Total Recall

Déjà vu is about a sense of familiarity. It is the feeling of ‘Have I been here before?’ It is an intuition about something that you feel connected with. It could be based on a place, time, person or occasion.

Denzel Washington acted in a film called Déjà Vu. It was about residual memories - implanted information. How much of your childhood to you remember? If the use of a tool feels familiar in your hands, could you have learnt how to use it previously? How did you develop your ball sense?

Some cognitive scientists and neuroscientists believe that déjà vu is no more than installed memories. If you are a fan of the city of Paris, and you are very well read (in the Lonely Planet and Wikipedia sense), then your trip to Paris may yield a sense of familiarity. It is, as if, you experienced astral projection in your sleep and travelled across time and space – which is not that bizarre an idea if you buy into the time-space continuum theory. Einstein imagined riding on a moonbeam…and induced one of his Theories of Relativity.

In branding, what is top-of-mind branding? Messrs. Trout and Ries wrote about ‘Positioning: Battle of the Minds’.

With rapport, it may feel like you may have met that person before. A handshake and a smile may trigger that sense of familiarity. Sharing the same tone of voice and rhythm may also create this connection.

Familiar things comfort humans. It is one of our core instincts. How can you incite déjà vu with your people? Can this be a leadership outcome that you can invoke, at will and by design? Which are déjà vu moments that you would consider engaging? In dysfunctional relationships, we can use déjà vu to reduce conflict and predict inevitable outcomes. Habits are déjà vu in appearance and characteristics.

By the same token, if things are too predictable and eliminates creativity then this déjà vu becomes useless. This applies to television and film with repetitive plots and formulaic (like reality TV series). Even publications like tabloid newspapers and magazines create a readership of an arrested development. That is why, be careful of what you read and feed your mind with.