Each of us has heard of such a feeling as deja vu, and most of them have experienced it. Feeling, when you already saw it, was here, talking to someone, it was all already. .. We can recall in detail the rooms in which we had never before been, people we had never met before andthe like. Why is this happening? How does it appear? Many are asked these questions, but the answers to them are still as obscured by the gloom.
Plan of the article:
- Deja vu is. ..
- Deja vu study
- Physiological explanation
- Reincarnation or reboot?
Déjà vu is. ..
For the first time, the term "deja vu"( déjà vu - already seen) was used by the French psychologist Emile Boirec( 1851-1917) in his book The Psychology of the Future. Prior to this, this strange phenomenon was characterized as "false recognition" or "paramnesia"( memory deceptions in the case of a disturbance of consciousness), or "promenezia"( a synonym for deja vu).
There are also several similar phenomena: deja vecu( "already experienced"), deja entendu( "already heard"), jamais vu( "never seen").The opposite effect of deja vu - jamaive, is typical for him when a person does not recognize familiar things. This effect differs from memory loss by the fact that this state comes quite suddenly, for example, your friend during a conversation with you, may suddenly seem to you an absolutely unfamiliar person. All the knowledge that you had about this person simply disappears. But the phenomenon of a jameway is much less common than a deja vu.
Scientists find it difficult to study these effects, because they in turn relate exclusively to human feelings and feelings. From the point of view of physiology, the cause of all these phenomena is in the brain. It is very difficult to experiment in this area, since even the most insignificant interference can make a person disabled, deaf, blind or even worse paralyzed.
The study of "deja vu"
The scientific study of the deja vu phenomenon was not as active. In 1878, a proposal was made in the German psychological journal that the sensations of "what has already been seen" arise when the processes of perception and awareness, which mostly occur simultaneously, in one case or another mismatch, for example, fatigue. This explanation has become one of the sides of the theory, which in turn suggests the cause of the appearance of deja vu in brain congestion. If to say in other words, then deja vu arises in the case when a person is very tired, and in the brain appear peculiar failures.
Judging from the other side of the theory, the effect of deja vu is the result of a good rest of the brain. In this case, the processes occur faster several times. If we are able to process this or that image fairly quickly and easily, our brain, at the subconscious level, interprets this as a signal of what we have already seen. As the American physiologist William H. Burnham wrote in 1889, who was the author of this theory - "when we see a strange object, its unfamiliar appearance is largely due to the difficulty we face when we realize its characteristics. But then, when the think tanks finally rested, the perception of a strange scene may seem so easy that the appearance of the event will seem familiar. "
Later, Sigmund Freud and his followers took up the study of the deja vu effect. The scientist believed that the feeling of "already seen" arises in man as a result of spontaneous resurrection in his immediate memory of subconscious fantasies. As for the followers of Freud, they in turn believed that deja vu is the result of the struggle between the "I" and "It" and "Super-I".
Some people explain their deja vu with the fact that previously unknown places or things they have already seen in a dream. This version is also not excluded by scientists. In 1896, Arthur Allin, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Bulder, advanced the theory that the effect of deja vu was a reminder of fragments of our forgotten dreams. Our emotional reactions to a new image can reproduce a false sense of recognition. The effect of deja vu arises, when our attention is suddenly distracted for a short time during our first acquaintance with a new image.
Also the phenomenon of deja vu is also characterized as a manifestation of false memory, that is, in the work of the brain, and to be more precise, then in certain areas, some failure occurs, and it begins to take the unknown for the known. For so-called false memory, such age periods are characteristic when the activity of this process is expressed most of all - from 16 to 18 and from 35 to 40 years.
The splash during the first period is explained by the emotional expression of the adolescent period, the ability to react too sharply and even dramatically to certain events, for lack of life experience. In this case, a person turns to a fictitious experience for help, receiving it directly from false memory. As for the second peak itself, it, in turn, also falls at a turning point, but this is a mid-life crisis.
At this stage, deja vu is moments of nostalgia, some regrets about the past, a desire to return to the past. Such an effect can also be called a deceptive memory, since memories may not even be real, but supposed, the past is presented as the ideal time when it was still beautiful.
In 1990, a psychiatrist from the Netherlands, Herman Sno, suggested that traces of memory are stored in the human brain in the form of some holograms. The hologram from the photo is distinguished by the fact that each fragment of the hologram carries all the information that is needed to restore the whole image. The smaller the fragment, the correspondingly reproducible picture is vague. According to Sno's theory, the emerging feeling of what has already been seen is obtained when some small detail of the situation is quite close to a fragment of memory, which in turn conjures up an unclear picture of the past event.
