What does the word deja vu mean from the French translation. What does the word deja vu mean and why does it happen

The phenomenon of "déjà vu" (translated from French - "already seen") was noticed more than one century ago. The first mention of it in literature and at the same time - the consolidation of a new term - occurred at the end of the 19th century.

It was used by the psychologist Emile Bouarac in his book The Future of Psychology, comparing it with other effects: dejavecu (already experienced), dejaentendu (already heard), javemu (never seen).

Today it is believed that "déjà vu" is one of the mental states in which a person, getting into a particular situation, feels as if he had previously been in it.

What sensations does a person experience with "déjà vu"?

When déjà vu occurs, we engage in "familiar" dialogues, although, in fact, they occur for the first time. Or we observe the course of events in which we seem to have never been, but, nevertheless, we are “haunted” by the feeling of “knowledge of the situation”.

In some cases, we can even "predict" the further actions of the participants in these events, relying precisely on the state of deja vu.

Along with this, in ordinary life, in moments when there is deja vu, we perceive it as something supernatural, inexplicable, but at the same time very familiar. Reality for us at this moment loses its usual shape, its perception bifurcates, there is a "confusion" in the definition of the past, present and future.

Later, when talking about it, we may not remember the details, but, along with this, we will keep the impression of the “déjà vu” experienced for many years to come.

Can everyone experience this effect on themselves?

According to specialized literary sources, every mentally healthy person has experienced “déjà vu” at least once in their life.

Some scientists identify age periods in which the probability of the manifestation of the phenomenon is higher: 16-18 years old (certain life experience has been accumulated, sensitivity and perception of reality are aggravated), 35-40 years old (knowledge, experience in solving problems and situations have been accumulated).

In people suffering from mental disorders (epilepsy, schizophrenia), the manifestation of this condition is observed much more often. In these cases, clear age restrictions missing.

Why does the phenomenon occur?

As for the origin of the phenomenon, oddly enough, to date, scientists have not been able to come to a consensus: versions differ, scientific disputes continue.

The impossibility of modeling the situation (creating it artificially) makes it difficult to collect the evidence base, and, accordingly, complicates the determination of the origins of the origin of "déjà vu".

medical version

According to one hypothesis, this phenomenon is associated with an error in the work of the brain, namely, in the disruption of the temporal lobe of the brain, in the department that is “responsible” for searching for analogies in the human memory.

In this department, there is a comparison of memories with what is happening at the present time, and a search for similarities or differences between the images existing in the memory. Among the causes of such disorders, fatigue, increased fatigue, stress / depressive states, and mental overstrain are distinguished.

Also, neurologists point to changes in the way the time is coded by the brain as the reason why “déjà vu” occurs, which again signals certain violations of its work.

In addition, in their opinion, the occurrence of deja vu can be triggered by changes in the external environment that affect a person ( magnetic storms, excessive cold or heat, changes in atmospheric pressure).

The theory of preliminary "playing situations"

If we turn to individual scientists for an explanation, then Sigmund Freud, for example, spoke of "déjà vu" as a consequence of preliminary unconscious processing of information, including in a dream.

At such moments, the subconscious seems to form options for the development / solution of situations, one of which is subsequently embodied in reality.

The writer Andrei Kurgan partly agrees with this theory in his writings. He conducted a detailed study of the structure of time, which he observed in people in a state of "déjà vu".

And he suggested that the actual cause of the experience could be the layering of two situations - the one that a person experienced once in a dream, and what is happening to him in the present.

At these moments, the researcher fixes the “stretching” of the present, which contains both the past and the future.

Ancestral consciousness, intuition or parallel reality?

Among other widely accepted hypotheses for the origin of the déjà vu effect, one can consider:

1. Obtaining information from the consciousness of our ancestors. This version is offered by esotericists, based on the "theory of reincarnation." However, how in this case to explain that a person, being in a state of "déjà vu", can "remember" what our ancestors did not see and could not even imagine?
2. The work of intuition or the protective reaction of the body: when it hits difficult situation our brain looks for solutions based on experience, and if it doesn’t find a suitable one, it invents new ones and “passes them off” as familiar, time-tested ones.
3. Contact with another (parallel) reality or time travel, which can also be presented as a “fault of the fourth dimension”.

