"To read is to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone"

The New Yorker
December 24, 2007

Twilight of the Books

What will life be like if people stop reading?

by Caleb Crain

ILLUSTRATION: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET

A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren.

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

This decline is not news to those who depend on print for a living. In 1970, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book, there were 62.1 million weekday newspapers in circulation—about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990, circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3 million weekday papers—about 0.17 per person. In January 1994, forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those who read online. Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005. In “To Read or Not to Read,” the N.E.A. reports that American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is “near its twenty-year low,” even as the average price of a new book has increased.

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.

The erosion isn’t unique to America. Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every fifteen minutes of their leisure time. Time-budget diaries yield richer data than surveys, and people are thought to be less likely to lie about their accomplishments if they have to do it four times an hour. Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent.

The most striking results were generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages, and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.

The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading. Bigger cells are easier for scientists to experiment on, and some species of squid have optic-nerve cells a hundred times as thick as mammal neurons, and up to four inches long, making them a favorite with biologists. (Two decades ago, I had a summer job washing glassware in Cape Cod’s Marine Biological Laboratory. Whenever researchers extracted an optic nerve, they threw the rest of the squid into a freezer, and about once a month we took a cooler-full to the beach for grilling.) To symbolize the humanistic approach to reading, Wolf has chosen Proust, who described reading as “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” Perhaps inspired by Proust’s example, Wolf, a dyslexia researcher at Tufts, reminisces about the nuns who taught her to read in a two-room brick schoolhouse in Illinois. But she’s more of a squid person than a Proust person, and seems most at home when dissecting Proust’s fruitful miracle into such brain parts as the occipital “visual association area” and “area 37’s fusiform gyrus.” Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.

Wolf recounts the early history of reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes. For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in connecting to language centers that handled its meaning.

In the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians developed cuneiform, and the Egyptians hieroglyphs. Both scripts began with pictures of things, such as a beetle or a hand, and then some of these symbols developed more abstract meanings, representing ideas in some cases and sounds in others. Readers had to recognize hundreds of symbols, some of which could stand for either a word or a sound, an ambiguity that probably slowed down decoding. Under this heavy cognitive burden, Wolf imagines, the Sumerian reader’s brain would have behaved the way modern brains do when reading Chinese, which also mixes phonetic and ideographic elements and seems to stimulate brain activity in a pattern distinct from that of people reading the Roman alphabet. Frontal regions associated with muscle memory would probably also have gone to work, because the Sumerians learned their characters by writing them over and over, as the Chinese do today.

Complex scripts like Sumerian and Egyptian were written only by scribal élites. A major breakthrough occurred around 750 B.C.E., when the Greeks, borrowing characters from a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician, developed a writing system that had just twenty-four letters. There had been scripts with a limited number of characters before, as there had been consonants and even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it. The classicist Eric A. Havelock believed that the alphabet changed “the character of the Greek consciousness.”

Wolf doesn’t quite second that claim. She points out that it is possible to read efficiently a script that combines ideograms and phonetic elements, something that many Chinese do daily. The alphabet, she suggests, entailed not a qualitative difference but an accumulation of small quantitative ones, by helping more readers reach efficiency sooner. “The efficient reading brain,” she writes, “quite literally has more time to think.” Whether that development sparked Greece’s flowering she leaves to classicists to debate, but she agrees with Havelock that writing was probably a contributive factor, because it freed the Greeks from the necessity of keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, memorized.

The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar media are taking us into an era of “secondary orality,” akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text. If so, it is worth trying to understand how different primary orality must have been from our own mind-set. Havelock theorized that, in ancient Greece, the effort required to preserve knowledge colored everything. In Plato’s day, the word mimesis referred to an actor’s performance of his role, an audience’s identification with a performance, a pupil’s recitation of his lesson, and an apprentice’s emulation of his master. Plato, who was literate, worried about the kind of trance or emotional enthrallment that came over people in all these situations, and Havelock inferred from this that the idea of distinguishing the knower from the known was then still a novelty. In a society that had only recently learned to take notes, learning something still meant abandoning yourself to it. “Enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity,” he wrote.

