I experience
DEJA VU when I start reading my textbooks. Didn’t get it? Chalo I’ll take the pleasure of explaining you
what exactly DÉJÀ VU IS.
If you are
having a cup of coffee with your girl friend or if you are on a tour seeing new
places and you feel as if you have already encountered the same situation or
you visited the same place before for a fraction of few seconds, this is like”
you are experiencing something in the
present and you feel as if you have
already experienced the same in the past”. This is DÉJÀ VU.
How strange.
Interesting right? Let
me elaborate. It’s a French word which means literally “already seen”. This is
a puzzle which is troubling scientists since many years. No perfect conclusion
has been drawn yet. But there are some theories proposed by psychologists.
Let’s go through them.
THEORIES
BEHIND “DÉJÀ VU”
The truth is even though 60% to 80% of us say we’ve
experienced it, ”DEJA VU” stumps science as it stumps the rest of us that’s because it happens so
quickly and randomly it’s difficult to study. It’s very complex but the theories
which are put forward are
1) It depends on the way our brain processes memories. In it,
a new experience doesn’t go through the part of the brain that processes short
term memories. It goes directly to the part that processes long term ones. When
this happens memory feels old and familiar, even though it is in fact a new
memory.
2) One theory has to do with areas of brain that recognize
familiarity and recall memories. They are in different parts of brain but these
are in sync with each other. When we recognize a familiarity our brain triggers
past memories present or stored in our subconscious mind .so we feel like we
have already seen it. For example in your office if you have your cabin
designed in particular fashion that matches
with the room you studied or played in your childhood you feel as if you have
already been there.
One thing scientists seemed to figure out about “DÉJÀ VU” is
that it is majorly experienced by people aged between 15 to 25 years more often
than older people. Reason given is brains of younger people are more active and
they produce more dopamine which has been linked to ‘DÉJÀ VU”. This hypothesis gained traction after the
peculiar case of 39 year old man came to light. The man doctor by profession
was fighting the flu by taking amantadine, phenylpropanolamine, two drugs known
to increase dopamine activity in the brain. Within 24hrs of starting the drugs
he reported intense, recurrent episodes of “DÉJÀ VU” .Once he stopped taking
those drugs his ‘DÉJÀ VU” also disappeared.
3) Another theory for occurrence of “‘DÉJÀ VU” comes from
studies of epilepsy. There is strong and consistent link between DÉJÀ VU and
the seizures that occur in people with medical temporal lobe epilepsy, a type
of epilepsy that affects the brains hippocampus. Hippocampus plays a key role
in maintaining short and long term memories. So due to temporal lobe epilepsy
hippocampus gets affected resulting in mismatch between short and long term
memories. This phenomena has led experts to propose that DÉJÀ VU, may be result
of neural misfiring and cause healthy people a false sense of remembering
familiarity
DÉJÀ VU may
be related to some other phenomena that are equally challenging for scientists
to explain. JAMAIS VU or “never seen” occurs when a person experiences
something familiar –like their own living room but they feel they have never
seen that before and DEJA ENTENDU (“already heard”) occurs when someone is certain they have heard something
before, like a musical phrase or a
conversation bit cannot recall the precise place or time where they heard that.
So far there is no simple conclusion on why
DÉJÀ VU occurs. Reasons given above are just theoretical without proper proof.
This proofs that DÉJÀ VU is very difficult for man to find a solution and the
answer lies in our understanding of human brain. So further research on human
brain should be encouraged to solve the mystery behind DÉJÀ VU.
#Knowing #9D
#Knowing #9D
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