Which version of the origin of the effect is the most plausible?

Modern scientists are most inclined to accept the version of preliminary single or multiple reflection, analysis of information (in a dream or outside it), on the basis of which a person subsequently has a feeling of “repetition” of the situation.

That is, exactly the hypothesis on which Andrei Kurgan relied in his writings when explaining the “déjà vu” effect.

deja vu effect has not yet been fully explored. Doctors, psychologists, esotericists, magicians and sorcerers, religious scholars are trying to explain this phenomenon. The increased interest of people of various professions has led to the birth of several hypotheses. Why does the deja vu effect occur?

Can you use it to your advantage? Can it be controlled?

What is deja vu?

Many people have experienced this feeling. Some sources call the figure 97%. It is not surprising that there are a lot of myths and assumptions around the phenomenon.

The word "déjà vu" came to us from French. True, there it is written separately. In dictionaries and encyclopedias, the term is explained as follows:

“Deja vu (from the French “already seen”) is a psychological state of a person in which he feels that he has already been in a similar situation, been in this place, seen certain objects.”

Imagine: You arrive or arrive in a completely unfamiliar place. But! You are haunted by the feeling that you have been here before. You've seen it, you've smelled it, you've talked to these people. Some can even tell exactly what is behind them. Or what is behind the door on the left.

All this knowledge appears at the level of sensations. Memory does not tell when this situation has already happened. When you arrived at this place. Moreover, such a situation may never have happened. But the feeling of "acquaintance" does not leave. When it passes, only confusion remains.

Feeling of "familiarity", a talent for foresight and a memory disorder.

Do not confuse deja vu with simple forgetfulness or painful memory disorders. FROM deja vu man encounters regardless of circumstances, time and place. It is impossible to establish periods, to notice any regularity.

Forgetfulness haunts a person for a certain period. It manifests itself not only in the sensations of something familiar, but also in other everyday trifles. We don’t remember where they put the keys, glasses, turned off the stove, and so on.

Serious memory problems are the domain of psychotherapists and neurologists. Sometimes in the mind of a person there is a past and present. Sometimes a whole period of life falls out altogether. It's already amnesia.

Foresight, premonition is the recognition of a future event in advance. At the level of intuition, consciousness. Some see clear visual images of things to come. For others, the near and distant future comes in dreams. For still others, knowledge appears in the form of a simple instinctive reaction. The event did not happen, but the person felt or saw it.

With deja vu, it’s different: something happened, and the person felt something familiar. He "recognized" a place, phenomenon, conversation, etc., new to his memory.

From ancient times to the present.

For the first time the term "déjà vu" is found in the works of the French psychologist Emile Buarak. He worked at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Émile Boirac used this word to denote the feeling of the unreality of what is happening. A strange feeling was accompanied by anxiety, a perception of oneself as if from the outside.

Almost simultaneously, other phenomena were discovered:

déjà vécu (if deja vu is the visual perception of information, then déjà vécu is at the level of feelings and emotions; “already experienced”);
déjà entendu (auditory perception, "already heard");
déjà baisée (moving, sensual, "already tried");
déjà lu (imposition of images perceived through reading, "already read");
déjà eprouvé (emotional perception, "already experienced").

The opposite term for deja vu is jamevu. Its literal translation is "never seen". Being in a familiar, well-known environment next to familiar people, a person feels novelty. As if he had not been here, he did not know these people.

All these phenomena were discovered already at the end of the nineteenth century. And they did not meet in isolated cases. The events were massive. But it is very difficult to study them in detail, to apply scientific methods. The main reason is the unpredictability of manifestations of phenomena.

It is impossible to know exactly when women started to shave their legs and when the feeling of "fame" in an unknown place will appear. Since it became impossible to explain the occurrence of deja vu with the help of science, various hypotheses and assumptions were built. Some of them are highly dubious. Although... Who knows where the seed of truth is buried.

Hypotheses regarding the occurrence of deja vu:

1) Multiple transmigration of souls.

From time immemorial (namely, from ancient times) people believed in "past lives". Each nation even had its own traditions of burial of the dead. All rituals and actions are aimed at achieving one single goal: to allow the soul of the deceased to leave the body, and then return to earth in a new guise, in a new physical body.

