Has it ever happened to you: you’re with friends, having a conversation, and suddenly your brain seems to hit a spark and you tell yourself that you have already lived it before. You don’t remember when, that’s the problem, but you have lived the same situation in a remote past that seems to have melted into your mind, far enough away that you can’t know more about it. Maybe in another life? In another universe?
The phenomenon of déjà vu, that fascinates us all, was created by the French psychic researcher and has been given from totally psychological meanings to some more esoteric. In reality, that feeling of having lived something that has not actually been lived is very common and is even classified in different ways: déjà vécu (already lived), déjà senti (already felt) and déjà visité (already visited). Dreams? Reincarnations? Parallel universes? What is the true meaning?
It is a very common phenomenon and there are several classifications: déjà vécu (already lived), déjà senti (already felt) and déjà visité (already visited)
In the early nineteenth century, some people pointed out that it could be due to mental dysfunction or some kind of brain problem. Surprisingly, at the beginning of this millennium, a scientist named Alan Brown he decided to carry out a review of everything that the writers had pointed out about this phenomenon and, most of them attributed to him a paranormal and supernatural relationship, things from past lives or psychic abilities.
But Brown’s papers also served him to get some fundamental findings. For example, he determined that about two-thirds of people experience déjà vu at some point in their lives, and that the most common trigger is a scene or a place, as well as the next most common is a conversation. In addition, he also reported indications about a possible association between this phenomenon and some types of convulsive activity in the brain. His work served as a catalyst for scientists to design experiments to investigate déjà vu.
About two-thirds of people experience déjà vu at some point in their lives, and the most common trigger is a scene or place
Prompted by that work, a research team began conducting experiments aimed at testing hypotheses about the possible mechanisms of this phenomenon, reports ‘Science Alert‘. They thus investigated a hypothesis (almost a century old) that suggested that it can occur when there is a spatial similarity between a current scene and a scene not remembered in your memory. Psychologists called this the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis
According to hypothesis from the familiarity of the Gestalt, if that previous situation with a design similar to the current one does not come to mind, you may be left alone with a strong feeling of familiarity for the current (for example, if you are in a hospital visiting a friend and at another time you did something similar, in a similar scene, with the furniture placed in a similar way to the scene of the past).
Déjà vu is more likely to occur when people are in a scene that contains the same spatial arrangement of elements that they have already lived through
To investigate this idea in the lab, the team used virtual reality to locate people within scenes. That way, they could manipulate the environments people were in: some scenes shared the same spatial layout and, for the rest, they were different. As predicted, it was more likely that a déjà vu happened when people were in a scene that contained the same spatial arrangement of elements as a previous scene they saw but did not remember.
Therefore, the research suggests that a factor that contribute to déjà vu it may be the spatial similarity of a new scene with one in memory that is not consciously remembered at that moment. However, that doesn’t mean that spatial resemblance is the only cause of déjà vu. Most likely, many factors can contribute to making a scene or a situation feel familiar. Further research is underway to investigate possible additional factors at play in this mysterious phenomenon, but we’re on the right track.
Has it ever happened to you: you’re with friends, having a conversation, and suddenly your brain seems to hit a spark and you tell yourself that you have already lived it before. You don’t remember when, that’s the problem, but you have lived the same situation in a remote past that seems to have melted into your mind, far enough away that you can’t know more about it. Maybe in another life? In another universe?
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