Deja vu is an unexplained mental phenomenon

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In everyday life, sometimes something amazing happens to many people: when they first find themselves in a certain environment or situation, they feel that all this has already happened to them once. Déjà vu takes place - a phenomenon that neither psychologists nor mystics can explain to this day.

Denial of reality

Although the state of deja vu (from the French deja vu - "already seen") was first described at the end of the 19th century, it still remains one of the mysteries of human nature today. Déjà vu cannot be induced artificially, because to this day it is not clear why it occurs.

Therefore, medical research of this phenomenon is associated with great difficulties. Meanwhile, 97% of the world's population has experienced déjà vu at least once in their lives. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that at the moment of an episode of false memory, a person, as it were, denies objective reality, perceives it as something vague and obscure, instead plunging into the world of his own subconscious.

Since the time of Freud, scientists have found several more reasons for the emergence of déjà vu. Sometimes it looks like a memory. What a person sees, hears or feels correlates with information that is already in his memory. And then there is a feeling that he was not in the situation for the first time, although this is not at all the case.

It also happens that false memory serves as a signal of increased mental anxiety. Even when receiving completely new information, the brain still sends a signal to a person that he already knows all this, causing additional anxiety.

Déjà vu often happens to people who are prone to distraction. Their subconscious mind captures information so quickly that the brain, busy with something else, simply does not notice it. And when consciousness focuses on the surrounding reality, a person believes that he has already seen all this - since it is so.

However, with too frequent cases of deja vu, especially in the form of hallucinations, psychiatrists consider them an indirect sign of a mental disorder. In epilepsy, a false memory sensation sometimes precedes the onset of the disease. In general, with this ailment, the state of deja vu is much more common than in healthy people.

And in patients with schizophrenia, so-called false memories occur - a condition that is often mistaken for déjà vu and which in fact is not. Doctors strongly recommend that if déjà vu becomes an obsessive condition and interferes with normal life, you must seek medical attention.

At-risk groups

The modern world is no longer inclined to doubt the actual existence of the déjà vu effect. Over the past decades, the number of skeptics who consider false memory to be fiction has decreased from 70% to 40%. The study of this condition is also moving forward, although not as quickly as specialists would like. Scientists managed to establish which social groups are more susceptible to the state of false memory.

According to research results, there are "especially dangerous" age moments for déjà vu, when the risk of its occurrence is greater than at other times.

The first age group is from 16 to 18 years old, when the emotionality of the adolescent psyche, an acute and dramatic reaction to events and a lack of life knowledge provoke an appeal to false experiences from false memory.

The second risk group is people from 35 to 40 years old. The midlife crisis embodies in moments of déjà vu nostalgia for a bygone youth, regret for the events of the past, attempts to go back in time even in thoughts.

This effect occurs due to memory distortion, when the brain does not reproduce real memories, but only their illusion, representing the past years in a perfect light. However, the older a person is, the lower the risk of being in a state of déjà vu.

In addition, those who travel a lot around the world are more likely to have an attack of false memory. Travelers constantly see a huge number of new faces and places, and therefore, having arrived somewhere for the first time, they may well think that they have already met the surrounding landscapes and people.

The possibility of manifestations of déjà vu also depends on the level of education. Experimentally, scientists have found that primary school students and people with low professional qualifications (for example, laborers or farmers) are least likely to be overcome by false memory. And the most extensive group in a déjà vu situation is made up of people with advanced degrees or high-level professionals. Moreover, in women, cases of false memory are much more common than in the stronger sex.

False memory or another life?

Followers of the religions of the East, esotericism and parapsychologists argue that the state of déjà vu comes to people as a memory from their past lives. Some writers and philosophers were inclined to a similar thought. Leo Tolstoy, for example, remembered his past life, painfully hitting his head when falling from a horse while hunting.

At the moment of the blow, according to his own statement, the writer suddenly realized that he had already fallen from a horse in the same way two centuries ago, while being a completely different person. Carl Jung at the age of 12, even before he became the founder of analytical psychology, also faced a memory from a past life.

Once, while visiting, he saw a porcelain figurine of an elderly doctor, wearing massive boots with silver buckles. And the usual buckles shook little Jung to the depths of his soul - he clearly understood that he himself had once worn this particular pair of shoes.

Since then, the boy seemed to accommodate two people at the same time - an insecure schoolboy and a respectable gentleman who lived in the 18th century. This gentleman wore buckled shoes, rode in a large carriage, and held some important position. After such “memories”, Jung maintained throughout his life that déjà vu comes to people from their past lives.

Now some celebrities are absolutely sure that they are not living for the first time. Singer Madonna, finding herself in the imperial palace of Beijing, felt that she knew all its halls and corridors and lived there many centuries ago. Sylvester Stallone is convinced that in ancient times he roamed the steppe with his tribe and was a sentinel in it, warning of the approach of enemies.

Keanu Reeves often mentions in interviews that in a past life he was a ritual dancer in one of the Bangkok temples. The most curious thing is that during hypnosis sessions, which allowed the actors to look into the past, all this information was confirmed.

The clearest and most diverse descriptions of déjà vu are recorded by scientists in India, which is not surprising, because the religious beliefs of the inhabitants of this country include an unshakable belief in an endless series of rebirths. There are many cases of false memory among Indians.

For example, an elderly woman began to speak a language unknown to anyone, and philological experts established that she speaks in one of the outdated dialects of Farsi. Moreover, without even having a secondary education, the woman boldly narrated about her life in the ancient kingdom.

No less interesting is the case of a six-year-old girl who “remembered” that she once lived in another city. When she was brought there, the little girl confidently showed the place where her house stood and described her “parents” in detail. And after interviewing the neighbors, it turned out that in the place indicated by the girl there really was a house where the family she described lived: husband, wife and their little daughter.

According to mystics, the state of déja vu is due to the memory of the soul that accompanies a person in all his incarnations. Memories of past lives, in their opinion, are stored in the solar plexus, they are our subconsciousness, which is able to activate the experience received in one of the reincarnations.

Groundhog Day forever

One of the extreme manifestations of déjà vu is reflected in the Hollywood comedy Groundhog Day, the hero of which has lived the same day over and over again. The adventures of the main character of the film look very funny, but the young Briton, who has found himself in a similar situation these days, is not at all laughing.

The young man was forced to quit his studies at the university and practically dropped out of normal life after a unique case of chronic deja vu happened to him.

The young man had to stop reading books and watching television, attending lectures and even regular communication with friends and family because of the feeling of a continuous repetition of the same events. At the first appointment with a psychologist, the patient announced that he was in a time loop and could not continue to live, because he was stuck in a kind of looped period.

Doctors characterize the young man's mental state, which has been going on for about a decade, as extremely alarming. It was anxiety that caused the young man's first cases of false memory, which at first lasted no more than a minute, and over time became more and more prolonged and intrusive.

In the end, the increasing stress made the Briton's déjà vu effect permanent. Currently, doctors can only observe the course of an unusual ailment, but, unfortunately, they are not able to help their patient. And it is still unknown when scientists will be able to unravel the secret of this mysterious whim of the human brain.

Ekaterina KRAVTSOVA, "Secrets of the XX century" magazine, 2016