According to this theory, deja vu is nothing more than remembering a fragment from a previous life. Echoes of the hypothesis can be found in the writings of Pythagoras. Plato went even further. Believing in the immortality of the soul, he argued that before entering the physical body, the spiritual principle contemplates the world, phenomena, people, places.

The soul not only sees and hears everything, it also analyzes, evaluates, draws conclusions. Already in the body, the soul "remembers its past thoughts." This is how the process of cognition of reality takes place. It is not surprising that a person feels "familiar" at certain points in his life.

Carl Gustav Jung adhered to the theory of the transmigration of souls in his writings. A famous Swiss psychologist active in the early twentieth century believed that he himself worked as a physician in the eighteenth century.

The hypothesis is, of course, interesting and very simple. There is no confusion about feeling famous in a new place. But ... If deja vu appeared at the time when you visited a trendy club. Or while working on the computer. Or during a conversation with a friend in sunglasses and ripped jeans. Were there the same places and the same things a hundred years ago? Don't the objects around us change from century to century?

2) Prophetic dreams.

For the first time, Arthur Allin, an American psychologist of the late 19th century, spoke about the connection between the phenomenon of deja vu and prophetic dreams. Since then, this theory has only supporters. Opponents are stopped by the unprovability of the opposite. Indeed, it is very difficult to refute the connection between deja vu and a prophetic dream. But not everyone sees upcoming events and meetings in their dreams.

3) Subconscious fantasies.

When we are talking about the conscious and the unconscious (subconscious), one involuntarily recalls Sigmund Freud. And before him, ideas about the unconscious arose in philosophical minds. But experimentally, these concepts were developed precisely by an Austrian psychologist.

He and his supporters explained deja vu as follows: in the subconscious there are certain fantasies, images, ideas; when they coincide with ongoing events, there is a sense of recognition.

Modern theories:

AT modern world there is also a scatter of opinions and hypotheses regarding this phenomenon.

1) Violation of such perception processes as memorization and recall.

Normally, these two processes should work together. But sometimes one of them "turns off". The other in his absence is activated independently.

How does a person perceive new information? The brain tries to correlate the impressions it receives with similar familiar ones. That is, those who this moment are in a person's memory. This is a remembrance. At the same time, the brain remembers the received information.

If there is no recall? The brain cannot find similar information. There is a false sense of recall. The brain passes off the new as the familiar.

One more moment. Memorization always follows perception. They saw, touched, smelled, tasted, heard - remembered. If a temporary failure occurs, then these processes are superimposed. There is an illusion of remembering the new, deja vu.

2) “Incorrect” information transfer rate.

Neurophysiologists believe that deja vu appears when the perceiving organ transmits the received information faster, and the brain processes it faster. As a result, the new is perceived as well known. This may happen after have a nice rest.

3) Visual data transfer failure.

We have two eyes. Accordingly, there are two ways of delivering visual information to the brain. It is delivered almost at the same time. If one signal is delayed by milliseconds, then it will not be new for the brain.

4) The source of information has been forgotten.

Every day, every hour and every minute, our brain perceives a lot of information. He does not always consider it necessary to connect consciousness. We simply “smeared” the subject with our eye, accidentally heard a snippet of a phrase, and the brain has already received this information, processed and stored it. We don't even notice how it all happens. These impressions “ignored” by consciousness are the basis of deja vu.

Typical examples.

We were visiting, looking at photos of the hosts. Family, friendly. There were faces in the background. And then we get acquainted with these randomly captured faces. And we can’t remember in any way: where have I seen him before?

In some book read a description of a medieval castle. The action of a movie took place on a certain street of a certain city. Only individual details are visible, elements that are completely unimportant for understanding the plot. Let's get to that place real life- there is deja vu.

5) Recognition of a familiar object.

In a new environment, we can see a familiar object, smell a familiar smell, hear a familiar sound. Consciousness may not notice this. But the brain speeds up the processing of new information. And the consciousness is not able to isolate the stimulus for this. There is deja vu.

6) Time offset.

This is an esoteric hypothesis. No time. This concept blurry and relative. If we easily remember the past. Why can't we remember the future in the same way?! What will happen in a few seconds. The flow of time is one. Perhaps there is access to it from both ends?!

