Nostalgia and Deja Vu

NOSTALGIA AND DEJA VU Mr. Marzzz

Dec 15, 2023

Nostalgia and Déjà Vu are the two faces of the same coin. Nostalgia is a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life whereas Déjà Vu is the phenomenon of feeling as though one has lived through the present situation before

Déjà Vu in Real life

Have you ever felt like you have lived through a situation before, and you totally know what the outcome is going to be.

Well if that is the case you have experienced Déjà Vu. It's an illusion of memory whereby—despite a strong sense of recollection—the time, place, and context of the "previous" experience are uncertain or impossible.

Experiencing déjà vu has been correlated with higher socioeconomic status, better educational attainment, and lower ages. People who travel often, frequently watch films, or frequently remember their dreams are also more likely to experience déjà vu than others.

Déjà vu may happen if a person experienced the current sensory experience twice successively. The first input experience is brief, degraded, occluded, or distracted. Immediately following that, the second perception might be familiar because the person naturally related it to the first input. One possibility behind this mechanism is that the first input experience involves shallow processing, which means that only some superficial physical attributes are extracted from the stimulus.

Dreams can also be used to explain the experience of déjà vu, and they are related in three different aspects. Firstly, some déjà vu experiences duplicate the situation in dreams instead of waking conditions, according to the survey done by Brown (2004). Twenty percent of the respondents reported their déjà vu experiences were from dreams and 40% of the respondents reported from both reality and dreams. Secondly, people may experience déjà vu because some elements in their remembered dreams were shown. Research done by Zuger (1966) supported this idea by investigating the relationship between remembered dreams and déjà vu experiences, and suggested that there is a strong correlation. Thirdly, people may experience déjà vu during a dream state, which links déjà vu with dream frequency.

Nostalgia in Real life

Sometimes when I study or when I am out there is this weird feeling of nostalgia, a feeling of going back to the fun time with my fellow friends and family members, a feeling that makes me want to travel back in time and relive the moment again and again.

Nostalgia is a feeling that's usually tagged with anything and everything, it could be triggered by a song, a sentence, a word, sometimes even food.

Nostalgia is associated with a longing for the past, its personalities, possibilities, and events, especially the "good ol' days" or a "warm childhood".

The scientific literature on nostalgia usually refers to nostalgia regarding one's personal life and has mainly studied the effects of nostalgia as induced during these studies. Emotion is a strong evoker of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of one's past are usually important events, people one cares about, and places where one has spent time.

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Nostalgia and Deja Vu