Déjà vu is the feeling that you have already lived through some experience before in your life. Most likely, you have experienced a feeling of déjà vu at least once in your life. It's a strange, disturbing, and sometimes creepy little event. No matter how surprising it may be, déjà vu still remains a mystery to science. Nevertheless, we managed to learn quite a lot. In this article we will tell you 10 facts about this mysterious psychological phenomenon.
1. The term “déjà vu” is of French origin and means “already seen”
2. Some people who have experienced déjà vu say it is like the dream they have ever had.
3. What is called “déjà vu” usually lasts a very short time, which is why this phenomenon is so difficult to understand and study
4. Some psychological studies show that déjà vu can be caused by outlook, fatigue and stressful situations.
5. Sigmund Freud believed that déjà vu is associated with memories of our dreams.
6. In general, the number of times a person experiences déjà vu increases after age 25.
7. Some studies show that the effect of déjà vu is directly correlated with dopamine levels in the brain. This also explains why young people are more likely to experience déjà vu
8. Déjà vu may simply be a consequence of your brain's inability to create memories correctly, where a memory is created twice.
9. Research shows that two-thirds of adults have experienced déjà vu at least once in their lives.
10. Travelers experience déjà vu more often than those who do not travel. This is likely because travelers see more noteworthy and memorable places
Deja vu is considered to be a certain psychological state during which a person feels that a similar situation has already occurred, while this feeling is in no way connected with any moment from the past. As a rule, a person at this moment feels a certain feeling of strangeness, and also understands that this is not real. There are times when a person can even know with frightening accuracy what will happen next. And some even perceive the effect of déjà vu as paranormal abilities.
The term “Déjà vu” was first used by psychologist Emil Buarakov in his book “L’Avenirdessciencespsychigues” (Psychology of the Future).
There are also very similar phenomena: “already heard” and “already experienced.” But the opposite phenomenon of Deja Vu is Jamet Vu - “never seen before.” During this state, a person experiences a strange feeling: for example, he is in a place familiar to him, while the person feels that he has never been here.
What are the causes of the Deja Vu phenomenon and how does it manifest itself?
There are cases when the impressions of déjà vu can be so strong that they haunt a person for many years. At the same time, the person is unable to remember absolutely no details of the events that he experienced during déjà vu. As a rule, déjà vu is accompanied by so-called depersonalization. This can be explained this way: reality becomes so blurry that a person cannot concentrate. It happens that a person experiences a state of “derealization of personality” - this can be compared to the denial of reality. Freud gave this definition to this condition. But Bergson gave his definition of déjà vu: he believed that it was “a memory of the present.” He was sure that at that moment the person perceived reality as if it were divided and, to some extent, was mentally transported to the past.
deja vu 1
Research has shown that the phenomenon of déjà vu is a very common phenomenon. 97% of absolutely healthy people have been in this state at least once in their lives. But among people who suffer from epilepsy, this percentage is even higher. No matter how hard scientists try, it is impossible to artificially induce the phenomenon of déjà vu. This is precisely the reason why scientists can tell us so little about this strange phenomenon. The exact reasons why a person experiences déjà vu are not known. The only thing that scientists agree on is that déjà vu is caused by the interaction of various processes in the areas of the brain that are responsible for perception and memory.
At the moment, the most plausible proposal can be considered the following: the déjà vu effect is caused by nothing more than preliminary processing of information, for example, during sleep. In life, a person finds himself in a situation that his subconscious has already thought through and played out in a dream, and the brain has successfully simulated, while the event is very close to the real situation. This is how the deja vu effect occurs. Psychiatrists claim that if a person experiences the phenomenon of déjà vu too often, then this indicates a mental disorder.
Deja vu is not an illusion. It means something that you have actually already seen.
In your unconscious fantasy. Believe it or not. The “great and terrible” Freud wrote about this a hundred years ago, and many subsequent studies only confirmed his guess.
So, the phenomenon of déjà vu - the feeling of “already seen”, according to Freud, corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy. And since this fantasy has never been in consciousness, then during the phenomenon of deja vu it is impossible to “remember” something that seems to have already been seen.