There is another, very beautiful explanation of the deja vu phenomenon. Everyone from birth has his own destiny, his own line of life. For each specific person, certain circumstances, certain people, work, meetings, places are ideal.

This ideal life line is known to our subconscious. When deja vu appears, our life path intersects with someone prescribed by an ideal trajectory for us. Therefore, we are on the right track.

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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"). How to understand and what it means word deja vu?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps one of the most famous psychological and psychiatric terms is the “déjà 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.

The name of this state is borrowed 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... stand for deja vu expressions, jame vu and presquet vu?

deja vu

Each of us has heard of such a feeling as deja vu, and most of us have experienced it. The feeling when you have already seen it, been here, talked to someone, all this has already happened ... We can remember in detail the rooms in which we have never been before, people whom we have never met before and the like. Why is this happening? How does it appear? Many people ask these questions, but the answers to them are still obscured.

For the first time the term "déjà vu" (déjà vu - already seen) was used by the French psychologist Emile Bouarak (1851-1917) in his book "Psychology of the Future". Prior to this, this strange phenomenon was characterized as "false recognition" or "paramnesia" (deceptions of memory in violation of consciousness), or "promnesia" (synonymous with deja vu).

The scientific study of the phenomenon of deja vu was not so active. In 1878, a German psychological journal suggested that the sensation of “already seen” arises when the processes of perception and awareness, which basically occur simultaneously, are in one case or another mismatched due to, for example, fatigue. This explanation has become one of the sides of the theory, which in turn suggests the reason for the appearance of deja vu in the congestion of the brain. In other words, deja vu occurs when a person is very tired, and peculiar failures appear in the brain.

Judging by the other side of the theory, the deja vu effect is the result of a good rest of the brain. In this case, the processes are several times faster. If we are able to process this or that image quite quickly and easily, then our brain, at the subconscious level, interprets this as a signal of what we have already seen before. As the American physiologist William H. Burnham, who was the author of this theory, wrote in 1889, “when we see a strange object, its unfamiliar appearance is largely due to the difficulty we face in understanding its characteristics. But when the brain centers have finally rested, the perception of a strange scene may seem so easy that the sight of what is happening will seem already familiar.

Later, Sigmund Freud and his followers took up the study of the deja vu effect. The scientist believed that the feeling of "already seen" arises in a person as a result of spontaneous resurrection in his immediate memory of subconscious fantasies. As for the followers of Freud, they, in turn, believed that deja vu is the result of the struggle of the “I” with the “It” and the “Super-I”.

Some people explain their déjà vu topics that previously unfamiliar places or things they have already seen in a dream. This version is also not excluded by scientists. In 1896, Arthur Allin, professor of psychology at Colorado State University Boulder, theorized that the déjà vu effect is a reminder of fragments of dreams we have forgotten. Our emotional reactions to a new image can reproduce a false sense of recognition. The déjà vu effect occurs when our attention is suddenly distracted for a short period of time during our first encounter with a new image.

Also, the phenomenon of deja vu is also characterized as a manifestation of false memory, that is, in the work of the brain, and to be more precise, in certain areas of it, some failure occurs, and it begins to take the unfamiliar for the known. The so-called false memory is characterized by such age periods when the activity of this process is most pronounced - from 16 to 18 and from 35 to 40 years.

The surge during the first period is explained by the emotional severity of adolescence, the ability to react too sharply and even dramatically to certain events, due to the lack of life experience. In this case, a person turns to fictitious experience for help, receiving it directly from a false memory. As for the second peak itself, it, in turn, also falls on a critical age, but this is already a midlife crisis.

At this stage, deja vu is a moment of nostalgia, some regrets about the past, a desire to return to the past. This effect can also be called a trick of memory, since memories may not even be real, but supposed, the past is presented as an ideal time when everything was still beautiful.

In 1990, Herman Sno, a psychiatrist from the Netherlands, suggested that traces of memory are stored in the human brain in the form of some holograms. What distinguishes a hologram from a photograph is that each fragment of the hologram carries all the information that is necessary to restore the whole image. The smaller such a fragment, the correspondingly reproduced picture is vague. According to Sno's theory, the emerging sense of what has already been seen is obtained when some small detail of the current situation coincides quite closely with a certain fragment of memory, which in turn conjures up a vague picture of a past event.

