What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Wonders If It’s Triggered by Parallel Universes

I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across Amer­i­ca, and, dur­ing it, expe­ri­enced per­haps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Mem­phis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lob­by of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and imme­di­ate­ly felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lob­by before. But I then real­ized exact­ly why: it fol­lowed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same busi­ness cen­ter com­put­ers, the same café with the same chalk­board ask­ing me to “Try Our Clas­sic Oat­meal” — of the one I’d vis­it­ed the pre­vi­ous day in Okla­homa City.

Should we chalk this up to gener­ic Amer­i­can place­mak­ing at its most effi­cient, or can we find a more inter­est­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we expe­ri­ence when we expe­ri­ence déjà vu. “There is a the­o­ry,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,“that déjà vu sim­ply elic­its frag­ments of mem­o­ries that we have stored in our brain, mem­o­ries that can be elicit­ed by mov­ing into an envi­ron­ment that resem­bles some­thing that we’ve already expe­ri­enced.”

But wait! “Is it ever pos­si­ble on any scale,” he then tan­ta­liz­ing­ly asks, “to per­haps flip between dif­fer­ent uni­vers­es?” And does déjà vu tell us any­thing about our posi­tion in those uni­vers­es, giv­ing us signs of the oth­ers even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an anal­o­gy first made by physi­cist Steven Wein­berg which frames the notion of a “mul­ti­verse” in terms of our vibrat­ing atoms and the fre­quen­cy of a radio’s sig­nal: “If you’re inside your liv­ing room lis­ten­ing to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one fre­quen­cy. But in your liv­ing room there are all fre­quen­cies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock sta­tions. All these radio fre­quen­cies are vibrat­ing inside your liv­ing room, but your radio is only tuned to one fre­quen­cy.” And some­times, for what­ev­er rea­son, we hear two sig­nals on our radio at once.

Giv­en that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we con­sist “no longer vibrate in uni­son with these oth­er uni­vers­es,” when “we have decou­pled from them, we have deco­hered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ulti­mate­ly grants that “déjà vu is prob­a­bly sim­ply a frag­ment of our brain elic­it­ing mem­o­ries and frag­ments of pre­vi­ous sit­u­a­tions,” you may get a kick out of putting his mul­ti­verse idea in con­text with some more tra­di­tion­al expla­na­tions, such as the ones writ­ten about in venues no less depend­able than Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and Smith­son­ian. But in any case, I beg you, Mar­riott Court­yard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolute­ly Every­thing

Michio Kaku: We’re Born Sci­en­tists But Switch to Invest­ment Bank­ing (and More Cul­ture Around the Web)

Michio Kaku Schools a Moon Land­ing-Con­spir­a­cy Believ­er on His Sci­ence Fan­tas­tic Pod­cast

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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