DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

“As If Time Had Slipped a Cog”

The Déjà Vu Experience
By Alan S. Brown. Essays in Cognitive Psychology series. New York: Psychology Press, 2004. xii + 231 pp. Cloth, $44.95.

Roughly one in three people never experience déjà vu. To them the description of what déjà vu feels like must seem strange, if not downright contradictory. The experience of déjà vu juxtaposes the conviction that what is happening now is happening for the first time with the vague feeling that it is a repetition of something that happened in a dim past. Woodworth (1940, p. 357) described the déjà vu experience as the “weird feeling that one has been through all this before, as if time had slipped a cog and were now repeating itself.” I take this description from Table 2.2 in Alan Brown's monograph The Déjà Vu Experience, which lists more than 50 descriptions and definitions, sampled from a body of literature that ranges from the mid-19th century to the present day. This already points to a prominent feature of this book: Brown takes the long view on his subject.