Pierre Glur, a neuropsychiatrist, conducted experiments in the 1990s, and stubbornly insisted that memory uses special systems of "recovery" (retrieval) and "recognition" (familiarity). In his work, which was published in 1997, he argued that deja vu phenomenon appears on rare occasions. When our recognition system is activated, but the recovery system is not. Other scientists insist that the recovery system cannot be turned off completely, but can simply be mismatched, which in turn is reminiscent of the fatigue theory that was put forward much earlier.

But, in spite of everything, scientists were still able to figure out which parts of the brain are involved in the process at a time when a person experiences feeling of deja vu. It is worth noting the fact that different parts of the brain are directly responsible for different types of memory. The frontal part is responsible for the future, the temporal for the past, and the main - intermediate - is responsible for our present. When all these parts of the brain are doing their normal work, when consciousness is in a normal state, then the feeling that something is about to happen can only occur when we think about the future, worry about it, warn it, or build it. plans.

But not everything is as simple as we would like. There is an area in our brain (amygdala) that directly sets the emotional “tone” for our perception. For example, when you are having a conversation with someone and you see how your interlocutor's expression changes, it is the amygdala that gives a signal in a matter of fractions of a second about exactly how to react to this. In neurological terms, the actual duration of the "present" is so short that we don't experience as much as we remember.

Specialists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently announced that they have solved the riddle of deja vu.

We have discovered the region of the brain responsible for the formation of this mysterious sensation, - assured the team leader, biologist Suzumi Tonegawa, Nobel laureate 1987. Our experiments have shown: leading role play neurons in the memory center of the brain - the hippocampus. Specifically, its dentate gyrus, which allows you to quickly - almost instantly - recognize the smallest differences in similar images.

Thanks to the activity of this section, a person realizes which impressions are reminiscent of those that he has already seen, and which are fundamentally new. The hippocampus, as it were, divides a person's experience into past and present. But when two experiences are too similar, the hippocampus fails. Which leads to deja vu.

The researchers believe that a set of neurons, which they call place cells, form a kind of blueprint for any new place we enter. Since we unconsciously begin to imagine it, using previously accumulated information. And when we see the same place already in reality, we try to compare the “virtual” image with the real one. And if this process fails for some reason, for example, in a stressful situation or from fatigue, then the brain begins to consider the previously simulated picture or situation as real and, as a result, gives out “false” memories as true ones. And then it seems to us that we were in this place, although we are in it for the first time.
Short memory stores information for several minutes. The hippocampus, in turn, is responsible for this: memories, which in turn are associated with a particular event, are scattered across different sensory centers of the brain, but they are connected in a certain order by the hippocamus. Including there is also long-term memory, which is located on the surface of the brain, along the temporal part.

In fact, it is quite fair to say that the past, present, and future exist in our brain without having clear boundaries. When we experience something in the present, we compare it with a similar past and already decide how to react at the moment to what is happening in the near future. It is at this moment that all the necessary areas of the brain are turned on. In the case when there are too many connections between short-term and long-term memory, the present can be perceived as the past, and in this case, the déjà vu effect occurs.

As an explanation for this phenomenon, one can also use global matching models, as psychologists call them. This or that situation may seem familiar to a person because it strongly reminds him of a past event stored in his memory, or if it has a resemblance to a large number of events held in memory. That is, you have already been in identical and quite similar situations more than once. Thus, your brain summarized and compared these memories, as a result of which, it recognized a picture similar to them.

SAD MISTAKE

According to Igor Vysokov, an employee of the Department of General Patterns of the Development of the Psyche at the L. S. Vygotsky Institute of Psychology, deja vu- this is most likely an error that occurs due to the similarity of situations. A person, observing circumstances that really have similarities with those that have already taken place in the past, confuses the mise-en-scenes - they merge for him into one event. That is, the basis of the phenomenon is only the ability human brain to associative thinking. Often the effect occurs only at the sight of an insignificant trifle that has a distant connection with the person's past. So, for example, it may seem to a person that he has already met this passer-by if he suddenly sees on him a jacket that he himself once wore in his youth.

