What makes you feel deja vu. Do you know what déjà vu, jamé vu and presque vu mean? Can everyone experience this effect on themselves?

Helpful Hints 05.09.2018
Helpful Hints

Perhaps one of the most famous psychological and psychiatric terms is “ deja vu effect". Today it is used quite often, but it is not always understood what, in fact, it is and under what circumstances the effect occurs.

Deja vu, or a false memory, has happened to each of us at least once. This is a distinct feeling that the situation in which you find yourself has already been in your life, and the event that is happening at the moment is only repeating itself. At the same time, you know for sure that nothing like this has ever happened to you before.

Deja vu is a psychological sensation that you went through earlier in a given situation, somewhere or already knew a certain level. Okay, now you know what we're talking about. Although here you really experienced the same situation twice, the feeling of deja vu is exactly the same. With an option only: Imagine asking for a fried purple squash sandwich for the first time; now imagine that as soon as you ask, you already know the taste of which.

The sandwich will be without trying. Worse, you know exactly the taste of the sandwich you just asked for and that the chef hasn't even started making. A person who experiences deja vu does it as if it happened in the past. Unseen places, faces and events can seem extremely familiar, and in some situations you can swear that you can accurately predict what the next words will say. The event appears in your head as if it were a memory, even though it is happening now and you have no earlier memory of it.

The name of this state is taken from French: "déja vu" in translation means "already seen." It was first described by the French psychologist E. Bouarak at the end of the nineteenth century. Usually lasts feeling of deja vu not for long, no more than a few seconds, and the person barely has time to realize what is happening to him, as it disappears.

As if that weren't enough, the experience is so great that you soon doubt this certainty because you have no concrete proof that it was before, no memory. But if you stop thinking, you also don't have concrete evidence that you had a fever last month, even if you stayed. So you know when you want to remember the name of a song and it stays on the tip of your tongue but it never comes? It's like having something on the tip of your tongue without having a tongue in the first place.

We are used to sorting events in chronological order in our minds, almost spatially arranged on shelves. Sometimes we just call the name and its associated memory. Sometimes we have to try to remember who started the fight. Deja vu torments both the victims and the scientists, who made them try to isolate various areas of activity from this non-memory in order to look for where the "failure" might occur. Here are the main ones.

The opposite state is also observed in people, which, by analogy, is called jamais vu- "never seen". During “jamevu”, a person in a well-known environment suddenly ceases to recognize his surroundings: it seems to him that he has ended up in a completely unfamiliar place and is talking to unknown people.

This condition, too, is usually short-term and unpredictable, moreover, it is much less common than deja vu.

It literally means "already seen" or "already lived like that." The experience of feeling associated with what we say or do. Look around and remember the place or people around us, as well as objects. This means that "already felt" deja senti is primarily or equally exclusive to the psychic event, with no foreshadowing aspects, and rarely, remains in the person's memory shortly thereafter. This is sensory and physical memory.

This is the strangest feeling of all. Anyone who experiences this situation can, for example, know everything around him in a city that he has never visited before, knowing that he has never been there. Throughout our lives, we encounter several of these floating spaces of memory. As is customary in a scientific model, we label a phenomenon with a descriptive name and pretend to explain it.

Today, there are many different theories and assumptions about what constitutes deja vu. Some believe that these are memories of those who dreamed once and suddenly emerged from the depths of memory. Others - that these are manifestations of the subconscious work of the brain, when the amount of accumulated and processed information suddenly at some point moves to a new level.

Our brain is a complex entity. This allows our 3D memory to organize into complex holographic patterns. Individual memories can interbreed with others in a complex network. Research shows, for example, that when we try to remember someone's name, we activate our memories of those people's faces in one part of the brain, while at the same time we call on another part of the gray matter to remember their name. We don't have simple raw data that glows when we think about it, everything fits together, just remembering the time of study, is it easier to remember a sequence of 12 letters or a complex phrase, and then deduce a sequence of 12 letters from code words and from these codes?

The most fantastic theory says that at these moments a person suddenly becomes able to perceive information from the future, and his consciousness, not accustomed to such phenomena, automatically translates it into a form of memory familiar to perception.



As a rule, deja vu occurs rarely: a common person I only experience it a few times in my life. But even those people who have this condition quite often can never predict its onset in advance. Therefore, a direct study of the human condition during deja vu with the help of modern methods almost impossible.

