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The Deja Vu Experience
It has happened to me and it has probably happened to you. It is sudden and quick, leaving you as unexpectedly as it came. While the experience is clear and detailed it is often difficult to recapture. After feeling it, you usually find yourself saying, " Wow, I just had the strangest deja-vu." Through research I have become knowledgeable of interesting facts and causes behind deja vu. Because it is still a puzzling ongoing phenomenon, I hope to give you (my audience) a better understanding of the deja-vu experience. In the next few minutes, we will take a closer look at different facts of deja vu and 3 probable causes of this strange feeling: the brains memory, the influence of DNA, and the possibility of Reincarnation.
Let's begin by observing some facts about déjà vu. According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, "Déjà vu is the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time." Emile Boriac, who had a strong interest in the psychic phenomenon, first introduced the term in the late 1800's. He believed déjà vu was something influenced by one's past. Studies today show that as much as 70% of the population has experienced some form of déjà vu. A higher number of incidents occur in people between the ages of 15 and 25. Drug users and psychiatric patients are also more likely to have the déjà vu sensation. Benjamin Wolman, author of Handbook of Parapsychology, stated, "déjà vu experiences are more frequent among younger than older persons and that more women than men reported having déjà vu." Moving right along to the causes of déjà vu.
The first, and perhaps most common believed cause of déjà vu is from the brain and its memory. A mismatching in the brain ca...
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...ieve. In most cases, the distinct and haunting feeling of déjà vu develops from mismatches in the memory, ancestor's genes, or from a previous life once lived. With continuing research, perhaps this common phenomenon can someday be truly unmasked. But for now it still remains one of the minds most tantalizing and elusive tricks. Albert Einstein once quoted, "The Universe is stranger than we Imagine."
Bibliography:
Bibliography
"Déjà vu." Merriam-Webster's Dictionary. 2001 ed.
Wolman, Benjamin. Handbook of Parapsychology. New York, NY: Van Nostrand
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Geary, James. "Been There, Done That." Time. May 1997.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1997/int/970505/science.ben_there_don.html
Fraser, Sylvia. The Quest for the Fourth Monkey. Toronto, Ontario: Doubleday Canada
Limited, 1992.
Humans have an incredible capability for thinking and memory. We can remember events from our past, for our future, and of things that have no relative meaning to ourselves. These memories can be traced back to different systems of our brains through a process of encoding, storage, and retrieval. As part of the retrieval process, memories can be remembered with or without their sources. As research has found, our memories are not labeled or tagged with their origin (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay 1993). Because of this, our memory has developed a process called source monitoring. This is how we link our memories to the source that they developed from, usually using specific characteristics and general knowledge of the memory. For example, source monitoring includes identifying who told you something, whether or not you saw an event in real life, the time of the event and whether you told something to your friend or only thought about telling it. The source-monitoring framework for the process involved in pinpointing the origin of information by Johnson and colleagues, explains both vertical and distorted memory with a common set of principles. First, a specific memory consists of specific characteristics including spatial, temporal, and perceptual details. Secondly, the memories can differ in characteristics that can be used to find the origin. More extensive source monitoring can involve beliefs about memory and cognition as well as retrieving more information from memory and finding the source of the memory given these beliefs, other specific characteristics or general knowledge (Johnson et al. 1993). Sometimes these beliefs aren't always accurate. Because some people may be influenced by their personal ideologies during retriev...
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
The second stage of memory processing is storage. Aronson et al. (2013) defines storage as the process by which people store the information they just acquired. Unfortunately, memories are affected by incoming information through alteration or reconstruction. This phenomenon is referred to as recon...
...pporting details. At the conclusion of the article, the authors share their thoughts on how it might be virtually impossible to determine when a memory is true or false. I also like their willingness to continue the investigations despite how difficult it might be to obtain concrete answers.
Since memory is a puzzling part in the brain, it has been studied over the years.
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
.... Serial Position Effect for Repeated Free Recall: Negative Recency or Positive Primacy? Journal of Experimental Psychology, 96(1), 10-16. doi:10.1037/h0033479
Research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about having a near death experience. Instead, researchers feel that these experiences are manifestations of normal brain functions gone wrong, during a traumatic or sometimes harmless event (Mobbs, D., & Watt, C. 2011). Research has shown that the main parts of the brain being affected during these events may be linked to malfunctions in the temporal lobe, and the basic arousal systems may be responsible for several of the components of the near death experience (Mobbs, D., & Watt, C. 2011).
Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814
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Human memory is highly susceptible to modifications due to the compelling nature of false memories. This causes the recollection of events to be different from the way they happened or to be non-existent. (Roediger, Jacoby and McDermott, 1996). The first study by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) was to understand and determine if human’s episodic memory, which is the recollection of past events in their thoughts and feelings at that point of time, could be modified by suggestive information. (Wheeler, Stuss and Tulving, 1997). The independent variables were the types of information (3 true and 1 false) given...
Doing this may trigger your brain to remember something that may have been a long time ago, or had not been that