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You are sitting in a cafe and your friend is sitting opposite. She is excitedly telling you about her latest trip. Suddenly a strange feeling welled up in your heart. The surroundings, the dim lights, the words of good friends, the tone of voice, suddenly become so familiar-the here and now, this scene seems to have been completely experienced at some point in the past.

Image source: pixabay

Have you ever had a similar experience in French, the feeling of "yesterday reappearing" and "this scene seems to have been dreamed of" is called "D é j à Vu", and now we translate it into "established vision". The survey shows that about 2/3 of people have experienced this phenomenon, with the highest frequency among young people, with an average of 2-3 times a year.

Over the past 100 years, many explanations have emerged for this phenomenon, including going back in time, psychics, multidimensional space, hypnosis, insanity, and so on. In recent years, psychologists have also begun to pay attention to this phenomenon; one theory is that it is just a small flaw in the operation of the memory system.

"I must have seen it!" I feel that I have seen what is in front of me, and this kind of memory is called recognition memory in psychology. There are two types of recognition memory: the first is "recollection", where you can indeed recall the situation you experienced before, and the second is "familiarity", in which you only have a sense of familiarity with what is in front of you, but you are not sure where it came from.

▲ "Why can't you remember?"

For example, if you saw a person in the hallway yesterday and noticed him in the elevator today, there are two possibilities. One possibility is that you did see him in the hallway yesterday, so you recognized him. Another possibility is that you have a sense of familiarity with his face, but you can't remember exactly where you've seen it, but based on that familiarity, you'll think you've seen him.

The emergence of the phenomenon of "established vision" is also related to this sense of familiarity. Take the scenarios at the beginning of this article as an example, you may have experienced some similar scenes in the past (such as chatting with others in a cafe), although you do not realize it, but the characteristics of these scenes have been stored in your memory system. At this moment, sitting opposite this friend, some of the clues around you match with the characteristics of similar scenes in your memory (such as dim lights), creating a sense of familiarity. it makes your brain automatically judge that the scene in front of you has been experienced, which leads to the experience of "recurrence of yesterday".

Supporting evidence there is some research evidence to support this explanation. For example, some researchers have found that people who love to travel, dream often or watch movies are also more likely to experience the "recurrence of yesterday". Using the above theory to explain, this is because these people are knowledgeable, experienced, and have seen more different scenes, so they are more likely to encounter familiar scenes in terms of probability.

▲ image source: pixabay

Other researchers have induced a similar experience through experiments. For example, Alan S. Brown, a psychologist at Columbia University, and Elizabeth J. Marsh, a psychologist at Duke University, showed some college students pictures of the campus of a school far away. After a period of time, they called in the college students and showed them photos of the university, some of which they had seen for the first time, some of which they had not seen, and asked them to judge whether they had been to these scenes. It turned out that for the scenes they had seen in the first experiment, the subjects were more likely to judge that they had actually been there, although in fact they did not.

▲ image source: pixabay

These studies support the familiarity recognition theory's explanation of "yesterday's reappearance". Of course, this is not the final answer to the question. Psychologists are continuing to analyze which similar features in the scene cause this phenomenon, and some people also explain this phenomenon from a perceptual point of view.

In any case, the next time you have this feeling of "yesterday reappearing", you don't have to panic. It's not a psychic event, and you may not really dream about the future. It's just a little joke played by your brain.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fruit Shell (ID:Guokr42), author: silent Uncle Ma Editor: forget Jianghu

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