And voila, we have the first column of the periodic table with the elements helium, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, cesium and Francio. Unusually, this is how our mind works. Now that we know what part of it needs to be running in order to start getting memories, it still remains a mystery. And where is the memory when no one remembers it?

Frankly, we still do not have a rational explanation for this phenomenon. Some people will be quick to claim that they have lost memories of past lives. Some people will say that brain failure helps us store trivial facts in long-term memory, causing a temporal illusion. Some people will say that we have many simultaneous incarnations in other dimensions and sometimes memory slips from one dimension to another. Some people will say that it is not something that is connected with the past, but with the memory of the future. people will say that it is caused by demons who want to confuse us with illusions. Some people will say that you are lying. Some people will say that this is a failure in the world of illusions we live in. . None of these explanations can be refuted.

Researchers rely only on information obtained by interviewing patients and systematizing data about their health status.

According to the physiological theory of deja vu, this state occurs due to an imbalance in the activity of the brain lobes. Today it is known that the frontal part is responsible for the perception of the future, the temporal part is responsible for understanding the past, and the main part of the brain that lies between them is responsible for processing current information.

No one is more or less rational than the other. Therefore, anyone who asserts any of these explanations must also satisfactorily refute all other alternatives. If it is not clear that causality is also an illusion. In this case, everything can be explained in different and even opposite ways. Ironically, if causality is an illusion, then we didn't need to remember anything.

What happens when we experience this feeling of deja vu or already feel, already feel, already visited?

The scientific name for the feeling of "déjà vu" is paramnesia, from the Greek steam, next to and from amnesia. Are you prone to paramnesia? It affects 7 out of 10 people, and theories about it are still being hypothesized because the human brain remains a vast field of study.

It is believed that with a heavy load experienced by the brain, the number of connections between its lobes increases dramatically, and at this moment confusion can occur, the consequence of which is a feeling of deja vu.

Some people may experience deja vu very often, and it is only natural that this causes them to worry about the state of their psyche. First of all, when the “attack of deja vu” begins, you need to calm down and stop panicking.

The brain will stop for a very short time, and when it resumes its activity, the impression of deja vu will be born from the moment of pause. We've already seen a quarter of a second before! People with certain forms of epilepsy will be more likely to experience déjà vu. It may be a temporary anomaly in the neuronal discharge system.

This may be a false recognition of a forgotten event in a conscious or close, but in a different state. On a psychoanalytic level, Freud considered deja vu as the emergence of the perception of a fantasy or unconscious daily dream. In more mystical terrain, some speak of memories from a previous life. Others believe that what has already been seen will be the revival of a dying dream.

Surely many people at least once in their lives had a strange feeling that you have already seen the events around you somewhere, although you are clearly aware that everything is happening to you for the first time. For example, have you been to this place before or seen somewhere stranger but you don't remember where you could see everything. It feels like the present suddenly meets the past. it mysterious phenomenon was called déjà vu (translated from French as "already seen"). So how to understand and what does the word deja vu mean?

Our confession would play a little trick, because it will work in associations: a name for an object or a person, a sound or a form. If your confession picks up on the signal, it performs an approach to something close. Does the person you think you have ever met have a name close to another person?

Like something straight out of a movie science fiction, it's like you've already traveled in this future. Perceived vision occurs in about 60-80% of people, a phenomenon that is almost always fleeting and can occur at any time. Despite this great banality, deja vu phenomena still not understood by the scientific community. Given that there is no clear and identifiable stimulus that triggers the déjà vu experience, it is very difficult to study what has already been seen in the lab, scientists explain.

Many writers and psychologists have described it in their books. For example, famous psychologist Carl Gustav Jung first felt this feeling when he was only 12 years old, he was completely sure that he was living a parallel life.

It turns out that not many people know the meaning of the word deja vu, but this is quite a common phenomenon. According to studies, about 97% of people have experienced this condition at least once in their lives.

According to many studies, about two-thirds of the population has already experienced at least one episode of déjà vu in their lifetime. Episodes of deja vu may be closely related to how memory is stored in the brain. The storage of memories, events, and lasting events is stored in the temporal lobes, and certain parts of the temporal lobe are also integral to familiarity detection and recognition of certain events. The essential point is that the temporal lobe is the place where memories are created and stored.

