💧 What Do Psychedelics, Déjà Vu, and Home Have in Common?

Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s lead story is about a phenomenon known as “psychedelic familiarity,” the uncanny sense that a place you’ve never been — including realms we travel to while tripping — feels like somewhere you’ve been before. A new study set out to measure that feeling, comparing it to déjà vu and found that something else entirely is going on with that sensation. You can find that story immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find stories about iboga and Gabon, Rick Strassman’s experience with the mystical, and psilocybin’s impact on Parkinson’s disease

🖤 Happy Dia de los Muertos 🖤
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

Psychedelic Experiences Can Feel Like Deja Vu, But New Research Says Something Else Is At Play

A survey of more than 1,000 people found that the familiarity sparked by DMT and other psychedelics feels stronger, stranger, and more comforting than déjà vu or a childhood home.

People who smoke DMT often come back to reality with stories about alien worlds, geometric visions, and messages from uncanny deities about the true meaning of life. But many also return having experienced an even stranger sensation: that even the most alien realm they had ever seen somehow felt like home. A study published on Sept. 11 in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs is among the first to measure that feeling directly. It found that the familiarity sparked by psychedelics can be more intense, more comforting, and more transcendent than the familiarity people feel toward a childhood home or during déjà vu.

Dr. David Wyndham Lawrence, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Toronto, said the intensity of the experience itself may be part of the answer. “We know that factors such as processing fluency (how easily the brain processes something), vividness, and emotional intensity can shape feelings of familiarity,” he told DoubleBlind in an email. “One possibility is that these features of a psychedelic experience generate a powerful sense of recognition that is then mistaken for evidence of a previous encounter.”

The inspiration for this study grew out of Lawrence’s earlier research, in which he analyzed roughly 3,800 DMT trip reports. Alongside experiences of alternate dimensions and otherworldly beings, he found that a common response people had was that they felt like they were “coming home” or that they had some kind of rapport with the beings they encountered

“These extraordinary descriptions were fascinating in their own right, but what intrigued me even more was the profound sense of familiarity some people described alongside them,” Lawrence said. “Some even described it as the place we go when we die. How could something so bizarre and seemingly novel feel so deeply familiar?”

To find out, Lawrence and co-authors Manoj Doss of the University of Texas at Austin and Akira O’Connor of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland surveyed 1,050 people. Participants were asked to recall the psychedelic trip that felt most familiar to them, a place or memory from everyday life that felt familiar, such as a childhood home, and a typical episode of déjà vu. They answered a 19-item questionnaire about each one, rating how strongly these experiences felt like home, like returning somewhere, or like visiting a place that exists before birth or after death. Of the 800 Psychedelic users, 91.5% said they had felt familiarity on a trip, usually at the peak. DMT produced it most often, followed by psilocybin, and LSD.

Lawrence pointed out that the feeling of familiarity even showed up in 41 first-time users, which he considers one of the definitive takeaways from the study. “What we can say with confidence, based on this study and some of our earlier work, is that psychedelic familiarity is ‘non-referential’ to a prior psychedelic experience, given that people report it during their first psychedelic experience,” he said. “In other words, the familiarity can’t be explained as individuals simply remembering a state they’ve experienced on the drug before.”

When the researchers compared the answers, people rated their psychedelic experiences as feeling more familiar than everyday memories or déjà vu on all of the 19 questions. The biggest gaps came on questions about what the researchers called “transcendent features,” such as the sense of visiting a place that exists before birth or after death. People rarely felt that about a childhood home or a moment of déjà vu, but they often did about a trip. Participants also rated how strange, new, and comforting each experience felt. The trips were rated as the strangest and most novel of the three, and also the most comforting.

“That combination is particularly interesting: something can feel deeply strange and deeply familiar at the same time,” Lawrence said. He was careful to add that when people said a trip felt like visiting a place before birth or after death, they were describing their impression of that place. “These descriptions reflect how people experienced and interpreted the familiarity, rather than evidence that they had actually visited such a place before.”

Many psychonauts use the term “déjà vu” to describe the phenomenon, but Lawrence said the two are distinct. “In memory research, déjà vu has a fairly specific meaning: a feeling of familiarity that seems inappropriate because you know the situation is new,” he said. “That tension is central to it: you feel you’ve been here before, while knowing you haven’t.”

About 83% of respondents called the familiarity authentic, though Lawrence cautions against reading that as proof of anything. “That tells us about how convincing the feeling is, rather than whether it reflects a real memory,” he said. “Understanding that distinction could be useful when helping someone make sense of their experience afterward.”

The study has other limitations, too. Respondents were mostly experienced users recruited through online psychedelic communities, and many described trips from more than a year earlier.

“It means we need to be very cautious about how widely we apply the findings,” Lawrence said. “We were asking people to look back on their experiences, sometimes from more than a year earlier, so their recollections may have changed over time. Most were experienced psychedelic users recruited online, particularly through psychedelic communities, which may have attracted people with especially intense or positive experiences.”

Still, about half of those who felt psychedelic familiarity said it changed them in lasting ways. In written responses, they most often described an emotional or psychological transformation, a sense that everything is connected, or shift in how they see reality. Some even said it left them more at peace with dying. Lawrence pointed to research by the late Roland Griffiths showing psilocybin could ease death anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer, and he sees a possible thread, connecting the two.

“If they interpret that place or state as where their consciousness came from, or where it might return after death, that could make death feel less like an unknown and more like a homecoming,” he said. “We can’t say whether that interpretation is true, but the comfort it brings could outlast the experience itself.”

DoubleBlind Digs

🌱 WANDER THE GARDEN: adrienne maree brown, the author of “Emergent Strategy” and “Pleasure Activism,” just opened the Garden of Ideas, a free online living library of her writing, videos, and podcasts. Take a short quiz to find the ideas calling to you, then save your favorites into seed packets you can revisit and share, like playlists for your inner life. Start wandering here.

⚛️ GLOBALIZED: Global Psychedelic Week kicks off tomorrow, bringing the psychedelic field together from more than 100 countries for a week of conversations on longevity, culture and AI, regulation and research, and the future of the industry. The main online program runs Nov. 3-6, with day passes starting around $32 and week passes that include a month of recordings. Get tickets here.

🌱 ALT(HER)ED STATES: Psychedelic State(s) of America just launched a new column on women and psychedelics from writer Gianna Biscontini. The first installment, “Benevolent Instigation,” makes the case for asking better questions about women’s health in the psychedelic space. It’s free to read with an email sign-up. Read it here.