At least once in his life, every person has experienced déjà vu - the feeling that what happens to him has already happened once. What is the reason for this strange phenomenon? Nobody knows the exact answer to this question, but some ideas still exist.
SOMETHING IN MY MEMORY BECAME
Deja vu is a feeling familiar to many of us. If you believe the dispassionate statistics, 97% of healthy people experience this feeling at least once in their life, and patients with epilepsy are much more often.
The relationship between déjà vu and the level of education of a person has been experimentally proven.
The dependence is directly proportional: the higher the level of intelligence, the less a person is insured against such a condition. The lowest level of déjà vu (48%) was recorded in primary school children. The highest (81%) - among doctors and candidates of science.
Once, finding ourselves in a completely unfamiliar place, we suddenly realize that we have already visited it. When, under what circumstances? Not everyone can answer these questions, therefore déjà vu is characterized by an acute feeling of anxiety and confusion. For example, you were invited to visit a new place.
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You travel for two whole hours in the metro to the other end of the city, get off at a new station, rise to the surface and understand: you have already been here once! Here is the bank's office, here is the familiar ice cream tent, and here on the high-rise building there is a huge billboard with an advertisement for a car you have long dreamed of.
But you never know similar places in the metropolis ?! That's how it is, only here she is - a grandmother in a flowered kerchief and a plaid coat, selling dried porcini mushrooms on a string. You have already seen her just here!
The state of déjà vu is like re-reading a long-read book or watching a movie that you have already watched but completely forgot what it was about. The impression of déjà vu is sometimes so strong that it remains in our memory for years. But no matter how hard we try, the memories of the events that have already occurred cannot be restored.
OUT OF THE HEAD?
Sometimes déja vu is confused with ordinary forgetfulness. It is quite possible that the person ended up in a familiar place, but last time he did not pay attention to him, although some details of the situation were still recorded in his memory.
Sometimes such forgetfulness has a banal explanation. As part of a large delegation, a person found himself in a country hotel at an offsite corporate event.
Among those invited was one red-haired person whom he remembered. She, for example, stood out in that she laughed the loudest. A long time passed, and suddenly he hears a familiar laugh in the restaurant, in confusion begins to look around and sees that a blonde is sitting at the other end of the hall and laughing wildly.
The man understands that he sees this woman for the first time in his life, but an inner voice tells that he is familiar with her. It can not be so! In fact, the blonde from the restaurant and the red-haired beast are cousins, about which our hero does not know, does not know. But an attack of déja vu is guaranteed to him.
A place that seems painfully familiar to us, we could see in early childhood, in photographs, on TV, or someone talked about it in detail. A few years ago, a curious case was discussed in blogs and in newspapers. An American with his family went on an excursion to Fort Laramie (Wyoming).
Since 1938, the fort has been part of the system of national parks, and during the Civil War between North and South it was considered an important strategic point. It was here that peace was signed with the Indians. Tourists are frequent guests in this place, but that same American was here for the first time. However, as he wandered through the tourist sites, he had a sense of déjà vu.
He knew the layout of the fort like the back of his hand. And before the guide had time to open his mouth, the American told the family the purpose of this or that room. The secret was revealed in the souvenir shop: the man saw there the book "Queen of Bedlam" by Robert McCammon, which he had read for a long time, but had forgotten about it. The novel is set at Fort Laramie. The writer did a great job, painting interiors and surroundings, and the reader, apparently, had an enviable imagination and memory.
GAMES OF SUBCONSCIOUSNESS
The term "déjà vu" was coined by the French psychologist Emile Bouarak at the end of the 19th century, who used this expression in his book "Psychology of the Future". Translated from French, it means "already seen". The psychologist was completing the last year of the university and was enthusiastically engaged in research not only deja vu, but also related concepts: deja vechu (already experienced), deja enttendu (already heard) and zhame vu (never seen ").
Buarak relied on facts known from ancient times, because the effect of déjà vu was described by ancient authors. Thus, Aristotle was the first to associate the phenomenon of déjà vu with a mental disorder. Much later, such celebrities as Chateaubriand, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Clifford Simak, Leo Tolstoy mentioned him. At first, scientists did not pay attention to the work of Bouarak, but it was impossible to write off a huge number of cases for mental disorders, and the phenomenon was finally assigned an official name.
Sigmund Freud, of course, could not ignore such a phenomenon as déjà vu. In his opinion, this is nothing more than a subconscious memory of a real, but traumatic experience that could have occurred in the past.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the famous scientist describes his understanding of déjà vu on the example of a girl who, having come to her friend in the village (a friend has a sick brother), catches herself thinking that this has already happened.
However, a simple analysis of her life gives us an understanding that the girl does not remember this place, but her sick brother, the memory of which she drove as deeply as possible into the subconscious. Freud would not be Freud if he did not connect the phenomenon of déjà vu with instincts and taboos. Here is an excerpt from his book: “The feeling of“already experienced”is a kind of reminder of the secret fantasies of man. A signal that we are touching something desirable and forbidden at the same time."
Note that Freud's disciple and opponent, Gustav Jung, considered déjà vu to be evidence of the transmigration of souls and a person's experience of the experience of his past lives. This statement is a balm for the souls of all who adhere to the idea of reincarnation! By the way, these thoughts were shared by the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras assured that he could remember fragments of his previous lives. Plato echoed him: his theory of anamnesis is nothing more than a "theory of remembering," since the soul retains the memory of its past incarnations.
French philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson defined déjà vu as "a memory of the present." In his opinion, the perception of reality at this moment suddenly bifurcates and is partly, as it were, transferred to the past.
PROGRAM FAILURE
How do modern scientists relate to déjà vu? On this score, there are several scientific views trying to explain this phenomenon.
Deja vu appears when the normal functioning of two separate, but interacting processes of perception and processing of external information - memorization and recall - is disturbed.
These two processes normally work in concert, but sometimes they fail, and then one of the processes can be activated in the absence of the other. If the brain does not find impressions similar to the current ones in its "card index", then it begins to produce a false sensation, presenting the new as familiar.
The latest curious research in this direction was carried out by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They concluded that déjà vu originates in the temporal lobe of the brain, the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. This department searches for analogies in memory and finds differences between similar images.
Thanks to the hippocampus, we are able to distinguish the past from the present, and the already seen from the new. However, if a malfunction occurs in the work of this brain department, in a tiny fraction of a second the seen image falls into the center of memory, and then a new request from the hippocampus arrives there: is something similar stored in memory?
The brain immediately gives out a memory that has not yet cooled down, which is perceived as something from an indefinite past. In other words, we do not notice that we see something for the first time two whole times instead of one, since we do not remember the first session. The hippocampus can be disrupted in a similar way as a result of stress, fatigue, adverse environmental conditions (heat, cold, atmospheric pressure), as well as in a state of depression and due to various diseases.
Psychiatrists have noticed that people with epilepsy often say that they are experiencing déjà vu before a seizure. Similar sensations, according to scientists, can also be experienced by people suffering from disorders of the central nervous system, but to a much lesser extent than epileptics.
Déjà vu in this case can become a symptom of an impending severe disease. However, while this is only a theory, therefore, having experienced déjà vu, do not rush to consider yourself a sick person.
Oksana VOLKOVA