These strange dreams
Let's start from afar. Along with conscious fantasies, there are also unconscious ones, i.e. simply daydreams. As a rule, they express some kind of desire (as do many dreams). But when we feel déjà vu, we don’t experience any desires—we just feel some place or situation is familiar. It's all about one of the fundamental mechanisms of the “work” of the unconscious - displacement.
Its job is to “shift” our thoughts, feelings or memories from those that are significant to those that mean absolutely nothing to us. The work of displacement is clearly visible in dreams, when in dreams, for example, about the death of our loved ones, we do not experience any pain about their loss, or strangely discover that we are not afraid of a ten-headed dragon in a dream, but wake up in a cold sweat after a dream about a quiet a walk in the park. Displacement does an insidious thing to our dreams - it shifts the emotion (affect), which, logically, should relate to the dragon - to a quiet walk. But this is complete nonsense, and completely impossible from the point of view of common sense!
And from the “point of view” of the unconscious, it is possible. The whole point is that in our unconscious (and dreams are fundamentally the product of this particular psychic agency) there is no logic (just as there are no contradictions, the concept of time, etc., in it, paradoxical as it may be). Just as our primitive ancestors did not have it. Lack of logic is one of the properties of our unconscious. Logic is a product of a more rational mind, a property of the mind - consciousness.
Displacement is one of the processes responsible for the strangeness in our dreams. And what is impossible in reality and would never even come to mind (for example, “tearing away” the emotion of sadness from the tragic event of the death of a loved one) is very possible in a dream.
Déjà vu is a fairly common phenomenon. Research shows that up to 97% of healthy people have experienced this condition at least once in their lives, and those with epilepsy have experienced this condition much more often.
Censorship
But displacement is not just one of the properties of the primitive “mind” and the unconscious of modern man, it, according to Freud, also works for the benefit of the so-called “censorship” of dreams. It would take too much time to provide the necessary evidence of its action, so let’s just briefly talk about Freud’s conclusion. It is this: the task of censorship is to confuse the dream, to make it strange and incomprehensible. For what?
Freud believed that this is one of the ways to “veil” the details of a dream that are undesirable for awareness, secret to the dreamer himself. Modern depth psychologists are not so categorical. And, as mentioned above, they consider the “entanglement” of dreams to be just a manifestation of the properties of our unconscious, which comes into its own in a dream. Although this does not at all prevent these properties from acting as constant “censors” of the dream, and indeed making the “obvious” secret, preventing the awareness of desires that are “forbidden” for us. But this is another topic, which we will not develop today.
It is believed that a possible cause of déjà vu may be a change in the way the brain encodes time. In this case, the process is easiest to imagine as simultaneous encoding of information, as “present” and as “past” with the simultaneous experience of these processes. In this regard, there is a sense of separation from reality. This hypothesis has only one drawback - it is unclear why many déjà vu phenomena become so significant for some people, but the main thing is what causes the change in time coding in the brain.
Déjà vu – distorted memory
What does deja vu have to do with it? As we have already said, the cause of this phenomenon is unconscious fantasies. It is directly impossible to find out about them by definition - they are not conscious. However, they may be indicated by many indirect reasons, which may be “invisible” to the common person and catch the eye of a specialist.
In his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud talks about the case of a patient who told him about an incident of déjà vu that she had not been able to forget for many years:
“One lady, who is now 37 years old, claims that she most clearly remembers how, at the age of 12 1/2 years, she was visiting her school friends for the first time in the village and, entering the garden, immediately experienced such a feeling as if she had already been here once; this feeling was repeated when she entered the rooms, so that it seemed to her that she knew in advance what the next room would be like, what the view would be from it, etc. In fact, the possibility of so that this feeling of familiarity has its source in previous visits to the house and garden, at least in very early childhood. The lady who told me about this was not looking for a psychological explanation; in the appearance of this feeling she saw a prophetic indication of the significance that these particular friends were later to have for her emotional life. However, consideration of the circumstances under which this phenomenon occurred points the way to another explanation. Going to visit, she knew that these girls had one seriously ill brother. During the visit, she saw him, found that he looked very bad, and thought: he will soon die. Now further: her own only brother was dangerously ill with diphtheria a few months earlier; During his illness, she was removed from her parents' house and lived for several weeks with a relative. It seems to her that her brother also took part in the trip to the village in question here; it even seems that this was his first long walk after his illness; however, here her memories are surprisingly vague, while all other details, especially the dress she was wearing that day, stand before her eyes with an unnatural brightness.”