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:

Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.

Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

In the nineteen-seventies, the psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole tried to replicate Luria’s findings among the Vai, a rural people in Liberia. Since some Vai were illiterate, some were schooled in English, and others were literate in the Vai’s own script, the researchers hoped to be able to distinguish cognitive changes caused by schooling from those caused specifically by literacy. They found that English schooling and English literacy improved the ability to talk about language and solve logic puzzles, as literacy had done with Luria’s peasants. But literacy in Vai script improved performance on only a few language-related tasks. Scribner and Cole’s modest conclusion—“Literacy makes some difference to some skills in some contexts”—convinced some people that the literate mind was not so different from the oral one after all. But others have objected that it was misguided to separate literacy from schooling, suggesting that cognitive changes came with the culture of literacy rather than with the mere fact of it. Also, the Vai script, a syllabary with more than two hundred characters, offered nothing like the cognitive efficiency that Havelock ascribed to Greek. Reading Vai, Scribner and Cole admitted, was “a complex problem-solving process,” usually performed slowly.

Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

Upon reaching classical Greece, Wolf abandons history, because the Greeks’ alphabet-reading brains probably resembled ours, which can be readily put into scanners. Drawing on recent imaging studies, she explains in detail how a modern child’s brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with “Mother Goose” poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller.

At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts. Instead of passing along a “dorsal route” through occipital, temporal, and parietal regions in both hemispheres, reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,” which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.” Imaging studies suggest that in many cases of dyslexia the right hemisphere never disengages, and reading remains effortful.

In a recent book claiming that television and video games were “making our minds sharper,” the journalist Steven Johnson argued that since we value reading for “exercising the mind,” we should value electronic media for offering a superior “cognitive workout.” But, if Wolf’s evidence is right, Johnson’s metaphor of exercise is misguided. When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”

Wolf has little to say about the general decline of reading, and she doesn’t much speculate about the function of the brain under the influence of television and newer media. But there is research suggesting that secondary orality and literacy don’t mix. In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement “The presentation was interesting,” and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement “I did not learn anything from this presentation.” The silent readers remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.

The antagonism between words and moving images seems to start early. In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a child’s development. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found “little room for doubt” that television worsened performance in reading, science, and math. The relationship wasn’t a straight line but “an inverted check mark”: a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed that the younger children were watching educational shows, and, indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches “Sesame Street” is likely to have higher grades even in high school. Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels. The alternative is that we are nearing the end of a pendulum swing, and that reading will return, driven back by forces as complicated as those now driving it away.

But if the change is permanent, and especially if the slide continues, the world will feel different, even to those who still read. Because the change has been happening slowly for decades, everyone has a sense of what is at stake, though it is rarely put into words. There is something to gain, of course, or no one would ever put down a book and pick up a remote. Streaming media give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them. “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium,” Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in 1967. Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and they give us the impression that we know more about her health and mood, too. The viewer may not catch all the details of a candidate’s health-care plan, but he has a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and his response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been mysterious.

Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality, and, as in Plato’s day, the solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession. “Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement,” in McLuhan’s words. The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.

And he may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose. ♦

Life repeated, Life repeated, Life...

The New York Times
July 2, 2006

Déjà Vu, Again and Again

By EVAN RATLIFF

Correction Appended

Pat Shapiro is a vibrant woman of 77, with silver hair, animated blue eyes and a certain air of elegance about her. She lives with her husband, Don, in a white two-story Colonial in Dover, Mass., a picturesque town set on the Charles River east of Boston. After 56 years of marriage, Pat and Don have a playful repartee that borders on "Ozzie and Harriet," and her still-sharp mind is on display in their running banter. "Don, we haven't had an 'icebox' in years," she'll say, interrupting one of his winding stories. "It's called a refrigerator."

