before despite knowing otherwise.

[geraldscott]

My deja vu come from dreams then manifest months to years later

[bradsmithy]

The craziest deja vu is when you have it in a place you have never been before.

[zerowaste]

So much effort put into debunking and dismissing what we don’t understand rather than being open and trying to understand it

[kidchris]

I remember having a convo with somebody and in the middle of it I started feeling a deja vu moment and I finished the rest of what they said. Yea I actually caught the moment, everybody in the room just kinda stopped and starred at me for a second. Pretty crazy

[yafavbrujita]

I really like science.. but the flaw in science is humans.. because what most (not all) scientist try and do when they can’t figure out an explanation for something, or show valid proof.. they try and debunk it.
I have precognitive visions and I also experience déjà vu. However since I’ve had my abilities since a young child. I can and have had to understand the two. Idc what this lady’s studIes have shown.

I have stopped my mom in the middle of her talking before and finished what she was going to say. I asked her was that what she was going to say, she looked shocked and confused and replied saying “yes I was” I told her I dreamt about this, I dream of many things that later come true. Either days, weeks, months or years later. I never have control of them (I wish I did) but after all these years of self studies on myself I have noticed that after I awake from the dream I will have this sense of knowing it will come true.. then hours later I “forget it” obviously just going into my subconscious. And I will not “remember” the vision until it is happening. DeJa vu is this random sense of I’ve been here. It’s totally different than actual visions.

[Null_And_Void]

*When ever I realize I’m in the middle of experiencing deja vu I always change my actions as to “avoid” making it exactly like it was in memory*

[snowflakeeel]

Totally false conclusion. Deja Vu CAN lead to true precognition. I have experienced it once. I was at a church luncheon and the guy next to me started talking. I had a Deja Vu and saw, just moments before that he would end his statement by slapping the table. I had just enough time to raise my hand to slap the table, knowing that it would happen only a second later and I would not have time to explain using words. I lifted my hand to slap the table and then he ended his sentence and slapped the table, I was sitting there with my hand up over the table, physical proof that I knew what would happen. I didn't know what to do or say, but I told him i knew he was going to slap the table. He just dismissed me as joking, but I told myself, store this memory well, dont ever forget that this really happened, and doubt it when you recall it in the future. It's the most unexplainable thing that has ever happened to me. What a shame there was no security footage! It would have been proof to the entire world that deja vu can lead to true precognition. So, dont listen to the results of failed science experiments like this, that can not explain true examples of precognition that do actually happen.

[NJOverclocked]

As a child, I remembered a recurring dream in great detail, which I had 3 times in 1 year. I was standing in a massive open room, full of people, many of whom were waiting in lines. The walls were white, except for big blue stripes close to the ceiling. Men were holding boxes near me. I even told some friends about it. About 2 years after my first time having the dream, I went on a family vacation to Nevis & Anguilla, & sure enough I found myself in the exact room, with the exact surroundings. It was the entry/customs room to the airport. I've had deja vu at least 20 times, but I've never had an experience like that again.

[THEBATMANAHH]

These experiments are flawed in that they are unintentionally priming the participants to give an expected answer. This does not answer the question of precognition in places we have not been yet. Brand new experiences that are not quantifiable or testable. When you have a dream and something happens right down to the finest detail. All of this research is well and fine in recreating brain signals. But sadly we are no where near understanding why we do in fact see the future sometimes.

[stevesjigs]

The comments say much of what intellectuals miss and just cant grasp.Thanks to all that shared their reality experience.

[jeffbriggs]

I've had normal deja vu where u feel like you've lived this moment before, and i've had deja vu where I could see a short distance in the future as if I actually lived it for real and then came back to this moment. Feels so crazy.

[toddfarkman]

Precognition doesn't come from deja vu, deja vu comes from precognition. Imagine you have a precognitive dream that you've forgotten. Just like any dream, it can be recalled by something that reminds you of it. Despite thinking you've forgotten the dream, it's still there in your memory. It happens with regular dreams, why not precognitive dreams? So deja vu is just remembering a precognitive dream

[kimberlycoleman]

There were times I would have deja vu experiences, then feel extremely nauseous immediately afterward. No explanation why.

