The Human Memory surely acts as an indispensable asset for all people around us to boast about. Possessing good memory inarguably serves us an edge over our competitors in the natural world. Wait, haven't you already read this before? Or doesn't it seem quite too similar to something that you've already been through? Such sensations of having something experienced before even when you are witnessing it for the very first time just isn't that uncommon as it may seem to you consciously. While some of these many astonishing instances are absolutely appropriate when your memory system ultimately retrieves the memories related to that particular event, others may seem equally perturbing when such instances trigger a feeling of intense familiarity that quickly fades away leaving the subject entirely shocked. Such kinds of experiences together contribute to what civilized people in the developing world have increasingly come to refer as Déjà vu.
But What exactly is it and how does it manifest?
To define its occurrence in the simplest of terms, Déjà vu is an uncanny and shadowy feeling of familiarity with a particular event, situation or occurrence that is unsettlingly profound than it normally should.
Tracing its origin in the sophisticated French language, the term which literally translates to 'Already Seen' was first introduced by Emile Boirac and since its inception researchers and scientists have speculated more than 40 theories to accurately explain the phenomenon. Originally viewing it as a component of the paranormal context, modern scientific approaches thanks to the highly efficient neuroimaging techniques and significant advancements in Cognitive Psychology have finally come to realise that it's a lot more than a mere prophetic signal or subconscious recollection of past. It stems as an anomaly of memory whereby despite of the overwhelming sense of recollection of an experience, the precise details of it such as the time, place and practical context are completely uncertain and hence believed to be wrong. While people may confuse such feelings with the failure of one's memory system to retrieve accurate details, the fact is Déjà vu is actually significantly different from a simple retrieval failure.
It can manifest due to some underlying biological cause most prominently the Temporal Lobe epilepsy which causes the brain cells to send unregulated amount of electrical signals that ultimately result in a seizure which drives people to briefly lose control over their thoughts and movements, eventually leading them to link a novel experience to an already familiar event. Albeit this explanation has been considered plausible enough for several decades, research clearly reflects that it fails to portray the complete picture as not every Déjà Vu experience is pathological i.e. happens due to some existing underlying problem. A survey suggests that around 60-70% of people who experience this transitory mental state are healthy and hence its non-pathological. So what can be attributed as the causal factors in such cases?
1. Theory of Dual Processing- Our Nervous system and the processes related to the transmission of information it involves are pretty complex and hence are always vulnerable to errors. This theory itself is based on one i.e. delayed vision. Robert Efron tested an idea at the Veterans Hospital in Boston in 1963 whereby he proposed that a delayed neurological response might result in Deja Vu. The focus was that since information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than one path, it is possible that occasionally the blending of information might not synchronize accurately and the temporal lobe (which btw is responsible for sorting incoming information) might register a stimuli as a separate event which could result in a sudden sense of familiarity.
2. The Hologram Theory- Remembering a particular event often involves reliving it subconsciously as our sensory inputs such as the smell, sound, sight etc are normally processed and mixed together as one event. Dutch psychiatrist Hermon Sno proposed the idea that memories are like Holograms, one can recreate the entire image from a fragment of the whole. However, the smaller the fragment, one harbors, the fuzzier the present image will be. This often results in Confusion with the past where our present provokes our memory and we witness a sense of strange familiarity but there is no concrete recollection of the past because we are not presently aware of the those past memories entirely.
3. Precognitive Dreams- Dreams have for centuries been a subject of greta interest for many philosophers and psychologists and while it has been clearly established that dreams are no omens describing one's future, they certainly have been proposed by many to be the determinants behind many Deja Vu experiences. J.W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer who designed planes in World War 2 conducted studies in 1939 using students of Oxford University where he found 12.7 percent of his subjects' dreams shared similarities with future events which could be explained as potential causes of Déjà Vu. The role of divided attention is also noteworthy in some of these instances when your brain observes some particular thing without conscious awareness and then after some time your experience of that same situation spearheads you with an overwhelming sensation of familiarity that can't be easily explained and hence subsides gradually.
To define its occurrence in the simplest of terms, Déjà vu is an uncanny and shadowy feeling of familiarity with a particular event, situation or occurrence that is unsettlingly profound than it normally should.
Tracing its origin in the sophisticated French language, the term which literally translates to 'Already Seen' was first introduced by Emile Boirac and since its inception researchers and scientists have speculated more than 40 theories to accurately explain the phenomenon. Originally viewing it as a component of the paranormal context, modern scientific approaches thanks to the highly efficient neuroimaging techniques and significant advancements in Cognitive Psychology have finally come to realise that it's a lot more than a mere prophetic signal or subconscious recollection of past. It stems as an anomaly of memory whereby despite of the overwhelming sense of recollection of an experience, the precise details of it such as the time, place and practical context are completely uncertain and hence believed to be wrong. While people may confuse such feelings with the failure of one's memory system to retrieve accurate details, the fact is Déjà vu is actually significantly different from a simple retrieval failure.
It can manifest due to some underlying biological cause most prominently the Temporal Lobe epilepsy which causes the brain cells to send unregulated amount of electrical signals that ultimately result in a seizure which drives people to briefly lose control over their thoughts and movements, eventually leading them to link a novel experience to an already familiar event. Albeit this explanation has been considered plausible enough for several decades, research clearly reflects that it fails to portray the complete picture as not every Déjà Vu experience is pathological i.e. happens due to some existing underlying problem. A survey suggests that around 60-70% of people who experience this transitory mental state are healthy and hence its non-pathological. So what can be attributed as the causal factors in such cases?
1. Theory of Dual Processing- Our Nervous system and the processes related to the transmission of information it involves are pretty complex and hence are always vulnerable to errors. This theory itself is based on one i.e. delayed vision. Robert Efron tested an idea at the Veterans Hospital in Boston in 1963 whereby he proposed that a delayed neurological response might result in Deja Vu. The focus was that since information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than one path, it is possible that occasionally the blending of information might not synchronize accurately and the temporal lobe (which btw is responsible for sorting incoming information) might register a stimuli as a separate event which could result in a sudden sense of familiarity.
2. The Hologram Theory- Remembering a particular event often involves reliving it subconsciously as our sensory inputs such as the smell, sound, sight etc are normally processed and mixed together as one event. Dutch psychiatrist Hermon Sno proposed the idea that memories are like Holograms, one can recreate the entire image from a fragment of the whole. However, the smaller the fragment, one harbors, the fuzzier the present image will be. This often results in Confusion with the past where our present provokes our memory and we witness a sense of strange familiarity but there is no concrete recollection of the past because we are not presently aware of the those past memories entirely.
3. Precognitive Dreams- Dreams have for centuries been a subject of greta interest for many philosophers and psychologists and while it has been clearly established that dreams are no omens describing one's future, they certainly have been proposed by many to be the determinants behind many Deja Vu experiences. J.W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer who designed planes in World War 2 conducted studies in 1939 using students of Oxford University where he found 12.7 percent of his subjects' dreams shared similarities with future events which could be explained as potential causes of Déjà Vu. The role of divided attention is also noteworthy in some of these instances when your brain observes some particular thing without conscious awareness and then after some time your experience of that same situation spearheads you with an overwhelming sensation of familiarity that can't be easily explained and hence subsides gradually.
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