Her short-term memory isn't quite what it used to be, she says, but it's nothing that impacts her life. "Her long-term memory is meticulous," Don says. "She can remember details from our trips to Europe years ago that I can't."

One day last December, however, an odd thing happened to Pat Shapiro. She was sitting in a car outside of a store with her daughter Susan, while another daughter, Allison, shopped inside. From the front seat Pat noticed a woman who seemed intensely familiar getting into a nearby car with a baby. "I saw her last time I was here," Pat remarked. "That baby did that exact same thing."

Looking up, Susan thought the comment strange; it seemed odd even that her mother had been to this store recently. Then Pat noticed another woman, smoking and chatting on a cellphone. "There's that woman who was smoking a cigarette, with the scarf on," she said.

This time, Susan protested. "Ma, the chances of the other woman, who doesn't know that woman, coming to the parking lot, smoking a cigarette —"

"No, they were there last time," Pat insisted. She couldn't place when exactly she'd been there before, but she felt positive she'd seen the women.

Allison returned, and as they left, Pat noticed two nuns on the sidewalk. They, too, she said, had certainly been there before.

"Mom, are you O.K.?" Susan asked.

"I feel fine," Pat replied.

Worried, Susan called her father later that day and asked if Pat had ever claimed to recognize strange people or places. "Oh, it happens every once in a while," he said. Susan asked if the episodes bothered him. "Only when she is determined to make me think that something has gone on that way," he said.

Later, though, Pat admitted to Susan that she was having such experiences frequently. As often as several times a day, in fact, she was struck with what sounded to Susan like an intense sensation of déjà vu, a familiarity with a place or situation that — logically, at least — she couldn't have encountered before. She would claim to recognize details of restaurants she'd never been to, and occasionally greeted total strangers as if she'd met them before. To Pat, in such moments, the familiarity didn't feel like déjà vu. It just felt like a memory. Like reality.

Take a moment to remember what happened during your day yesterday. Images and sounds begin to flash through your mind: people you spoke to, places you went, meals you ate. One scene cues up another, leading you on vivid tangents as you cycle through the day. Now ask yourself: how do you know that you are remembering those images as they happened, not altering or inventing them? The question sounds inane at first; you were there, after all. But what is it about those images that makes them authentic to you? Try inserting a completely false memory into your day, say that of running into a celebrity. You can picture it, sure, but it doesn't feel real. Why not?

Memory, like most systems we depend on continually, tends to fade into the background when it's working properly. Only when it fails or misleads us do we begin to ponder its mechanisms. The structure of memory has for centuries been one of psychology's most intractable mysteries. To the extent that science claimed to understand it at all, memory was seen as a kind of filing cabinet in which recollections were neatly stored, retrieved on demand and occasionally misplaced.

The research of the last three decades, however, has shattered that metaphor. The Canadian cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving struck a significant blow in the 1970's, when he postulated a distinction between episodic memories — our recollections about our own experiences — and semantic ones, involving facts and concepts. Knowing the capital of France is a semantic memory, for example; recalling your trip to Paris, an episodic one. When we access episodic memories, Tulving further observed, we don't just call up raw information. We actually re-experience the events themselves, and that feeling of recollection is part of what tells us that the memory is real. "Remembering," Tulving summarized in 1983, "is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past."

Tulving and a group of fellow cognitive scientists — aided by advances in neuroimaging technology — began to tease apart the relationships between recollection and consciousness. They showed episodic memories to be a product of a complex network of signals, scattered across the brain and then reassembled, ad hoc, when the moment arises. Some of those signals, centered in an area of the brain's temporal lobes called the hippocampus, are now thought to be vital in creating the recollective experience that Tulving described.

