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The term "deja vu" often appears in literature, movies, and medicine. It is a kind of paramnesia - a disturbance of memories. It means feeling that a certain situation has been experienced in the past, while knowing that it is possible Is deja vu a natural phenomenon? What is deja vu and what does its frequent occurrence mean?

Deja vu: what does that mean?

Deja vu- this term comes from French and means"already seen" . Indeed, people who experience deja vu, which is, according to scientists, 60 percent of us, have the impression that they have already experienced a given situation, but on the other hand, they realize that it could not be so, because they are, for example, in a given place for the first time.

Deja vu can really cover a wide range of events. A person staying in a restaurant, for example, may suddenly start to think that they have already experienced this situation, and what's more - they may feel that they know exactly what is going to happen in a moment.

Deja vu: how does it work?

Deja vu has some peculiarities, including:

  • sudden onset of the disorder;
  • the phenomenon and accompanying feelings last only a few seconds;
  • it is not possible to specify when in the past a previously experienced event would take place;
  • the memory is about the whole situation, not just one object or person.

Deja vu as a memory disorder

Deja vu is included in theparamnesia , thereforememory disorder . We recognize a given event, place, as something we have already encountered, but we cannot say anything more about it, and the recognition phenomenon is incorrect.

Deja vu is not the only paramnesia known to psychology. Other memory disorders include:

  • Jamais vu- this type of memory disorder can be described as the inverse of deja vu - it occurs when we mistakenly judge a previously known event or place as completely new.
  • Wrong attribution- this is a kind of paramnesia in which we correctly recognize a given situation, but wrongly assign it to a specific person or place. The psychologist Donald Thomson, unjustly accused of rape, found out about it.the exact course of which was given by the victim. Fortunately for the psychologist, he was in the television headquarters at the time of the attack, where he had performed live a short time before. Just before the rape, the victim watched an interview with a psychologist and mistakenly attributed the assault to him.
  • Unconscious plagiarism- we deal with this paramnesia if we recall a given piece of information as ours, without realizing that it was made by another person, e.g. someone else's opinion or lyrics.

Deja vu: reasons

Deja vu still remains a rather mysterious phenomenon, even for scientists. In the ancient past, reincarnation-related phenomena were considered the main cause of this paramnesia. Currently, views on the causes of deja vu are slightly different, but the exact mechanisms of its occurrence are still a mystery.

Below we present the most common theories of scientists on this subject.

Deja vu as a symptom of the disease

Paramnesia can actually occur in anyone, even in a completely he althy person. However, there are some states where deja vu tends to occur more frequently.

The main problems associated with the emergence of paramnesia in patients are neurological diseases. Memory delusions can be part of a migraine aura, but also one of the spectrum of seizure disorders (especially temporal epilepsy).

The term "deja vecu" was first used in 1873 by Paul Verlaine in his poem "Kaleidoscope"

The analysis of deja vu and its causes was de alt with by Sigmund Freud. According to his theory, the psychological mechanisms leading to this paramnesia could be e.g.the occurrence of previously unaware wishesor the fact thatthat a given situation evokes some kind of fantasies in a person .

Research on paramnesia often leads to interesting conclusions. It probably comes as no surprise that scientists have tried to link their occurrence with patients suffering from various mental illnesses.

In the end, it turned out that there is no unequivocal relationship between schizophrenia or anxiety disorders and deja vu …

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2. Transferring the feeling of familiarity from one element to the whole of the situation

The phenomenon of deja vu has been investigated by Dr. Marcin Małecki, a psychologist from SWPS1 . Scientistconducted an experiment on a group of 200 people, which showed that one element known to us is enough to relate this feeling to the whole situation.

The psychologist gives an example of a trip to Bora-Bora: entering a hotel room for the first time on an island where we have never been, we may be convinced that we have visited this place before. How it's possible? It is enough, for example … a lamp standing in the corner, confusingly similar to the one that our grandmother had in her apartment or a picture similar to the picture on the wall seen earlier.

The memory disorder known as deja vu wrote in their novels, among others. Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens.

Similar conclusions were reached by Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University and Alan Brown of Southern Methodist University - they proved that the information we record unknowingly returns later in the form of deja vu. The researchers conducted research among students - they showed them photographs in which they were to find a black or white cross in just one second.

In such a short time, the respondents did not have the opportunity to look at the photos in more detail, although their brains recorded landscapes and university buildings visible in the background. After a week, students were shown photos of the campuses, which were placed in the background of the previously shown photos with crosses.

Students experienced the feeling that they had been there before, recognized it - they experienced deja vu, although they were presented with photographs of university buildings where they had not studied and had not visited before.

3. Deja vu checks our memory

Akira O'Connor is another researcher who has taken a closer look at the phenomenon of deja vu2 . A team led by a scientist has figured out a way to… evoke false memories. First, the person was given a whole list of words related to a specific term, such as "pillow", "quilt", "fatigue", "night", but the word "sleep" was not mentioned, which united all these associations.

Then scientists asked the respondents if they had heard the word "dream" - they answered truthfully that they did not, but perceived this word as familiar, known to them earlier, and experienced deja vu. Scientists also studied how the brain reacts when experiencing deja vu - it turned out that the front part of the brain, which is responsible for our decision-making, was active.

Akira O'Connor formulated the thesis that this part of the brain checks the way our memory functions, while sending a signal about a conflict between what we think we have experienced and the actual experience.

Worth knowing

Deja vu in a blind person

The very name "deja vu" indicates that this feeling is closely related to the sight, and even necessary for its experience. The first theories of scientists even proved that déjà vu arises as a result of unequal (in time) registration by the brain of stimuli reaching the eyes.

On the unconscious level, the brain was supposed to read the image from one eye, and after a few milliseconds - from the other, and hence the feeling that we had seen something before.

This thesis, however, was refuted by the research of the aforementioned Akira O'Connor. The researcher points to the case of a blind man who experienced deja vu through the senses: taste, smell and touch.

For a man, the sound of a zipper recalled a fragment of the music he had heard earlier, and keeping a plate in the canteen - a fragment of a conversation. Therefore, O'Connor proposed the same hypothesis as in the above-mentioned experiment - using deja vu our brain tests how memory works - whether we can see or not.

Deja vu: what does its presence mean?

Based on the studies mentioned above, it cannot be concluded that the frequent occurrence of deja vu, unless associated with migraine aura or epileptic seizures, is a cause for concern.

It is most likely how the brain resolves memory conflicts. However, researchers indicate that deja vu may experience more often:

  • young people,
  • frequent travelers,
  • people who are exhausted and live under long-term stress.

Usually deja vu occurs no more than once a year.

This will be useful to you

Deja vu: interesting facts

  • About deja vu was already discussed in antiquity - they did so, among others. Plato and Socrates, as well as St. Augustine.
  • In the nineteenth century it was claimed that deja vu is to be a trace of our "preexistence" - life in a previous incarnation. This theory was also supposed to explain why children experience deja vu more often than adults - because they would better remember their previous incarnations.
  • According to parapsychologists, through deja we contact extraterrestrials who have all the knowledge about the world.
  • Deja vu is also common in people of different genders and races.
  • Deja vu is not really a cause for concern, but it was not the case in the movie "The Matrix", where it was a disturbing signal that machines were changing their world.

Sources:

  1. Access to information about the study on the website: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/19.04.PR0.116k25w1
  2. Access toinformation about the study at: http://akiraoconnor.org/2016/08/16/this-is-your-brain-on-deja-vu/

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Category:

Psychology