The experiment conducted by psychologists at the University of Leeds also speaks in favor of the "associative" version of the emergence of this phenomenon. They managed to find a way to artificially evoke a feeling in a person deja vu. Volunteers were shown a list of 24 words on a screen. Then they were hypnotized. The participants in the trance were told that when they saw the words in the red box, those words would be familiar to them, although they would not know where and when they saw them.

Awakened test subjects were shown old and new words within different colors. Of the eighteen subjects, ten people had the feeling that they had already seen the words in red boxes somewhere, even if they were completely new words.

However, the psychophysiological cause of the phenomenon is still not clear: it has only been noted that deja vu manifested against the background of fatigue and frequent stress. It also became known that this phenomenon worries 17-year-olds most of all, who have already gained a minimum baggage of impressions and react very sharply to various life situations. And the second and last wave deja vu For some reason, it comes at 35-40 years. And most susceptible to this feeling are melancholic people with a heightened sense of life, very nervous and impressionable.

OPINIONS OF SPECIALISTS

Leonid KARASEV, PhD in Philosophy, Leading Research Fellow at the Institute for Higher Humanitarian Studies of the Russian State Humanitarian University:

My explanation of this phenomenon is closest to the "holographic" hypothesis. The principle of holography means that each point in the image contains enough information to recreate the whole picture from it, regardless of the angle at which the eye falls on it. It is also possible that this amazing phenomenon is built. Almost all the information that we encounter in life is stored in an encoded form in the brain. But everything that we have seen and heard is hidden so deep that it is almost impossible to pull it out in the usual way. This information can jump out thanks to just a small detail. Some smell, sound, lighting, a fleeting meeting with some passerby can give you the illusion that you already found yourself in a similar situation 5-10 years ago. Although a detailed analysis reveals that very much does not match.

Director of the Mental Health Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Alexander TIGANOV:

Phenomenon deja vu stands closest to paramnesia, that is, to certain distortions of memory from the field of psychopathological disorders. It can occur in otherwise healthy people. But nevertheless, every person with such phenomena should be carefully examined in order to make sure that he does not have pathological foci in the brain. After all, this unusual effect in some cases can develop into amnesia, when the past completely disappears from consciousness. Or, conversely, give impetus to the emergence of fantasies such as delusions, hallucinations or idefixes.

Jamevu

Jamais vu (Jamais vu - never seen) - the opposite feeling, when, being in a familiar environment, situation, surrounded by familiar people, a person suddenly begins to feel as if he is seeing all this for the first time in his life.

Psychologists describe it as a sudden feeling that previously known facts and people are completely unknown to us. Also, people who experience jamevu seem to be in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Let us cite as an illustration a fragment of the text by V.A. Kaverina about a girl with such a disorder that she had after sudden death to her mother: “With a strange feeling, I returned to my empty room - I entered and stopped in surprise on the threshold, as if I had fallen into an unfamiliar house. Familiar things stood on their usual things. But in a different light, I saw this room and myself, standing on the threshold and carefully peering into something new - I myself did not yet know what. As if not in the room, but in the soul, I did not find anything in the old place. And the grief that used to be painfully sharp and so “mine” that I involuntarily pulled away when even close people looked into this “mine” receded a little, moved away - so that now I could look at it from afar.

Scientists consider jamevu as a type of cryptomnesia - the term is used to refer to the distortion of memory. Moreover, jamevu is considered a mental disorder, which is one of the signs of senile psychosis or schizophrenia. It is precisely because the feeling of jamevu is extremely rare that it is considered not a special feeling, but paramnesia or a sign of a serious mental illness.

presquevue

It often happens that for a long time you cannot remember a well-known word that “spins on the tongue”. It turns out that this is not just the case. This phenomenon is called the phenomenon of presquevu (from French presque - “almost seen”), when you forget an elementary word that you have known for more than one year. At the same time, it seems that you are about to remember it, that it is already flying off the tongue. But it wasn’t there: you can even remember it for several days, and then all of a sudden, quite unexpectedly, even for yourself, “blow it out”. Then you start to get angry at yourself, and in general at the existence of that word, you look for other words, but they no longer adequately describe the meaning.