Simultaneously, psychologists began to demonstrate the myriad ways in which memories can and do go wrong — not only when we forget, but also when we incorporate distorted or false information. At the University of California at Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus conducted an important series of studies in the 1990's, in response to a wave of "recovered memory" child-abuse cases, showing that false memories could be induced in research subjects. In 1995, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrated that people who were read a list of words like bed, rest, awake, dream, wake and slumber, when tested later, would often definitively remember hearing the word sleep. Research into post-traumatic stress disorder found that PTSD sufferers can be tortured by distorted memories of traumatic events. All of this work converges today on an ominous question: How is it we can be fooled by memories that are simply wrong? The answer lies not necessarily in the content of our memories but in the experience of reassembling and recalling them.

One way to try to understand that experience is by examining memory's tricks and illusions. "Memory doesn't just depend on a storehouse of knowledge, like putting cherries in a bowl and pulling out a cherry for each memory," says Morris Moscovitch, a prominent episodic-memory researcher at the University of Toronto. "What these unusual cases do is draw your attention to something that we only get a hint of in real life. This is a philosophical conundrum that has been struggled over for centuries: how is it that we distinguish ongoing experience from memory, and waking experience from dreams?"

Pat's daughter Susan began to scour the Internet, looking for information about her mother's repeated déjà vu episodes. She eventually came across the work of Chris Moulin, a neuropsychologist at Leeds University, in England. Moulin and several colleagues had published two scientific papers describing something they called persistent "déjà vécu" — literally translated, the feeling of having "already lived through" something. The cases seemed to match Pat's condition, and Susan sent Moulin an e-mail message asking for help.

Chris Moulin's office is located on the top floor of the psychology department at Leeds, in an oddly asymmetrical brick building at the center of campus. The room is cramped but spare, with a small collection of books in one corner, a pair of soccer cleats stashed under a chair and a set of framed Tintin cartoons on the wall. Moulin is 32 years old, with red, close-cropped hair, a matching beard and glasses and a penchant for jeans and sneakers. Today he's one of only a handful of scientists studying déjà vu-like illusions, but like most of us, he once thought of déjà vu as just an occasional, odd event in his own life. Translated literally from the French as "already seen," déjà vu can be, for some people, a strange and unsettling experience; for others, thrilling or even spiritual. Occurring at seemingly random times, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, it often comes with a feeling of approaching premonition. Not only does the situation feel familiar, but a vision of the future also seems just beyond the searchlights of your conscious mind.

The accepted scientific definition of déjà vu, put forth in 1983 by a Seattle-based psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe, is "any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past." Beyond the definition, however, the scientific understanding of this "inappropriate familiarity" remains murky. Religion and parapsychology have offered their own explanations, citing déjà vu as evidence for everything from clairvoyance to past lives. Because the phenomenon is difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a laboratory, though, researchers like Moulin have traditionally had limited means to dispel the conventional wisdom. At the beginning of his career, he says, "I didn't know anything about déjà vu, and it didn't really interest me."

In December 2000, Moulin was a postdoctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Bristol, working at a memory clinic in a hospital nearby in Bath, when he received a strange referral letter from a local doctor. It described an 80-year-old Polish immigrant whose wife said that he was suffering from "frequent sensations of déjà vu." The doctor had suggested to the man — a former engineer identified by his initials, A.K.P. — that he set up an initial appointment at the memory clinic. A.K.P. responded that he had already gone and didn't see the point of going back. The problem was, as the doctor knew, he hadn't actually ever been there.

Intrigued, Moulin started visiting A.K.P. and his wife at home. "He was very witty and articulate, able to look after himself," Moulin recalls. But A.K.P.'s wife was frustrated by his déjà vu, and he experienced other mental problems, including memory loss and confabulation, the use of subconsciously invented stories to cover memory deficits. His déjà vu episodes seemed to be "practically constant," as Moulin and colleagues outlined in a 2005 paper in the journal Neuropsychologia:

He refused to read the newspaper or watch television because he said he had seen it before. However, A.K.P. remained insightful about his difficulties: when he said he had seen a program before and his wife asked him what happened next, he replied, "How should I know, I have a memory problem!" The sensation. . .was extremely prominent when he went for a walk — A.K.P. complained that it was the same bird in the same tree singing the same song.. . .When shopping, A.K.P. would say that it was unnecessary to purchase certain items, because he had bought the item the day before.

