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Why do people experience déjà vu? – Atharva P., 10, Bengaluru, India
Have you ever had that weird feeling that yes he had experienced the exact same situation before, despite the fact that it's unimaginable? Sometimes it might even feel like you might be reliving something that has already happened. This phenomenon often known as already seenintrigued philosophers, neurologists AND writers For a really very long time.
Starting from the top of the nineteenth century Many theories began to emerge regarding what could cause déjà vu, which suggests “already seen” in French. People thought it is perhaps attributable to mental dysfunction or perhaps some form of brain problem. Or perhaps it was a momentary interruption within the otherwise normal workings of human memory. However, this topic has only reached the sphere of science quite recently.
The transition from paranormal to scientific phenomena
At the start of this millennium, scientist Alan Brown decided to perform a review of every thing researchers have written about déjà vu up thus far. Much of what he found had a magical flavor and needed to do with the supernatural – similar to past lives or psychic abilities. But he also found studies that surveyed extraordinary people about their experiences of déjà vu. From all of those articles, Brown was capable of draw some basic conclusions concerning the phenomenon of déjà vu.
For example, Brown found that about two-thirds of individuals experience déjà vu sooner or later of their lives. He found that essentially the most common trigger for déjà vu is a scene or place, and the following commonest trigger is a conversation. He also described clues that had appeared within the medical literature for a couple of century a couple of possible connection between déjà vu and certain sorts of epileptic seizures within the brain.
Brown's review brought the subject of déjà vu into the realm of more mainstream science since it appeared in each a scientific journal read by cognitive scientists and within the book addressed to scientists. His work served as a catalyst for scientists to design experiments to review déjà vu.
Testing déjà vu within the psychology laboratory
Influenced by Brown's work, my very own research team began experiments to check hypotheses concerning the possible mechanisms of déjà vu. We examined an almost century-old hypothesis this implies that déjà vu can occur when there’s a spatial similarity in your memory between the present scene and an unrecalled scene. Psychologists called this the Gestalt knowledge hypothesis.
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For example, imagine you pass the nursing station on a hospital ward in your option to see a sick friend. Even though you've never been to this hospital before, you're struck by the sensation that that is the case. The underlying reason for this déjà vu experience could also be that the layout of the scene, including the arrangement of furniture and individual objects within the space, has the identical layout as one other scene you’ve got experienced prior to now.
Perhaps the way in which the nursing station is situated – furniture, objects on the counter, the way in which it’s connected to the corners of the corridor – is identical because the set of welcome tables in relation to the signs and furniture within the corridor at ul. attending a college event you attended the 12 months before. According to the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis, in case you cannot consider a previous situation with an analogous arrangement to the present one, you might only be left with a powerful sense of familiarity with the present one.
To explore this concept within the lab, my team used virtual reality to position people in scenes. In this manner, we could manipulate the environments during which people were situated – some scenes had the identical spatial layout and were otherwise different. As foreseen, Déjà vu was more likely when people were in a scene containing the identical spatial arrangement of elements as the sooner scene that they had seen but had no memory of.
This study suggests that one factor contributing to déjà vu would be the spatial similarity of a brand new scene to at least one in memory that is just not being consciously recalled at that moment. This doesn’t mean, nevertheless, that spatial similarity is the one reason for déjà vu. It's very likely that many aspects can contribute to what makes a selected scene or situation seem familiar. Further research is being conducted to analyze additional possible aspects influencing this mysterious phenomenon.
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