[silverquill]

When I dream sometimes I am yanked out of the dream I am currently having and I see events or conversation in faded yellow tones. Always faded yellow. Sometimes the events happen the next day or sometimes next month but I did an experiment where I wrote down but I saw and when I thought it would happen I was right about 75% of the time so it wasn't illusory for me

[EskimoUlu]

The déjà vu I experience only happens from precognitive dreams. The weirdest feeling was in a dream. I'm sitting in a wood shop, that I have known all my life. I stand up and look down. The ground is further away, but I'm not standing on anything. I'm just standing on my own two legs. I look up and the others in the shop look familiar. I know exactly who they are, their names and what they look like. They just looked off to me. I had that dream in the 4th grade. Fast forward to the 10th grade. I'm sitting in the wood shop and I look down. I know I'm going to look down then look up and what faces I'm going to look at, and in which order. As soon as I look down I remember the dream. I then understand that why I felt like I was standing on something, was because I was a kid looking through a teenagers eyes. I was a foot and a half taller. The reason each face seemed familiar was because I grew up with the other kids, I was seeing them as teenagers. While only knowing them as kids, during the dream.

[konnektlive]

Well, this lady is a one absolute believer in what she wants/needs to see in the data. The problem with such profound subjective experiences is that they can not be repeated, quantified and can not be probed objectively. I'm a scientist by profession (Theoretical physicist shifted to philosophy of science and consciousness studies) and I have had multiple experiences that not only I KNOW personally/subjectively are true but people around me also realized there should be some truth to them. I will try to briefly describe one here:

One morning in Melbourne I was going to a new university for a lecture. I have never ever visited that place before and it was the first time for me to visit that university. On the road there I suddenly had this ineffable/weird (but not unpleasant) feeling that I have been there multiple times, it was a kind of feeling that you can even recall the smells and colours of the place you are going to visit before actually getting there. When I got there, the first thing that surprised me was the smell of the flowers, dirt and the vegetation in the gardens and that was just the beginning! I then visited the offices, theatre and many other locations in the uni and surprised (frankly shocked) to realize that I know the place beyond a shadow of doubt, I knew all the routes, all the buildings like I was working or living there for years!

There I was talking about my experience with someone else (the person who invited me) and explained that I have a feeling that the department X will be closed soon and also there will be problems in the uni because of incidents that I was not sure about at that time. I guess it was partly because of my heightened sense of smell that I could not make sense of for some reason. I know it sounds illogical but the experience was like smelling the location and many of its properties and places from the future, while being in the current time, it indeed felt very strange... Then in couple of weeks, that person called me back and with a very shaky sound said that the department X as I said to him is closed because of the funding issues, and also there was a fire incident in one of the big archive offices in the department Y which caused a chaos in the university as many important documents were destroyed now. AND! because of that, everyone could smell the burnt papers in many areas of the university... This incident was not the only experience I had, and I had enough of such experiences with other people and eyewitnesses that leaves no room for more doubts that, it does not matter how we play with words or try to be smart-asses, there is a fundamental reality behind what we define as reality that is way more profound and complex than we could even imagine. And believe me as a scientist I would have been the first person to deny such incidents and easily call them mumbo-jumbo stuff, but just like I can not deny my own subjectivity right now that I'm writing these lines here, I also can not reject or deny what my vividly real experiences either.

[KerilOfficialChannel]

How do you explain devaju when you experience it with people you have never met in your life before or places you have visited for the first time?

[marlenedietrich]

"this happend to a professor I know" has she never had a deja vu?

[kundanchhabra]

yes because there are actually 2 kinds of deja vu: past and future...that is, already in it and looking back, like you have experienced this before...and there are a few others who know they are about to enter into deja vu, just before it happens...

[hello-ohbk]

I have deja vu all the time and I usually have the dream of it happening months before it actually happens
It used to make me stop dead in my tracks too, but now I'm used to it so I'm always just like, oop deja vu I've been here before