Searching the modern scientific literature, Moulin found one case that echoed A.K.P.'s, that of an 87-year-old woman, who, according to a brief journal article from 2001, "reported that she was continuously reliving the past and felt that a significant part of her daily experiences had happened before." Moulin's mentor, Martin Conway, a pioneer in the understanding of episodic memory, also recalled a paper by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter in the mid-1990's. Schacter had described B.G., a man in his 60's, who claimed to recognize people and situations he'd never encountered.

Those cases persuaded Moulin that A.K.P. was more than an anomaly, and the clinic began sending him any patients with conditions that sounded similar. A month later, a referral letter arrived for M.A., a 70-year-old woman with what the doctor described as pervasive déjà vu. M.A. also found newspapers and television overwhelmingly familiar, and had even quit playing tennis, claiming that she knew the outcome of every rally. Moulin quickly discovered that in contrast to ordinary déjà vu experiences, in which the sensation instantly seems misplaced, neither A.K.P. nor M.A. recognized that something odd was happening. To them, the experiences simply felt like memories. "When we have déjà vu, we don't act on it," Moulin says. "But these people refused to watch television, they stopped reading the newspaper." The patients were what cognitive scientists call "anosagnosic" — unaware of their condition. They also found situations to be more than just familiar; they believed that they were really recalling them, so much so that they invented memories to justify that belief. They were, to use Tulving's phrase, time traveling to a reality that had never existed.

The history of déjà vu is as much a literary tale as it is a scientific one. Writers and poets have long proved more astute observers of it than scientists, and mentions of déjà vu-like sensations date to St. Augustine, who wrote of "falsae memoriae" in A.D. 400. Sir Walter Scott described it as "a sense of pre-existence," and Dickens, Tolstoy and Proust each explored it in prose.

Among scientists, déjà vu has traveled under a variety of names, including "paramnesia" and "phantasms of memory." The first flurry of research on the topic occurred in France in the 1890's, when prominent psychologists debated fine distinctions between various paramnesias. At a scientific meeting in 1896, the neurologist F. L. Arnaud proposed that scientists unify their descriptions under a single term, "déjà vu." He also recounted the unusual case of Louis, a 34-year-old who had recovered from cerebral malaria. Louis, as the Cambridge psychiatrist German Berrios wrote in a summary of Arnaud's work, "showed 'the first symptoms characteristic of déjà vu' when he started claiming that he could recognize certain newspaper articles that he said he had read previously." Louis felt that he "recognized" nearly every experience, a sensation he described as "I am living in two parallel years." Arnaud even took Louis to a funeral (Louis Pasteur's, as it happened) to see if he would claim to have remembered it. He did.

With the rise of behaviorism in the 20th century, déjà vu research largely faded into obscurity. Freud postulated that the sensation was caused by the similarity of a present situation to a suppressed fantasy but declared the phenomenon too confusing to investigate. What studies have been done rely on questionnaires about past déjà vu experiences. Such surveys show that between 30 and 90 percent of people experience déjà vu at some point in their lifetime. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University and the author of "The Déjà Vu Experience," the most comprehensive book on the topic, pegs the proportion at about two-thirds of the population.

Researchers suggest that déjà vu isn't experienced until the age of 8 or 9 at the earliest, indicating that the phenomenon may require a certain level of brain development to either experience or describe. But once déjà vu begins, it becomes more frequent through our teens and 20's, and is more likely to happen when we are tired or stressed. Surveys show that the episodes then decline with age, although scientists are uncertain why — and the experience of Moulin's patients demonstrates that sometimes the condition actually increases in old age.