Giving various arguments, Freud comes to the conclusion that the patient secretly simply wished for the death of her brother, which is not at all uncommon, and is considered among specialists (and not rigid public opinion, of course) quite normal and, moreover, a natural human desire - the death of a brother or sisters (unless, of course, it is accompanied by real actions that would provoke the death of an unloved person). After all, any of them is a rival who takes away part of the precious parental love and attention to themselves. Some people don’t have any big worries about this, but for others it turns out to be fatal. And almost always - unconsciously (after all, the desire for death, and even for a loved one, is completely unacceptable in a moral society).
“It is not difficult for an informed person to conclude from these testimonies that the expectation of her brother’s death then played a large role in this girl and either was never conscious, or after the successful outcome of the illness was subjected to energetic repression,” writes Freud. - If the outcome were different, she would have to wear a different dress - a mourning dress. She found a similar situation among her friends: her only brother was in danger; soon he actually died. She would have to consciously remember that a few months ago she herself experienced the same thing; Instead of remembering it - which was prevented by repression - she transferred her sense of recollection to the area, the garden and the house, was subjected to the effect of "fausse reconnaissance" (translated from French - "mistaken recognition" - NS), and it seemed to her that she once saw all this too. From the fact of repression we have reason to conclude that her expectation of her brother's death was not entirely alien to the coloring of desirability. She would then remain an only child.”
The unconscious mechanism of displacement, already known to us, “moved” the memories of the situation with the illness (and secret desire for death) of the brother to unimportant details - the dress, the garden and the house of friends.
However, this does not mean that all our déjà vu are manifestations of some “terrifying” secret desires. All these desires may be completely innocent for others, but completely “shameful” or scary for us.
Deja vu is considered to be a certain psychological state during which a person feels that a similar situation has already occurred, while this feeling is in no way connected with any moment from the past. As a rule, a person at this moment feels a certain feeling of strangeness, and also understands that this is not real. There are moments when a person can even know with frightening accuracy what will happen next.
. And some even perceive the effect of déjà vu as paranormal abilities.
The term “Déjà vu” was first used by psychologist Emil Buarakov in his book “L”Avenirdessciencespsychigues” (psychology of the future).
There are also very similar phenomena: “already heard” and “already experienced.” But the opposite phenomenon of deja vu is jamevu - “Never Seen.” During this state, a person experiences a strange feeling: for example, he is in a place familiar to him, while the person feels that he has never been here.
There are cases when the impressions of déjà vu can be so strong that they haunt a person for many years. At the same time, the person is unable to remember absolutely no details of the events that he experienced during déjà vu. As a rule, deja vu is accompanied by so-called depersonalization. This can be explained this way: reality becomes so blurry that a person cannot concentrate. It happens that a person experiences a state of “Derealization of Personality” - this can be compared to the denial of reality. Freud gave this definition to this condition. But Bergson gave his definition of déjà vu: he believed that it was “Memory of the Present.” He was sure that at that moment the person perceived reality as if it were divided and, to some extent, was mentally transported to the past.
Research has shown that the phenomenon of déjà vu is a very common phenomenon. 97% of absolutely healthy people have been in this state at least once in their lives. But among people who suffer from epilepsy, this percentage is even higher. No matter how hard scientists try, it is impossible to artificially induce the phenomenon of déjà vu. This is precisely the reason why scientists can tell us so little about this strange phenomenon. The exact reasons why a person experiences déjà vu are not known. The only thing that scientists agree on is that déjà vu is caused by the interaction of various processes in the areas of the brain that are responsible for perception and memory.
At the moment, the most plausible proposal can be considered the following: the déjà vu effect is caused by nothing more than preliminary processing of information, for example, during sleep. In life, a person finds himself in a situation that his subconscious has already thought through and played out in a dream, and the brain has successfully simulated, while the event is very close to the real situation. This is how the deja vu effect occurs. Psychiatrists claim that if a person experiences the phenomenon of déjà vu too often, this indicates a mental disorder.