Although today from all sides they say that you need to live full life, some people believe that a person can have several lives. This is the so-called theory of reincarnation.
Everyone has their own opinion on this, but here is a list of signals that may indicate that “there was a boy after all” and you already experienced existence on this planet somewhere in the heart of England during the Tudor era.
1. Recurring dreams
In general, there are many explanations for recurring dreams, but they say that if you have the same dream all the time, then perhaps this is the key to your past. The plot may be different. historical era, other area. This is one of the signs that you existed before at a different point in history.2. Deja vu
Each of us, at least once in our lives, has been seized by a sudden and strange feeling ... We know for sure: this is what is happening now for the first time. But suddenly we realize that this has already happened once: I have already been here, I saw the same person, heard the same words, and the light fell in the same way. The present seems to meet with the past... Scientists explain this by the phenomenon of paramnesia, parapsychologists - by a past life.3. You remember events in the past
Key point: you were not a member of them. That is, you have memories that should not be in your head. And, perhaps, you remember it in rather bright colors. Some people claim that these are fragments of your past memory.4. You have incredible intuition
People who believe in reincarnation claim that you are in amazing connection with time. Both past and present and future. You can often predict the outcome of an event, feel how and where to act, which often surprises others.5. Unfounded fears and phobias
We are all afraid of something: water, heights, spiders or snakes. But where did these fears come from? Some believe it is the result of painful events in the past. If, for example, you are afraid of snakes and don’t know why, maybe this is your answer?6. Mystical pains
This, of course, is a controversial point, but have you ever had phantom pains in healthy areas of the body that disappeared in a moment? Perhaps in past life you were, for example, a soldier and your leg was torn off, and now an old injury is responding to you ...7. You found your soul mate
It's kind of like the movie The Notebook. But it is possible that if you feel with all the fibers of your soul in someone a kindred spirit (maybe even in a stranger), it is possible that this is no accident. Such a beautiful romantic theory confirms that everyone has their own soul mate in this world.8. You feel like you have an old soul.
This phenomenon can occur when it seems to a person that his soul lives longer than himself. If you are wise beyond your years or feel more mature than you should, it is possible that you have a past behind you, and now is one of the “present”. Well, that's great. Whether it was real or not, isn't it time to apply your wisdom to life in order to achieve more?9. You feel like you're out of time.
The feeling that you are out of place here, one way or another visits many people. But few feel they are out of their time. Sometimes it may seem that a completely different era or area will be ideal for you. This of course does not mean that all single people yearn for a past life. But, if you are just drawn there, then maybe you missed a lot in the past?Image copyright iStock
Due to a tumor in the brain, Pat Long was haunted by such obsessive manifestations of deja vu that he began to question the very reality of what was happening to him and his life as such. His story, first published on the Mosaic website , can tell us a lot about the nature of this phenomenon.
A few years ago, on a very ordinary and even boring day, something unusual happened to me.
I lay down under a tree in a park in east London and suddenly felt dizzy - after which I was covered.
The park disappeared, I saw myself lying on a plaid picnic blanket among tall ears of golden wheat.
The vision was very realistic and vivid. I heard the slight rustle of ears of corn swaying in the wind, felt the warmth of the sun's rays on my face, and looked at the birds soaring in the sky.
I understood that these were my memories, very pleasant memories. But the thing is, I've never laid in a wheat field in my life. What I experienced was an extremely intense form of psychosensory illusion.
Image copyright iStock Image caption During his first deja vu, Pat Long found himself in the middle of a wheat field.
Our memories seem to us an integral, almost sacred part of our "I". A tune from an old TV commercial, the name of a previous prime minister or key moment popular at the time anecdote - memories are part of our personality.
Memory usually works invisibly, in the background, while we go about our daily activities.
We are accustomed to its effectiveness and perceive it as something natural. Until the system fails.
At the onset of an attack, patients may experience synesthesia, extreme euphoria, or even orgasm.
For the last five years I have been suffering from epileptic seizures, caused first by a lemon-sized tumor on the right side of the brain, and then by its removal.
Before she was diagnosed, I felt completely healthy. I was in my 30s and had no symptoms until one day - after my first seizure - I woke up on the kitchen floor with bruises under my eyes.
Seizures, or convulsions, occur after a sudden electrical discharge in the brain.
They are usually preceded by what is called an aura, a less intense seizure that may be accompanied by hallucinations or unusual sensations.
At the beginning of an attack, patients may experience synesthesia (when a person simultaneously perceives with two or more senses that others can feel with only one - Note. translator), extreme euphoria or even orgasm.
Image copyright iStock Image caption It's not all that exciting for me. I usually experience a sudden change in perspective, palpitations, restlessness, and sometimes auditory hallucinations.
One of the first to describe the epileptic aura was the English pioneering neurologist John Hughlings Jackson. He noted that hallmark of this state are often vivid hallucinations, similar to memories.
The main sign of my aura is deja vu. I don't remember experiencing them before, but now they happen up to ten times a day.
And I'm worried that this blurring of the lines between delirium and actually experienced events will not grow into madness.
In trying to understand what deja vu is, I hope to learn how to always return to reality from those amazing places where my imagination takes me.
In his novel Catch 22, Joseph Heller described déjà vu as "a strange, mystical feeling that you have experienced a similar situation before."
The term comes from the French expression déjà vu "already seen" and refers to a series of related "glitches" of memory.
50 surveys conducted in different time, show that about two-thirds of healthy people have experienced déjà vu at some point in their lives. Many do not pay attention to them, considering them a strange illusion.
Image copyright iStock Image caption If deja vu is usually fleeting and not given of great importance, then déjà vécu - "already experienced" - is a much more disturbing feeling.
Unlike déjà vu, déjà vu makes you feel like you've already experienced a given sequence of events.
The defining feature of déjà vu is the ability to be aware that it is an illusion and not reality. But people who feel the effect of "already experienced" lose this ability completely.
One of the leading experts in deja vu, Professor Chris Moulin, talks about a patient he worked with at the Memory Disorders Clinic in Bath.
Due to the gradual loss of brain cells caused by dementia, the man suffered from constant and obsessive déjà vu.
Image copyright iStock Image caption Sometimes it seems that the gears in our brains stop, so that we remember something that we did not suspect before ...
Even having met Professor Moulin, he immediately stated that they had already met, and named the specific time and place where this happened.
After meeting this patient for the first time, Professor Moulin became interested in the causes of déjà vu and how these subjective fantasies might interfere with the daily workings of memory.
But the doctor faced a difficult problem - the feeling of deja vu is so instantaneous and short-lived that it is almost impossible to recreate it in a clinical setting. What he was trying to do was like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
The phenomenon of deja vu has been studied by many scientists - from a parapsychologist late XIX century Emil Boyrak, who, in particular, was interested in the phenomenon of clairvoyance, to Sigmund Freud.
In one of his most famous works, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud investigated, among other things, memory defects.
The book, for example, describes the experience of a woman who came home to her friend for the first time, but at the same time claimed that she knew exactly the location of all the rooms.
The first scientific definition of deja vu was formulated in 1983 by a psychoneurologist from South Africa, Vernon Neppo. He also identified 20 certain types of this phenomenon, not all of which were related to the ability to see.
So, for example, one of Chris Moulin's patients, who was blind from birth, claimed to have had deja vu.
Image copyright iStock Image caption Freud described the experience of a woman who came home to her friend for the first time, but at the same time claimed that she knew exactly the location of all the rooms.
Professor Neppo's classification includes such phenomena as déjà senti ("already felt") and déjà entendu ("already heard").
Freud mistakenly attributed deja vu to exclusively psychological phenomena, which led to the displacement of this phenomenon into the plane of mystical phenomena.
In a 1991 Gallup poll, déjà vu was ranked alongside questions about astrology, paranormal activity, and ghosts.
Many people do not consider déjà vu to be part of the normal cognitive activity of the brain, and some even believe that it is a sign of psychic abilities.
Personally, it is not difficult for me to refute the latter statement, but the very existence of such an opinion shows how little attention has been paid to deja vu by official science.
Previously, scientists believed that our memories were stored in the brain in an organized manner, like documents in a filing cabinet.
But in the early 1970s, neuroscientist Professor Endel Tulving disproved this theory. He stated that memories actually fall into two different groups.
One of them is semantic memory. It stores general facts that do not depend on our personal experience.
The second group includes episodic memories associated with the events of our lives or personal experiences.
Image copyright iStock Image caption Knowing that the Natural History Museum is in London is a semantic memory, while the memory of my class tour there when I was 11 is episodic.
With the help of new technologies in brain research, in particular MRI, Professor Talving discovered that episodic memories are formed as small pieces of information in different parts of the brain, and then assembled into a single whole.
"The process of remembering is like a mental journey through time, when we relive what happened in the past," explains the scientist.
It is not surprising that déjà vu is experienced by those patients whose epileptic seizure originates in the areas of the brain responsible for the formation of memories.
In his work "The Deja Vu Experience", Professor Alan Brown suggests 30 various reasons why this feeling occurs.
In addition to pathologies (such as epilepsy), deja vu can also cause stress and fatigue.
Professor Brown is a supporter of the so-called split perception theory. The theory describes such a perception of reality when the brain does not pay enough attention to what is happening around.
For example, when a person is about to cross a busy street, but is distracted by a shop window. And then, when he crosses the street, he wonders why he does it. In this moment nervous system divided into two phases of one experiment.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption It's like the feeling when you crossed the street but can't remember why.
Another explanation suggests that déjà vu is caused by an error in the processing of memories.
When the brain becomes aware of events, it adds to each of them a kind of time stamp when it happened. And, therefore, deja vu occurs when the connection between the seen event and the moment of setting the "stamp" breaks.
At such a moment, the brain begins to think that the event has already happened before.
Researchers Alan Brown and Elizabeth Marsh conducted an experiment in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. They tried to test Brown's theory that déjà vu occurs due to an error in the hippocampus (a region of the brain involved in the mechanisms of emotion formation and memory consolidation - Note. translator) when that part of the brain processes memories.
Students of Brown and Marsh participated in the experiment. First, they were shown photographs of different rooms in their universities: libraries, auditoriums, and dorm rooms.
A week later, the students were shown the same photos again, but with an image of the new rooms inserted between the slides.
When the subjects were asked if they had previously been to these places, some confirmed this, even when the picture showed a room at another university where they had not been.
Image copyright iStock Image caption University buildings look pretty similar. Brown and Marsh came to the conclusion that just one image element or experience is enough for the brain to perceive the entire scene as familiar.
But the question is: why do deja vu occur in people who do not have brain diseases?
Professor Brown notes that healthy people experience deja vu only a few times a year, and usually this feeling is caused by some environmental factors.
"Déjà vu tends to get you indoors when you're feeling calm," notes Prof. Brown. "Fatigue or stress often accompanies the illusion."
Deja vu usually does not last long (10-30 seconds), occurs more often in the evening than in the morning, and on weekends.
Some researchers believe that there is a link between the ability to remember dreams and the feeling of déjà vu.
And Professor Brown suggests that although deja vu occurs in equal proportions in both women and men, young people are more susceptible to them, those who travel a lot, have higher incomes and liberal views.
Image copyright iStock Image caption “And there is a rational explanation for this,” he notes. “People who travel a lot have more opportunities to get into an environment that may seem familiar. People with liberal convictions are not afraid to admit that they may be experiencing an unusual psychological experience and try to understand it."
The night I was finishing this article, I experienced another intense déjà vu. I thought about the deadline for the submission of the article and suddenly remembered clearly how I sat and wrote the final sentence.
But when I reread the article the next day, the last paragraph was missing. It was just an illusion.
And now, as I write these final sentences, I sink back into the "I've already done this" feeling. Well, after all, as some people like to say, "our whole life is one big déjà vu."
This article first appeared on the Mosaic website and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.
You have most likely heard of such a feeling as Deja Vu, and 90% of people have experienced it at least once in their lives. Meanwhile, there are 2 more concepts that not everyone knows about - these are Jamevu and Presquevu. So what is it and why does it happen to us?
So, you are sitting at the table or standing, waiting for the bus, or walking somewhere with friends. Suddenly, you realize that you have been in this situation before. You will recognize the words that your loved ones say, remember how they were dressed, and you can remember the environment with accuracy to the last detail. Then this feeling disappears as suddenly as it came, and we continue to be in ordinary reality.
This feeling is called Deja Vu, and is translated from French as “already seen”. Scientists explain it in different ways and there are many reasons for its occurrence.
Memory error
There is an opinion that deja vu occurs when a person is very tired and the brain is overloaded. Then a certain failure occurs in his work, and the brain begins to take the unfamiliar for the known. Most often, the effect of false memory occurs at 16-18 or 35-40 years.
Accelerated information processing
According to another version, it is, on the contrary, the effect of a well-rested brain. Those. the brain processes information so quickly that it seems to us that what happened just a second ago is familiar and happened a long time ago.
similarity of situations
This or that situation may seem familiar to us only because it strongly resembles some past events that are in the depths of our memory. The brain simply matches your memories and recognizes similar pictures.
File confusion
This theory suggests that sometimes memory starts to misbehave and confuses short-term memory with long-term memory. Roughly speaking, instead of putting what you just saw in a kind of file short term memory, the brain is trying to encode new information into long-term memory, which makes it feel like we've seen it a long time ago. And yet, it happened just a second ago.
Hologram theory
According to the theory, our memory is formed in the form of three-dimensional images. And after one element, for example, taste or smell, a chain of memories will stretch - a “hologram”. The moment of deja vu is the brain's attempt to restore the "hologram".
These are just a few hypotheses, and meanwhile, there are more than 40 of them, ranging from the theory of parallel reality to reincarnation.
However, the psychophysiological cause of deja vu is still not completely clear. It is only known that this phenomenon appears more often in melancholic, impressionable people, in adolescence, as well as in cases where a person is too tired or is in a state of stress.
Have you experienced Jamevu and Prasquevu?
Jamevu
Or never seen. The feeling is the opposite of Deja Vu and more insidious, because. is a sign of some diseases.
Suddenly, a person begins to feel as if familiar and previously known places or people have become unrecognizable and completely unfamiliar. A person may think that for the first time in his life he sees this or that place.
Jamevu is rarer and often indicative of a condition mental disorder- paramnesia (impaired and disordered memory), as well as a symptom of severe brain fatigue.
presquevue
An obsessive feeling when you can’t remember a familiar word that is spinning on your tongue for a long time. This phenomenon translates as "almost seen", that is, a strong feeling that you are about to remember the word, but this does not happen. Most often, moreover, proper names are forgotten.
It has not yet been clarified whether this phenomenon is a violation of memory or speech. Or information is blocked if another word comes to mind earlier that needed to be said, then it blocks the retrieval of the other from memory. Or such forgetting is connected with the phonological feature of the word.
Did you feel deja vu? Have you ever thought that the situation in which you find yourself has already happened? The phenomenon of deja vu is as common as it is mysterious.
Briefly
For the first time the term "déjà vu" was used in the early twentieth century by the French psychologist Emile Boirac.
Deja vu is very common. Up to 95% of adults claim to have experienced this condition at least once. Empirically, a connection has been established between deja vu and the level of education of a person. The dependence is directly proportional: than more educated person, the less he is insured against the feeling of what "has already been." The lowest level of deja vu (48%) was recorded in children elementary school. The highest (81%) - among doctors and candidates of sciences.
A link has also been established between deja vu and a tendency to epilepsy.
The area of the brain that is responsible for creating false memories is called the hippocampus.
Deja vu is more commonly experienced by women.
The reverse of deja vu is called jamevu. This is when a person cannot recognize the situation or the environment, everything is new for him.
Primitive Consciousness
Anthropologists have established that the state of deja vu is very close and even identical to the primitive, mythological consciousness. Deja vu is characterized by a sense of timelessness, the integrity of the temporal flow, the depersonalization of the subject. The mythological consciousness has the same characteristics in the description of the famous researcher of antiquity A.F. Losev.
In this regard, the phrase said in the film "The Matrix" that deja vu is a sign of a reboot of the world seems to be quite reasonable. In a mythological way, it is. Getting into the state of "already happened", we turn to the primitive consciousness, when the "recognition" of the world is constantly happening.
Everything is a dream
The original, but still relevant and having its supporters theory was proposed in 1896 by Arthur Allin, a professor at the University of Boulder in Coloralo. He assured that deja vu is nothing more than a memory of what we have already experienced in a dream. Allegedly, our subconscious from time to time "scrolls" a dream when we are awake.
According to Freud
Studied the phenomenon of deja vu, of course, and Sigmund Freud. In his opinion, deja vu is nothing more than our memory of a real, but traumatic experience that has gone into the subconscious, which took place in the past. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud describes his understanding of deja vu using the example of a girl who, having come to her friend in the village (the friend has a sick brother), catches herself thinking that it "already happened." However, a simple analysis of her biography gives us an understanding that the girl remembers not this place, but her sick brother, the memory of which she "removed" into the subconscious.
Freud also links the phenomenon of déjà vu with instincts and taboos. He writes: "The feeling of "already experienced" is a kind of reminder of a person's secret fantasies. A signal that we are touching something desirable and at the same time forbidden."
