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Why do people experience déjà vu? – Atharva P., 10 years, Bengaluru, India
Have you ever had the strange feeling that you have previously experienced exactly the same situation, even though that is impossible? Sometimes it can even look as if they are experiencing something that has already happened. This phenomenon, known as déjà vu, has been confused by philosophers, neurologists and writers for a long time.
From the late 19th century, many theories appeared about what Déjà VU could cause, which means “already seen” in French. People thought it might come to mental dysfunction or maybe a kind of brain problem. Or maybe it was a temporary swallow in the otherwise normal operation of the human memory. But the topic recently reached the area of science.
Switch from paranormal to scientific
At the beginning of this millennium, a scientist named Alan Brown decided until this time a review of everything that researchers had written about Déjà VU. Much of what he could find had a paranormal taste that had to do with the supernatural – things like past lives or psychological skills. However, he also found studies in which regular people examined their déjà vu experiences. From all of these papers, Brown was able to explain some basic knowledge of the Déjà -Vu phenomenon.
For example, Brown found that about two thirds of the people will experience Déjà vu at some point in their lives. He found that the most common trigger from Déjà Vu is a scene or a place and that the next trigger is a conversation. He also reported on clues over a century medical literature of a possible connection between déjà vu and some types of seizure activities in the brain.
Brown’s review brought the topic of Déjà Vu to the area of the most important mainstream science, since it tasted both in a scientific magazine, tends to read the scientists who study perception, as well as in a book that is aimed at scientists. His work served as a catalyst for scientists to design experiments to investigate déjà vu.
Test from déjà vu in a psychology laboratory
Due to Brown’s work, my own research team began carrying out experiments to test hypotheses about possible mechanisms of déjà vu. We examined an almost centuries -old hypothesis that indicated that Déjà Vu can occur if there is a spatial similarity between a current scene and an unauthorized scene in her memory. Psychologists called this the shape of the hypothesis.
For example, imagine that you will pass the nurse station in a hospital unit on the way to attending a sick friend. Although they have never been to this hospital, they have the feeling that they have. The underlying cause of this experience of déjà vu could be that the layout of the scene, including the placement of the furniture and the respective objects in the room, the same layout as another scene that you have experienced in the past.
Perhaps the way in which the care station is located – the furniture, the objects on the counter, the way it combines with the corners of the hall is – it is the same as a series of welcome tables in relation to describes and furniture in a hallway at the entrance to a school event where they were visited a year earlier. According to the shape confident hypothesis, this earlier situation will not come to mind with a layout similar to that of the current one, they could only have a strong feeling of familiarity for the current.
In order to examine this idea in the laboratory, my team used the virtual reality to staged people. In this way we were able to manipulate the environments in which people were – some scenes shared the same spatial layout, while otherwise they were different. As predicted, it was more likely that Déjà Vu were in a scene that contained the same spatial arrangement of elements as an earlier scene that they viewed but did not remind you.
This research suggests that a factor that contributes to the Déjà VU can be a spatial similarity of a new scene with one in memory that does not consciously remind you at the moment. However, this does not mean that spatial similarity is the only cause of déjà vu. Most likely, many factors can help to familiarize a scene or a situation. Further research is underway to examine additional possible factors in this mysterious phenomenon.
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This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Anne Cleary, Colorado State University
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Anne Cleary is a member of the American Psychological Association.