In his book, Brown identifies as many as 30 plausible scientific explanations for the phenomenon, divided into "dual processing," "neurological," "memory" and "double perception" theories. Dual-processing explanations assert, essentially, that two normally separate brain processes are activated at wrong times. Imagine two heads of a tape player, one recording memory and the other playing it back. If the brain begins playing back while it's recording, the present might feel like a memory. Neurological explanations involve small electrical signals gone awry. If two signals carry information from the senses to the brain, the theory goes, a delay in the second signal might cause it to feel like a memory.

So-called memory explanations involve the brain's misunderstanding a similarity between the present situation and an actual, true memory. Encountering a chair that resembles one from your grandmother's living room, for example, could trigger a feeling that a new place is somehow familiar. Under "double perception" explanations, finally, the brain is momentarily distracted after it has already taken in part of a scene. When its attention returns to the scene fractions of a second later, it suddenly feels like a memory.

There's no guarantee that all déjà vu episodes have a single cause, and several of Brown's categories overlap. He says that, as with a condition like a stomachache, he "could easily be comfortable with four or five mechanisms." The essential feature in any déjà vu theory, though, is explaining the sensation. After all, déjà vu is much more than just familiarity. "You probably came into my office and thought, I've seen a desk lamp a bit like that," Moulin told me. "But it doesn't give you anything like déjà vu. You just think, Ah, yes, that's familiar. There's no startling sensation."

It was precisely that startling sensation that A.K.P. and M.A. seemed to lack during their déjà vu-like experiences. Moulin and Conway concluded that the patients must not be experiencing ordinary sensations of déjà vu, but what the researchers termed persistent déjà vécu. Their hypothesis rested on the understanding, established in the wake of Tulving's research, that episodic memories consist of two aspects: the information content, or "memory trace," and an accompanying experience of recollection. It's that experience, a little bit of consciousness attached to a memory, that lets us know that we are calling up something from the past. If someone experienced that feeling constantly, without any memory trace attached, they would feel — as Conway describes it — as if they were "remembering the present." In other words, déjà vécu.

Moulin set up a series of experiments to test the theory. In one, A.K.P., M.A. and 19 control subjects were shown a series of photos, some of random people and others of well-known celebrities. Later they were shown another series, containing a mixture of the old photos and new ones, and asked if each photo pictured either a famous person or someone they had been shown before. In another, subjects were read a series of words, followed by a mixture of those same words and new ones, and then asked which they had heard previously. The results were what Moulin had expected: compared with the control subjects, M.A. and A.K.P.'s false-positive rates were off the charts. They nearly always claimed to recognize faces and words they hadn't seen or heard. More important, they claimed not only to find the pictures and words familiar but also to actually remember seeing them. Often they even confabulated stories to justify those recollections. A.K.P. claimed that one random face was that of a local painter. "I know," he said, "because his tie is lower than it should be."

Brain scans of A.K.P. and M.A. revealed abnormal levels of atrophy, or cell death, in their temporal lobes. Moulin knew that epileptics whose seizures are centered in their temporal lobes often experience a minutes-long "dreamy state" similar to déjà vu prior to their seizures. Moulin and Conway concluded that their patients' déjà vécu was similarly located in the temporal lobes, in a "recollective experience circuit" that regulates the process of remembering. If the circuit was "continuously active," it would keep feeding the brain that feeling of recollection, without any real memory attached.

Could ordinary déjà vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering? "Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is separate from memory," Moulin told me. "If his can go chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong."

After hearing Pat Shapiro's story from Susan, I visited the Shapiros at their home in Dover. Pat warmly ushered me inside, and we sat in the couple's formal living room. She told me that her déjà vécu-like experiences started in the last two years, coming and going with no apparent pattern. Once, a nurse had come to the house to conduct a physical for insurance purposes. "The first thing I said," Pat told me, "was: 'So nice to see you! I haven't seen you in a long time!' " She laughed — as she did following a half-dozen other such tales — recalling that only later did she realize she'd never met the woman before. Generally, she said, such episodes didn't bother her.