Pierre Glouier, a neuropsychiatrist, conducted experiments in the 1990s and persistently insisted that memory uses special systems of "retrieval" and "familiarity."In his work, which was published in 1997, he argued that the phenomenon of deja vu appears in fairly rare moments. When our recognition system is activated, and the recovery system is not. Other scientists insist that the recovery system can not be turned off completely, but it may simply be mismatched, which in turn resembles a fatigue theory that was put forward much earlier.
Physiological explanation of
But, no matter what, scientists were still able to figure out which parts of the brain are involved in the process at the time when a person experiences a sense of deja vu. It is worth noting the fact that different parts of the brain respond directly to different memory options. The frontal part is responsible for the future, temporal for the past, and the main one - the intermediate one - is responsible for our present. When all these parts of the brain perform their normal work, when the consciousness is in a normal state, then the feeling that something should happen can only appear when we think about the future, worry about it, warn it, or build itplans.
But not everything is as simple as we would like. In our brain there is such a region( amygdala), which directly sets the emotional "tone" to our perception. For example, when you are talking to someone and see how your face changes face, it is the amygdala in a fraction of a second gives a signal about how exactly it is to react to it. According to neurological concepts, in fact, the duration of the "present" is so short that we do not experience as much as we remember.
The short memory stores information for several minutes. For this, in turn, the hippocampus( hippocampus) responds: memories, which in turn are associated with one or another event, are scattered around the different sensory centers of the brain, but they are joined in a certain order by the hippocamus. In addition, there is also a long-term memory, which is located on the surface of the brain, along the temporal part.
In fact, it's fair to say that the past, the present, and the future exist in our brains without clear boundaries. When we experience something in the present, then we compare it with a similar past and we already decide how we should react to what is happening in the near future. It is at this point and includes all the necessary areas of the brain. In the case when there are too many connections between short-term and long-term memory, the present can be perceived as the past and in this case the deja vu effect occurs.
As an explanation of this phenomenon, it is possible to attract, and models of global comparison, as they are called psychologists. This or that situation may seem familiar to a person, because it reminds him quite a bit of the past event stored in his memory, or in the event that she has a similarity to a large number of events held in memory. That is, you have already been in identical and quite similar situations more than once. Thus, your brain summed up and compared these memories, so you learned a picture similar to them.
Reincarnation or reboot?
Many people tend to the fact that deja vu has some mysterious, if not mystical, roots. This happens due to the fact that scientists can not really explain why there is deja vu. Parapsychologists explain deja vu with the theory of reincarnation, in the event that a person lives more than one life, and a few, he can recall some episodes of one of them.
The ancient Greeks believed in reincarnation, even early Christians and the rather famous Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who in turn believed that he lived two parallel lives. One life is his, and the second is the life of a doctor who lived in the eighteenth century. It is also worth noting that Leo Tolstoy mentioned deja vu.
Tina Turner, when she came to Egypt, suddenly saw quite familiar landscapes and objects, and remembered that during the pharaohs she was the friend of the famous queen Hatshepsut. Something similar was experienced by the famous singer Madonna during her visit to the imperial palace in China.
Many people assume that "already seen" is genetic memory. In this case, the awkward feeling of deja vu is explained as a memory of the life of ancestors.
Many psychologists believe that this phenomenon can only be a function of a person's self-defense. When we are in an awkward situation or in an unfamiliar place, we automatically start looking for some familiar things or objects, this is done in order to somehow maintain our body at the time of psychological stress.
The phenomenon of deja vu is quite common. Specialists found that 97% of people at least once, but experienced this feeling. There have also been some rather unique cases. When a person experiences a feeling of deja vu almost every day. Basically, this feeling is somewhat accompanied by a slight sense of discomfort, but sometimes it can frighten.
Psychiatrists also argue that the often-occurring deja vu can be caused by a symptom of temporal-lobar epilepsy. In many cases this is not dangerous. In addition, some studies have shown that deja vu can be induced artificially, either by hypnosis, or by electric stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain.
This amazing phenomenon is trying to explain even physics. There is an ecstatic concept according to which the past, the present and the immediate future occur simultaneously. Our consciousness, in turn, can perceive only what we call "now".Physicists explain the phenomenon of deja vu, some malfunction in time.
Despite the fact that this phenomenon is strange and mysterious, since it does not pose any danger to a person, it means that each person can personally explain to himself why a particular situation or object seems familiar to him. Perhaps you once saw him glimpse on TV or just read about it in some book.
