Man stuck in an 8-year “Groundhog Day” loop doomed to remember the same memories over and over again
According to a report published in Journal of Medical Case Reports, a 23-year-old man in the UK is stuck in an continuing eight-year circle of déjà vu. His condition has neuroscientists completely stunned.
The patient started experiencing continuous déjà vu in 2007, after taking LSD during his first year of university. He has a history of anxiety and a family record of obsessive compulsive disorder. Although few of the incidents only lasted minutes, they could also carry on for much longer. The patient told scientists that he felt “trapped in a time loop” and found the experiences “very frightening”. As a result, he stopped watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading newspapers and magazines, because he felt like the content had been taken from his memories. As one can imagine, this only worsened his anxiety.
He complained that it felt like he was actually bringing back previous experiences from memory, not just finding them common. The disturbing feelings of closeness which are normally linked with déjà vu, the authors wrote in the paper, published at the end of last year.
Déjà vu for many of us is short-lived and not overly disturbing. The only people that doctors know of are who experience the episode more fiercely are with temporal lobe epilepsy and who have abnormal neural firing or seizures in the region. However, this young man’s brain scans were all clear and showed no signs of damage, seizures, significant memory deterioration or other neurological conditions, which left the neuroscientists stunned.
This only makes it more demanding that medical scientists still cannot fully understand what déjà vu is, or the causes that triggers it. Déjà vu is generally believed to be the result of a temporary neurological fault in the processing of incoming information, which leads someone to believe that they have experienced it before. However, an early research suggests that déjà vu is found more in highly creative achievement. But, until now, scientists had not linked the experience with psychological conditions.
His specific symptoms have led the doctors to conclude that he has the first recorded instance of déjà vu caused by anxiety, which is now being called “psychogenic déjà vu”. The researchers explain that the study is now reason for further examination into the correlation between anxiety and other psychological disorders and déjà vu.
Or maybe theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku is correct, and déjà vu is actually a problem of throwing between parallel universes – an idea that we find horribly amazing.
Resource : Science Alert.