I heard markedly similar accounts from a college counselor in Glasgow, Scotland, named Pam. Two years ago, Pam's 82-year-old mother began saying that the BBC was repeating television programs. She even called a repairman to examine her set. Soon she was complaining about the newspaper and eventually all kinds of situations. The week before I met with Pam at her office in Glasgow, she and her mother had been sitting in a cafe when a child began crying. "Mum said, 'She's always here, and always crying,' " Pam said. "I let it go, because I know it's not the case, and we go to the same place every week."

Like Pat, Pam's mother is in otherwise good health. "It's sad and frustrating, because I can't do anything for her," Pam said. "The only thing that I can do is research it and tell her that she is not the only one." Like Pat's daughter Susan, Pam found Moulin's papers and corresponded with him. Both women said that talking to their mothers about the research seemed to reduce both mother's and daughter's anxiety.

Moulin regularly receives e-mail messages from people experiencing something like déjà vécu, or from their relatives. The stories themselves begin to take on a familiar ring: the woman who turned in her library card because she felt she'd read everything on the shelves, the man on his first trip to Paris who felt he'd been to every part of the city. Moulin says there may be many other persistent déjà vécu sufferers, afraid to tell their doctors for fear of sounding crazy. The Bath clinic alone has found six new patients for a continuing study.

When it comes to linking those patients to run-of-the-mill déjà vu, however, Moulin's work is not without objections from the small community of researchers with an enduring interest in the subject. The psychiatrist Vernon Neppe, founder of the Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute, says that he believes that Moulin's patients are not actually experiencing déjà vécu, claiming that they don't conform with the definition of déjà vu, of which déjà vécu is a subset. "The Moulin research is difficult because there is so much confabulation," he told me. "It's a different type of inappropriate familiarity."

Moulin says that he now regrets initially using the term déjà vu to describe the patients, as opposed to déjà vécu, the "ongoing" and "chronic" sensation. Still, he says, "That's what people come to their doctor and say: their husband or wife has got permanent déjà vu." Firmly establishing the experience of recollection that his patients exhibit, he says, will provide the theoretical underpinning for explanations of déjà vu — regardless of whether it is a real fragment of memory or a purely neurological glitch that sets it off.

Another objection comes from Art Funkhouser, a psychologist based in Switzerland who conducts déjà vu research and from whom Moulin and Conway borrowed the term déjà vécu. Funkhouser, who is currently analyzing data from a thousand respondents to an online déjà vu questionnaire, has complained to Moulin that using the word "chronic" will stigmatize déjà vu as a disease rather than a quirk of the human mind. "The people he is dealing with are being affected by various forms of dementia," he says. "I just wish that he would be a bit careful in how he talks about it, so that he doesn't give the impression that anybody who has this must be sick."

Moulin and Conway say that the sensation of memory that déjà vécu so aptly illustrates is just one of many "cognitive feelings," sensations that help us prioritize and act on our own thoughts. When those feelings go awry, they produce strange sensations. His latest experiments are designed to induce jamais vu — translated literally as "never seen" — the feeling that something familiar seems alien. Or take the aha! moment, a feeling you get upon solving a complicated problem. Aha! moments, which a team of researchers recently traced to activity in the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain, help us recognize a flash of insight. When we get the same feeling of insight without actually solving anything, we experience what's called presque vu, or "almost seen" — a misplaced sensation that everything makes sense. "I remember having it for cleaning my teeth," Moulin recalls, "thinking, Ah, yes, at the end of every day I clean my teeth! That just seems to have import. Like all life is cleaning teeth."

Trivial as they may sound, such cognitive feelings often guide our behavior, and glitches in them can have profound consequences. In his 2001 book, "The Seven Sins of Memory," the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter explores the phenomenon of "misattributed memory," in which you remember some aspect of an event correctly but mistakenly recall the origin of the memory. Misattributions, says Schacter, "have been involved in a number of cases of wrongful conviction of individuals based on eyewitness testimony." The same subjective feeling of memory that led A.K.P. to believe his déjà vécu was real can trick eyewitnesses into believing flawed identifications, or fool research subjects into believing induced memories.

