The human mind does not always experience reality as something entirely new. The mind is capable of loosening its grip and ends up blurring lines between familiarity and unfamiliarity in the strangest way possible, in the form of two very commonly experienced phenomena across the world- déjà vu and jamais vu.
We are all familiar with the experience of déjà vu. It is often perceived as something bizarre and mysterious, evoking a sense of wonder in us. When it occurs, we instinctively try to recall instances to justify our feeling but fail to find any relevant memory connected to it.
Déjà vu, the feeling of having already experienced something before, was coined by French psychical researcher Emile Boirac in 1876. Déjà vu can be explained in several ways- scientifically, philosophically, and spiritually.
If we look at déjà vu from a scientific point of view, it occurs because of a temporary mismatch in the brain’s memory processing system, particularly a failure of the familiarity signal, especially in the medial temporal lobe.
The familiarity signal is a mechanism that helps us to identify people, things and objects in general. When something feels familiar, our brain can retrieve a specific context attached to it. Most of the time, this system works accurately. However, our brain can temporarily generate a false familiarity signal, and this is when déjà vu happens. Hence, our brain produces a feeling of a lived experience but with no experience. Neuroscientists haven’t yet been able to determine what causes this false familiarity signal to occur in the first place.
Déjà vu sometimes results in temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological condition in which seizures originate in the temporal lobe of our brain, which is responsible for managing and processing emotions and memory. It might also occur during temporary periods of extreme stress or mental fatigue, as these can affect the way the brain processes familiarity and recollection. Though there is no real evidence to support this, a few scientists speculate that déjà vu could also occur due to a lesser amount of grey matter in memory-related parts of our brain.
Now, let us try to understand déjà vu from a philosophical lens. The word Memory carries many connotations. When we talk of ‘memory’, we often connect or associate it with the past. We understand Memory, as a recorded collection of moments of past events stored in the brain. And when we recall these memories, it invokes a sense of nostalgia in us. However, memory might not always be related to the past. It can be related to the present as well. And one such phenomenon that illustrates this complexity is called “déjà vu”.
In his analysis of déjà vu, Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, describes it as a “result of memory and perception becoming intertwined in the present moment”. It is a form of familiarity that appears to merge with the present moment, blurring the lines between the immediate experience and memory.
This brings us to our recurring and pertinent questions. Is déjà vu truly the recollection of an experience we have had before, or is it an illusion? Does it originate from our psyche and unconscious part of our brain? Or is it a neurological phenomenon?
Bergson rejects the common view of memory, i.e., memory happens only after perception, and terms it a false conception. If this is held, then it treats perception as primary and memory as a secondary operation. But Bergson points out that memory happens simultaneously with perception and not something that arises after perception is complete. So, according to him, we never experience a purely present perception, as memory exists within it all the time.
Bergson suggests that déjà vu, or the feeling that we have seen something before, is not necessarily proof that we have actually been in that situation in the past. He argues that not every image in our mind is a memory. Our brain creates images from things we read in books, watch in films, imagine, dream about, etc. These images do not have to point to an actual lived experience. Therefore, the difference between a mere image that our brain forms and a memory is that the image does not correspond to any temporality, but memory does and hence from his ideas, we can conclude “déjà vu” is just a mere image and has no association with memory.
Through a religious lens, déjà vu may be understood as a brief moment of connection with a higher power, which is the almighty considered by religious people or a divine connection with the universe as interpreted by the spiritual ones. It feels as though something that we unconsciously hoped for is unfolding in front of our eyes, creating a moment of meaningful, spiritual connection with the higher power.
Déjà vu can be understood as a form of revelation as well. It is the experience of reliving a moment already encountered before in our spiritual world in the present physical world, thereby allowing us to see a reality our soul has already seen before.
While déjà vu makes the unfamiliar feel strangely familiar, there exists another phenomenon, opposite in nature, termed jamais vu. In understanding the concept of jamais vu, repetition is a very important word, and I view this word as a double-edged sword.
When we are learning something, we are often told that repetition helps us remember things. The more we revise, the more deeply it gets stored in our memory. But this effect of repetition can have a harmful effect as well, and that effect is called jamais vu.
Jamais vu is an experience in which a person encounters something that has actually occurred before, or they are familiar with, but they are unable to recognise it. So, even though repetition helps us stay connected to our knowledge, excessive repetition can have the opposite effect. The brain becomes oversaturated with known information so much so that for a brief moment we seem to move away from the known world into a state of the unknown.
Both déjà vu and jamai vu arise from similar distortions in the functioning of the brain’s memory portion, but they manifest in opposite ways.
Most surveys indicate that 97% of the population has experienced déjà vu at least once in their life, with the number being highest in people aged between 15 and 25. However, no global estimate exists for jamais vu due to limited studies and documentation on it.
REFERENCES:
- The International Journal of Indian Psychology
- www.samwoolfe.com
- https://godinallthings.com
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov