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No, you haven't read this entry before (it's just the latest in a series on the brain and consciousness). But if you get the feeling that you have, you might be interested in psychologist Alan Brown's new book, The Dé jà Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology. In it he examines a subject he tells the New York Times "has been either ignored or considered too spooky or flaky for many scientists to touch." The Times describes dé jà vu, which is French for "already seen," as a "sudden and sometimes breathtaking sense of familiarity." It says Brown and others are learning more about it by taking it seriously. They're finding that dé jà vu happens most to people who travel, are highly educated, young, stressed, or have an active imagination. It does not, as in the Freudian tradition, necessarily "invoke hidden conflicts or unusual brain conditions," the Times says. "Normal, healthy brain function suffices." There's also something called jamais vu, "the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them." Article Meanwhile, the Chicago Readerdistinguishes between "a dé jà vu experience" and "an out-to-lunch experience"—"a glimpse of the supernatural" and "just a cognitive burp."

Related: More from the Chronicle of Higher Education

• Speaking of dé jà vu, there's yet another news magazine cover story on how God is just a figment of our biochemistry—this time it's a Timecover last month, "Is God in Our Genes?" (Story reprinted here.) (That's not the only regular religion cover Time and Newsweek trot out every once in a while—last week Jesus was on the front of both.) I'll read this story when someone can convince me 1) it's a meaningful addition to much-hyped coverage of neurotheology (here and here, to begin with), and 2) it isn't crippled by its Enlightenment bias toward rationalist and reductionist epistemology.

Earlier:
Religion as the sleep of reason, or the function of it?

• So now there's something called the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). They held a seminar earlier this year called "Experiencing Sacred Spaces" in the architectural mini-mecca of Columbus, Indiana (see sixth paragraph here). The AFNA president remarked to the gathering that "being transformed by space is a powerful experience, especially when it is sacred space." "Their goal was to develop research questions that might lend themselves to eventual empirical inquiry," says Arthur Farnsley, co-author of the forthcoming Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion, in a report for Martin Marty's Sightings newsletter. AFNA, Farnsley says, believes "it is now possible to ask empirical questions about what kinds of spaces inspire awe, surprise, mystery, anxiety, or comfort." Farnsley has some questions of his own: "Can sacred experiences truly be measured? Even if they could, what happens if subsequent generations wish their worship space to evoke different reactions? Might there be some insidious element in using neurological experiments to shape human experience?" AFNA is also looking into neuroscience and the design of hospitals, schools, and homes. "It is important to recognize that neuroscience is becoming an increasingly important tool for explaining not only how we experience external stimuli," Farnsley concludes, "but even for how we experience God." Entry

• Lie detectors make for great movie scenes, but little else. That was the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. Neither polygraphs nor voice analysis—it turns out that something called a Vericator fails to live up to its name—have satisfied scientists as reliable revealers of truth. Now brain scanning techniques, including "cognosensors," are being studied, says the Economist, and some have already been used in court cases, although the jury is still out on their long-term promise. Article

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