Note that Freud's student and opponent, Gustav Jung, considered deja vu to be evidence of the transmigration of souls and a person's experience of his past lives.
Hologram effect
In 1990, the Dutch psychiatrist Herman Sno suggested that human brain stores memories not entirely, but in the form of holograms, that is, the memory of a certain event consists of fragments, each of which contains general information. When we try to remember something, we don't remember "as a whole", we remember a part, and on the basis of this part we can "deploy" the rest of the picture of the past.
Sno believed that the phenomenon of deja vu is due to the fact that the remembered fragment is identical to any part of the mnemonic holograms. He is involved in the work of working memory and develops a picture of a holistic experience. Almost real. But false.
Subconscious games
University of Washington physiologists Larry Jacoby and Calvin Whitehouse conducted an experiment on memorizing words in a test group. First, subjects were shown a list of words and asked to memorize them. After a while, they were shown other lists and asked to tell which words they had seen before. The experiment was also complicated by the fact that immediately before the second test, the subjects were given, as if by chance, for a very short time to look at other words that were not in the first list.
The results were stunning. Almost everyone who saw "bonus" words for a millisecond added them to the list of words from the first list, although they were not in the lists.
Such memory games, when the information does not have time to be "caught" by consciousness, but is captured by the subconscious and still penetrates to the conscious level, are not uncommon in our life. This can partly explain the phenomenon of deja vu.
This is called deja vu, which means “already seen” in French. A feeling that covers you at some moments and says: "I have already been here, I have already done this." Although in reality there was nothing like that. This feeling can be so strong that it is even difficult to believe in its unreality.
Attacks of deja vu seem to indicate that we live the same pieces of life over and over again. It is probably this circumstance that led some people to consider déjà vu proof of the existence of reincarnation - the idea that our soul lives many lives.
Others see it as proof of the existence of precognition—knowledge of an event before it happens—and the fluidity of time. Supporters of this point of view believe that the future exists in parallel with the past and the present.
They say that sometimes events seem familiar to us because we know somewhere on a subconscious level that it was going to happen.
Scientists adhere to a more "earthly" explanation. They have come up with hundreds of different explanations for déjà vu, but no one knows which one is correct (if any).
While scientists don't know what causes déjà vu, many believe that the phenomenon is closely related to our brain's memory system. Deja vu, in their opinion, can be something like a memory malfunction. In favor of this opinion, an argument is made that we experience deja vu most often after prolonged stress, when we are overtired.
Some scientists say that déjà vu happens when one hemisphere registers events a fraction of a second before the other. So you get the feeling that you are experiencing the same thing twice.
Your brain contains 5 to 20 billion neurons ( nerve cells). The brain also contains glial cells, about 10 times more than neurons. Glia fills the space between neurons, forming the supporting frame of the nervous tissue. Each neuron has about 1000 synapses that connect it to other neurons. Not surprisingly, the brain is able to store an almost innumerable number of memories.
There is also an intriguing new idea that events are stored in memory as a kind of hologram. A hologram is a three-dimensional image made with a laser. The most interesting thing here is that the entire holographic image can be restored from any small part of it.
How is it possible that memories are stored in the form of holograms? Scientists say that information about any memory is stored in different places in the brain. It is possible to remove some part of the brain that contains a piece of memory, but the patient will still be able to call up the full picture in his memories. How is this possible? As with a hologram, any fragment of a memory can be used to restore the whole picture.
According to this theory, it turns out that deja vu can be caused by the fact that some current events have similar moments with events that have already happened to you. The brain can take pieces of different memories that are very similar to each other (for example, two memories of a dog in a red sweater), and combine them into a new, fictional memory - déjà vu.
Whatever causes it, déjà vu can involve multiple coincidences. A dermatologist named Stephen Cohn wrote about a chance meeting with a young man in New York. A man stood with a puzzled expression in front of a clothing store.
He told Dr. Cohn that it was his first time in New York. But he was seized by the feeling that he had already stood here once and, looking at the exact same suit in the window, was telling a stranger, Dr. Cohn, about his deja vu. Thus, the experience young man It was like deja vu in deja vu.
But what the young man had no way of knowing was that the man in his "double déjà vu" was not an ordinary passer-by, but a doctor. Dr. Cohn completed his dissertation on déjà vu.