While the connection between precognition, temporal lobe, and memory retention remains relatively unknown, clues have been made from people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. The results show that the events already observed can be caused by an electrical malfunction in the brain.

However, an interesting fact is that people suffering from epilepsy are more likely to experience deja vu.

A strange phenomenon led many people to believe that they were not living on this planet for the first time, and some lucky ones even managed to remember who they really were in a past life.

Madonna encountered this phenomenon when she first visited the Imperial Palace in Beijing. She suddenly felt that she had been here before and knew the palace like a home. After the trip, she concluded that perhaps in a past life she most likely served the last Manchu emperor in the palace. Tina Turner, when she first visited Egypt, felt that she had lived there before, perhaps in a past life. The singer began to claim that she was a friend of the famous queen Hatshepsu, and maybe even the queen herself.

Epileptic seizures are characterized by a dysfunction in the activity of neurons through the brain, which disrupts the electrical impulses that "activate" the neurons. These impulses can travel throughout the brain, causing seizures. "Clinical reports show that some patients suffering from temporal lobe epileptic seizures experience pre-epileptic seizures, almost as a kind of warning," the researchers say.

But what are the basics of deja vu healthy people who do not suffer from epilepsy? Some researchers describe this as a "mistake" in the brain - where the neurons for familiarity and recognition fire - so the brain miscalculates between present and past. In fact, the same abnormal electrical impulses that contribute to epilepsy may be present in healthy people. An example of this is sleep myoclonus.

The meaning of the word deja vu is a scientific explanation of an unusual phenomenon

What is the meaning of the word from the point of view of scientists?

  • A little bit of science

It turns out that there is a certain memory center in the brain, it has a dentate gyrus, it is she who instantly recognizes even slight differences in similar images. The memory center or hippocampus divides all the events that have ever happened in a person's life into either the past or the present. For example, if two events are very similar to each other, then there is some kind of failure in the memory center, which eventually causes deja vu. The brain, as it were, confuses a similar image that we once thought up with a real picture and passes it off as our memories. That is why it sometimes seems to us that we have already been once in the place where we first arrived.

Vibrant combination of neural pathways

This may be due to the fact that the brain is constantly trying to create a global perception of the world around us with limited data. For example, the brain only needs a small amount of sensory information, such as a familiar smell, to create a detailed memory. Already seen may be due to breaks in the brain's memory systems that lead to sensory information to bypass short-term memory and instead reach long-term memory.

This can cause a depressing feeling that we have already experienced in the past in a new event. In the visual system, sensory information travels along several paths, starting from the higher cortical centers of the brain, with all information reaching these centers at or near the same time. Some people believe that when a difference in information processing occurs along these pathways, perception is disrupted and perceived as two separate messages. The brain interprets the second version, albeit a slower secondary, separate perceptual experience—and thus an inadequate sense of familiarity—they add.


Other scientists interpret the meaning of the word deja vu arises due to the associative thinking of our brain. For example, a person can see on another person a jacket that he once had, it is this detail that will remind him of the past, so it may seem to him that he has already seen a stranger.

According to the researchers, there is still much to be learned about the mechanisms already seen and underlying them. “There may not be such a simple answer to the mechanisms behind what has already been seen, but with more research and research it may be possible to uncover this phenomenon in the future,” they say.

Already experience in epilepsy of the temporal lobe. The impression of deja vu has already been experienced by 60 to 80% of the population, an almost always ephemeral phenomenon that can manifest itself at any time. How this happens is still little known to the scientific community because there is no clearly identifiable stimulus, says Dr. Michelle Hook, assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas.

What experiment did the scientists conduct?

In support of the theory, scientists conducted an experiment. Thanks to the experiment, it was possible to artificially cause the effect of deja vu. A group of people were shown 24 words on a screen, then they were hypnotized. The subjects, while they were in a state of trance, tried in every possible way to suggest that the words that would be in the red box would seem familiar to them, but they would not remember where they saw them from before.

After that, all the test subjects began to show the words in multi-colored frames. An interesting fact is that almost more than half of the participants experienced deja vu when they saw the words in the red box.


We hope you got a figurative idea of ​​what the word déjà vu means. . The meaning of the word can be experienced by people who are very tired and under stress. Of the age groups, adolescents 17 years old and people from 35 to 40 years old most often experience feelings. To a greater extent, deja vu is observed in people who are nervous and impressionable, as a rule, in melancholic people.

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