Conway also studies PTSD, in which patients are tortured by traumatic memories that may be laced with distortions that can serve to compound feelings of guilt and helplessness. Accident victims might distinctly remember a moment in which they could have turned the car just to the left and avoided a collision, even if such a moment never occurred. "The recollective experience is the glue that sticks this all together," Moulin says. "People don't think they are making up these images. They think they are remembering them." Cognitive therapists, by understanding the recollective experience evidenced by déjà vécu, may be able to help persuade such patients that many of their negative images aren't real. The same is true for obsessive-compulsive disorder. "In order to cure those people, you have to train them about their memory," Moulin says. "They keep going back and checking the door, for instance, because they don't remember well enough having locked it. You have to say: 'Well, your memory isn't like that. It's just not that good.' " In other words, there's a limit to what you can expect from your memory.

All of which naturally raises the question: Why are humans cursed with such imperfect memories? "Human cognition is incredibly, incredibly complicated," Conway says, "and you are bound to get glitches along the way. The question really is, How costly are those glitches? In terms of survival, having experiences of déjà vu now and again probably isn't such a big deal. But if you have a déjà vu all the time, then, like A.K.P., you can't operate effectively in the world."

Such small glitches might even have proved evolutionarily valuable, giving us insight into our own minds. "One of the things about déjà vu in your daily life," Conway says, "is it does leave you wondering for about three weeks afterward what happened." Ordinary déjà vu is so striking precisely because our intellect is fighting against the feeling of recollection. "It's an immutable feeling," Moulin says, "but it's not immune to reason."

Salman Rushdie once observed that memory has its "own special kind" of truth. "It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also," he wrote in "Midnight's Children," "but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own." To what extent persistent déjà vécu itself constitutes a challenge to a person's sanity, or even counts as a disorder, seems to vary. A.K.P. and M.A. eventually withdrew from the world, stopped watching television or even leaving their homes. But they also suffered from other age-related cognitive disorders. Moulin is still seeking an effective treatment for such patients, as both anti-Alzheimer's and antipsychotic drugs have shown no effect. But he suspects that the condition could be helped by therapeutic techniques. Preparing déjà vécu patients for novel situations they are about to encounter, he says, could actually help reduce the feeling that they've already experienced them.

Ordinary déjà vu, of course, isn't a disease, and even déjà vécu-like conditions seem to vary in severity. "I think the persistent or continuous déjà vu that Moulin is looking at is found in people with normal function who are not disturbed or out of mainstream," Alan Brown says.

Pat Shapiro, to all appearances, is such a person. She lives a rich life, her mind intact, and she claims to be mostly unbothered by her condition. Her daughter Susan worries that the episodes tire her mother out, as she tries to puzzle out when she has been somewhere or met someone in the past. Mostly, the family tries to laugh about the incidents. "We're lucky that she can have a sense of humor about it," Susan says.

One afternoon in Dover, in the midst of relating her déjà vu experiences, Pat Shapiro paused and took off her glasses, looking at me intently. "I have to say, you look so much like my grandson," she said. "He has a little bit longer hair, but you look so similar. When I saw you get out of the car I just thought, Oh!"

"But wait," I asked, "couldn't that have just been a déjà vu?"

"No, it was just that you looked so much like him," she said. My face must have betrayed a hint of skepticism, and she quickly moved on.

Don came in a few minutes later, and soon he, too, paused. "I have to tell you one other thing," he said. "You look so much like our grandson, it's amazing." I looked at Pat, who smiled knowingly. Later, at Susan's house, she showed me a photo of the grandson in question. It was like seeing an image of myself, from a time that never happened.

Evan Ratliff is a writer in San Francisco and the co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World." This is his first article for the magazine.

Correction: July 16, 2006 An article on July 2 about déjà vécu, a syndrome that causes a feeling similar to déjà vu, misstated the location of the city where one woman who suffers from it lives. Dover, Mass., is southwest of Boston, not east.